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How Water Power May Have Been Used to Build the Great Egyptian Pyramids

How Water Power May Have Been Used to Build the Great Egyptian Pyramids Lex Loeb Contributor Network . The Ancient Pharaohs made themselves the "Living Gods" of Ancient Egypt by mastering water flow and irrigation technologies. It was common in ancient civilizations for the masters of water technology to assume power. Examples include: the ancient Indians, Cambodians and many others. The ancient Babylonians whose hanging gardens had to have had water pumped to the top of the structures to yield the gardens. The ancient meso-American civilization including the Maya and Aztec had sacred springs associated with major temple complexes. Irrigation was central to the whole Aztec building plan and agricultural system. In ancient Rome the Aqueducts released water at the top of hills where emperors built their palaces. Emperor Augustus's Palatine hill digs have been excavated revealing a fountain that represented the source of water as his or successive emperor's power source over the sprawling urban metropolis of Rome. The Ancient Pharaohs were doing this long before most other ancient civilizations and crediting themselves for the technologies as living gods not to mention having sufficient cash flow as the result of controlling water and putting tariffs on its use to build monuments celebrating themselves. The Pharaohs, unlike the later Roman Emperors did not receive most of their revenues from distant conquered lands necessarily. The Pharaohs power and cash flow probably resulted from local taxes and tolls and a lot of these funds were derived from water works. The ancient Egyptians knew how to irrigate the flood planes of the Nile by digging canals, lifting and pumping water, building dams and locks and by using upstream canals to increase water pressure at lower elevations along the Nile's decent to the Mediterranean Sea. A lot of the proof of this has been excavated at various sites in Egypt. The Nile River Delta was laced with canals to provide water for several growing seasons including those in times the river ran lower. The ancients even had to deal with tidal considerations in the delta and were keen to keep Salt marshes from taking over prime agricultural lands. The Pharaohs controlled the store houses for grain from a very early era. Stores for grain were primarily for grain paid to the royal family as taxes owed probably for water services rendered by the state. Not only were canals important for irrigation but they allowed the state to collect grain resources for storage by barge and to barge the grain shipments to sailing ships as the primary means of getting it to the stores. The stores acted like a water dam with grain because when grain was harvested it was cheap but a few months out after the harvest grain was scarce and that is what gave the Pharaohs their exceptional power. Surplus grain could also be traded with the ancient Phoenicians and others for goods and services from afar which was the ultimate creation of wealth at the time. That is a little background on how important irrigation and water works were to the ancient Egyptian civilization and how and why the Pharaohs maintained their god like status for several millennium. The economics of cash flow apply the same way they do with nation states and their taxing authority today. The Pyramids show signs that that they celebrate the high technology of the time and that technology was water flow and irrigation. Signs that water was used to build the pyramids are many. The site chose to build the Pyramids was selected such that there was easy access to the Nile at the site. There are excavated causeways that lead directly to the Nile. The prevailing theory is that these were originally ceremonial causeways and a means of directing visiting pilgrims to the pyramids from the Nile transportation system. Yes it is true that as ceremonial centers the pyramids were shrines visited by millions who would leave offerings some of which went to maintain the facilities as did major temple complexes at Luxor and Karnac. Looking at the causeways and the way they are constructed makes one wonder if they were not once elaborate canals once used to draw water to the site and perhaps to allow floating shipments to arrive at the base of the pyramids. The causeways and the pyramids themselves have stones so well fitted together that the engineering tolerances are amazing. These tolerances have been observed as impervious to water. The huge stones are carved so meticulously that water does not leak out between them. This is the prime piece of evidence that indeed water was used to build the pyramids but how? The same technology that allowed the Egyptians to draw water from up stream on the Nile with a canal and run it in the manner of an aqueduct to a higher level downstream than the river basin is one method. Building canals , dams and locks and using various means to pump and lift water also would have contributed to the effort. Evidence for a bypass aqueduct has not yet been discovered and certainly nothing had been built to the hight of the pyramids and then de-constructed. Using the tightly fitted blocks that eventually became part of the stone mass of the pyramids would certainly have allowed shallow barges and reed mat to lift enormous blocks to higher and higher levels. It might only take a few feet of water , as much as a half the height of the stone blocks to float a heavy block on a raft up from one level to the next up the pyramids. The Idea that blocks were lifted on sand ramparts is absurd because the sand and even slump piles of rock would probably have collapsed under the weight of the blocks being lifted. Lifting a finite amount of water from lock to lock to give buoyancy to a raft makes a lot more sense. Blocks could be lifted to a higher level then before they were deposited at a lower level. Air vents to the inner chambers of the pyramids that have been discovered would have had a water water flow purpose for existence during construction and not a religious meaning necessarily. The stone shafts actually do have what look like valves built into them that could be remotely controlled by ropes and levers? By stacking stones with a flotation Chanel between them in a spiral plan and by having workers lift water to higher levels the water could be trapped pooled behind dam locks and blocks could very easily have been floated to the top of these ancient monuments during construction. If I were going to consider building my own pyramids of the same sort of giant stones I definitely would use the water system to systematically build them. I would have definitely devised a way , like a maze and puzzle found a way to lift the final enormous cap stone by the same way later removing an even higher stone platform I would had to have to get it all the way to the top. Next time you look at pictures of the great pyramids of Giza consider that they may have been built using very simple water power technologies because it really starts to make sense for the achievement. With the right amount of buoyancy it might only take a several inches or feet of water to allow a raft of barge to glide over water without hitting bottom based on the amount of Obelisk load carried. So A minimum of pumping with a hand pump of one kind or another will allow flotation without need for any more water than necessary given the displacement. I Suspect that are fulcrum head devices modeled after wooden ones that would have been used as displacement pumps with a long beam leaver over the top. Wooden light weight poles with a fulcrum on top when pushed down inside a shaft full of water with a lock on the bottom that could be opened and closed to let a volume of water in at the ordinary water level would then be able to push the water up the tube to a higher level and spill out. I Believe the original obelisks were wooden and stood in pairs outside the gates of canal locks used by the egypitians to incrementally control the water level and were not always of religious significance.

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