Fourth domino
How to transport giant stone blocks?

Abu Simbel

We have a great example showing how modern man is capable of transporting ancient, multi-ton sandstone colossi carved from a single stone from point A to B.

This occurred during the construction of the Aswan Dam, where several ancient Egyptian temples and giant statues had to be saved from flooding. In 1963, professionals transported two stone temples and these massive, single stone statues to a new place at Abu Simbel.

The technology behind

The technology used was as follows: they lifted the temple and the statues with heavy machinery and helicopters... Oh wait, no.

They actually cut them into 807 pieces. Eight hundred and seven pieces.

Modern man doesn't have any other technology to move these hundred-ton statues other than by cutting them up and moving them piece by piece. This is exactly what happened at Abu Simbel.

How ancient Egyptians did it?

Well, there is a wall painting where we see the Egyptians dragging a huge statue on a wooden sledge across the sand. One person is pouring water in front of the sledge onto the sand to facilitate sliding.

It's certain that this method works. You could drag it all the way to a ship, and you can take the statue as far as you want by boat.

Ancient math lesson

Let's count the number of people pulling the statue. There are 2 x 21 = 42 people standing along each rope, and there are four parallel ropes, making a total of 168 people.

Assuming that one person can drag, say, ~100 kg on the sand, this statue could have been approximately 16.8 tons.

168 person = 16,8 tons.

The Serapeum

In Saqqara, there's a place called the Serapeum, where underground caverns house giant stone sarcophagi, each weighing 40 tons, made from noble stones like granite, basalt, and diorite.

As we just saw, one person can drag ~100 kg. Therefore, to drag such a sarcophagus, 400 (four hundred!) people would be needed. Even if one person could drag ten times more (1 ton), it would still require 40 people. On this narrow space.

If we discard both the UFO and the Harry Potter theories, we don't have many choices left to explain this, but...

Did someone say buckets?

However, there's an additional possibility for how all this could have been done. If the Egyptians knew about artificial stones, they could have brought the raw materials easily into the tunnel in buckets and cast the sarcophagi on site.

So, either they didn't move these 40-ton boxes around at all, or they did it with buckets, depending on your perspective.

But we will need another substance instead of wood ash, because Egyptian statues are not all black. We need some white material that can do the same as wood ash, that is, it contains freely available aluminum oxide.

The modern geopolymer

To crack this nut, let's review what modern geopolymers, or artificial stones, are made of.
  1. Waterglass - check, the Egyptians knew how to make waterglass.
  2. Alkali activation - check, wood ash juice is a strong lye, which was also used for soap making.
  3. Metakaolin - the most needed white material that turns waterglass into stone

What is metakaolin?

Metakaolin is a silly name for burnt (calcinated) kaolinit. Kaolinit, on the other hand, is a white mineral which is the residue of - wait for it - granite Granite, that has decomposed over millions of years. So, kaolinit is essentially disintegrated ancient granite.

Waterglass needs freely accessible aluminum oxide to turn into stone, which can be found in in kaolinite, and the burning process disintegrates it into white powder.

Where can we find kaolinite in Egypt?

SURPRISE! Where else (and actually nowhere else), but in Aswan! Where the unfinished obelisk is located. Obviously (?)

We find surface kaolinite fields only a few kilometers from Aswan in the western desert.

It's surely a fatal coincidence that the only place in Egypt where you can find kaolinit is where Egyptians started etching granite to produce waterglass.
Aswan is that divine place in Egypt where all the raw materials for making white geopolymer are within arm's reach.

Unproven theory (yet): Granite can be recast from the waterglass produced by etching granite with molten natron, using metakaolin from the western desert and mixing in the remaining original granite grains. Let's recap what we know so far: