The stones were cut with enormous precision, at least relative to what we know about the available cutting tools. You cannot still stick a knife between a lot of these stones. Maybe we will learn more about that.
I'm pretty sure we've conclusively answered these questions. Hand tools, skill, and absolutely unreasonable amounts of time and patience.
Any master stoneworker from any era should be able to carve stone to that level of precision given enough time and reason. The problem, as always, is that there is usually very little reason to put in that amount of time and effort when you can get 90% as good for 50% the effort.
There's a lot of incentive to put in the effort when your customer is also your God King.
I only recently learned that there are the equivalent of graffiti tags left by different work crews within usually inaccessible chambers that boast the respective team's pride. The discovery did away with the earlier assumption that it was all slaves.
Yes, experimental archaeology has reproduced the process from quarrying to transport.
But also there are accurately hewn stones all over the world from many eras of history. It is not unique or special in any way.
The pyramid stones also aren't generally that accurate in an absolute sense. They just fit really well together. The vast majority aren't particularly flat or square, but have been worked to mate with their neighbors, which is a very different and far more mundane type of work. Some stones, particularly exposed interiors and the outer face of the casing stones were cut pretty accurately, but only the parts you can see. Inside they're usually pretty rough.
Ancient Egyptian stoneworking was impressive, even at the time, but not spectacular or exceptional. Other civilizations throughout history have built to equal skill, if not scale. People in the West just get so caught up in the mystery of the ancient Egypt myth that they think it's magical ancient lost technology. It was just regular human labor and skill, but a whole hell of a lot more of it applied in one spot than anything we can imagine today.
(I know nothing about this subject, feel free to ignore me.)
My dentist is pretty good at doing this too, by putting marking paper between my teeth and having me bite down. I wonder if a similar technique could be used:
Have the blocks close together, constrained to only move on a single axis by rails or whatever. Drape a thin sheet of material over one of the blocks, the non-moving one (perhaps it's an already-placed one?) Maybe it's something that visibly shows when it's crushed, or maybe it's coated with the blood of the powerless. Smash the other block into it. Pull them apart and look where they made contact. If it's mostly everywhere, done. If not, grind down or chip out the parts that touched. Repeat until you run out of innocents.
To do the very last block, you'd have to meld two sides, remove a block, fix up the other side, and then put it back in. Which might make this testable.
But I'm just pulling stuff out of my nether orifice.
If you only care about the two surfaces matching each other, you don't even have to worry about your indicator. Just grind them against each other, or use some lapping compound to speed up the process. If you want to get the surfaces truly flat, then you use three surfaces that you successively grind against each other.
That's a fascinating link, and it sounds like what I'm talking about is what's called "engineer's blue" in the link.
But I think it would be vastly more difficult to grind two massive stone blocks against each other than to just ram one against the other. Not unless you stacked them, anyway, and if you stacked them I'm not sure if you could move the top one side to side in order to do the grinding. Maybe with some kind of grit, I don't know. Still seems harder.
Also, grinding methods end up removing more material (bad for teeth!), and I would expect more overall physical work to be done in order to remove that material (bad for massively heavy stone blocks).
As for making them flat, that seems unnecessary to me. But then, I'm not a pharaoh. (Even for a pharaoh, it seems like only the seems would need to be straight. Nobody could tell about the faces after assembly.)
Then again, after some quick researching, it seems like there's a good chance that the well-fitting blocks (which are not all of them) may have been cast out of a concrete-like slurry, not hewn.
How did nvidia make their most powerful GPUs in 2026? You mean sand and metal?
How does ASML make the most modern chips? You mean light and mirrors?
The stones were cut with enormous precision, at least relative to what we know about the available cutting tools. You cannot still stick a knife between a lot of these stones. Maybe we will learn more about that.
I'm pretty sure we've conclusively answered these questions. Hand tools, skill, and absolutely unreasonable amounts of time and patience.
Any master stoneworker from any era should be able to carve stone to that level of precision given enough time and reason. The problem, as always, is that there is usually very little reason to put in that amount of time and effort when you can get 90% as good for 50% the effort.
There's a lot of incentive to put in the effort when your customer is also your God King.
I only recently learned that there are the equivalent of graffiti tags left by different work crews within usually inaccessible chambers that boast the respective team's pride. The discovery did away with the earlier assumption that it was all slaves.
Can experimental archaeology actually replicate this? If not, I don't find the speculation, even though logical, to be conclusive.
Yes, experimental archaeology has reproduced the process from quarrying to transport.
But also there are accurately hewn stones all over the world from many eras of history. It is not unique or special in any way.
The pyramid stones also aren't generally that accurate in an absolute sense. They just fit really well together. The vast majority aren't particularly flat or square, but have been worked to mate with their neighbors, which is a very different and far more mundane type of work. Some stones, particularly exposed interiors and the outer face of the casing stones were cut pretty accurately, but only the parts you can see. Inside they're usually pretty rough.
Ancient Egyptian stoneworking was impressive, even at the time, but not spectacular or exceptional. Other civilizations throughout history have built to equal skill, if not scale. People in the West just get so caught up in the mystery of the ancient Egypt myth that they think it's magical ancient lost technology. It was just regular human labor and skill, but a whole hell of a lot more of it applied in one spot than anything we can imagine today.
Yes
(I know nothing about this subject, feel free to ignore me.)
My dentist is pretty good at doing this too, by putting marking paper between my teeth and having me bite down. I wonder if a similar technique could be used:
Have the blocks close together, constrained to only move on a single axis by rails or whatever. Drape a thin sheet of material over one of the blocks, the non-moving one (perhaps it's an already-placed one?) Maybe it's something that visibly shows when it's crushed, or maybe it's coated with the blood of the powerless. Smash the other block into it. Pull them apart and look where they made contact. If it's mostly everywhere, done. If not, grind down or chip out the parts that touched. Repeat until you run out of innocents.
To do the very last block, you'd have to meld two sides, remove a block, fix up the other side, and then put it back in. Which might make this testable.
But I'm just pulling stuff out of my nether orifice.
If you only care about the two surfaces matching each other, you don't even have to worry about your indicator. Just grind them against each other, or use some lapping compound to speed up the process. If you want to get the surfaces truly flat, then you use three surfaces that you successively grind against each other.
https://www.ericweinhoffer.com/blog/the-whitworth-three-plat...
That's a fascinating link, and it sounds like what I'm talking about is what's called "engineer's blue" in the link.
But I think it would be vastly more difficult to grind two massive stone blocks against each other than to just ram one against the other. Not unless you stacked them, anyway, and if you stacked them I'm not sure if you could move the top one side to side in order to do the grinding. Maybe with some kind of grit, I don't know. Still seems harder.
Also, grinding methods end up removing more material (bad for teeth!), and I would expect more overall physical work to be done in order to remove that material (bad for massively heavy stone blocks).
As for making them flat, that seems unnecessary to me. But then, I'm not a pharaoh. (Even for a pharaoh, it seems like only the seems would need to be straight. Nobody could tell about the faces after assembly.)
Then again, after some quick researching, it seems like there's a good chance that the well-fitting blocks (which are not all of them) may have been cast out of a concrete-like slurry, not hewn.
https://www.shutterstock.com/search/millstone
So they were polished? We already know how to do it.
Would be neat, loss of knowledge/skill is really a bummer in regards to ancient technology.