There was a time when giant cranes didn’t dot city skylines, and there were no bulldozers, backhoes, or excavators. But before these seemingly important technologies were invented, there were palatial mansions, temples, churches, and pyramids, all built purely through human ingenuity.
But how were these megastructures built back in the day? Let’s take a closer look.
1. The Great Sphinx of Giza
(Credit: gumbao/Shutterstock)
The Great Sphinx of Giza is one of the world’s most iconic statues. It’s thought to date back to the reign of Pharaoh Khafre between 2558 and 2532 BCE, and was built from a large block of limestone on-site, meaning no equipment was needed to transport it from elsewhere.
It is a limestone rock outcrop that was built using basic technology of the time, Josef WegnerEgyptologist, archaeologist, and professor of Egyptology at the University of Pennsylvania.
“The Egyptians were masters of limestone masonry, and their sculptors could have easily produced a sculpture of this scale,” Wegener said.
It was probably carved directly from the existing bedrock at the site, and no additional techniques were needed to hold the rock in place. When the sculpture was completed, like many statues of the time, it had alternating yellow and blue stripes on its headdress and a gold mask, but centuries of exposure to the elements have long since faded the paint.
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2. Petra
(Credit: xamnesiacx84/Shutterstock)
Founded over 2,000 years ago along an ancient Arabian trade route, Petra was once home to a community of over 10 million people. 10,000 nomads They were very successful in constructing this engineering marvel.
Workers created the sculpted city by building giant staircases in the sandstone to ensure that the quality of the rock was good enough to withstand the harsh desert sun and to allow the sculptors and masons to work without ropes and the risk of falling.
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3. The Great Pyramids of Giza
(Credit: Mustafa Y. Ibrahim/Shutterstock)
There are some things we don’t know about the pyramids’ construction because of a lack of original sources, so researchers have to look at what’s there and make inferences about such engineering feats, the researchers say. Aidan DodsonEgyptologist and historian at the University of Bristol.
“Apart from a few papyri that discuss ramp configurations, there are no surviving manuals that explain how to build pyramids,” Dodson says.
We know more about the logistics than the engineering. For example, we have the logbooks of the ships used to transport the good-quality casing limestone to the construction site, says Dodson. Here, as with the Great Sphinx, most of the lower-quality limestone (the filler, so to speak) would have been available on-site and wouldn’t have had to be brought in from elsewhere.
Pyramid building techniques remain a mystery, and researchers must study unfinished pyramids to deduce how the more complete pyramids were constructed. Ramps left in the unfinished ruins indicate they were likely used to stack stones to build these gigantic structures that have stood the test of time.
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4. Parthenon
(Credit: Huseyin Eren Obuz/Shutterstock)
The Parthenon was built in Athens, Greece, between 447 and 438 BC to honor the goddess Athena, and still stands in all its glory today. This ambitious project Pericles, Athenian politician The building was designed by the architects Ictinus and Kallikrates, and the sculptures were designed and supervised by the great sculptor Phidias.
The marble was transported by cart from a nearby quarry and each block was carved on-site. Though no one knows for sure, it’s believed that pulleys, ropes and wooden cranes were used to transport the heavy marble blocks to the top of the hill where the Parthenon still stands today.
Either way, moving such heavy stones was an engineering feat, and unlike the pyramids, the building materials needed to be transported to the construction site.
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Sarah Novak is a science journalist based in South Carolina. In addition to contributing to Discover magazine, her work has also appeared in Scientific American, Popular Science, New Scientist, Sierra Magazine, and Astronomy Magazine. She holds a Bachelor’s in Journalism from the University of Georgia’s Grady School of Journalism and is a Master’s candidate in Science Writing at Johns Hopkins University (Class of 2023).
