14 December 2006

Of Pyramids & Concrete.


The pyramids of Egypt were not built from massive cut rock hauled from distant quarries, but from concrete cast in forms:

Concrete was poured to build the Great Pyramids about 5,000 years ago, according to controversial research, which suggests the ancient Egyptians predated the Romans by thousands of years as the inventors of concrete.

Michel Barsoum, professor of materials engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia, and colleagues report in the current issue of the Journal of the American Ceramic Society that the pyramids were constructed with a combination of carved stones and blocks of limestone-based concrete.


It ain't news to me. Professor John Luster Brinkley was confidently asserting (the only way he's ever asserted anything!) this theory to his classics classes in the late 1980's, and who knows for how long before that. And of course I have been pedantically asserting the same ever since, needing no other authority than his. More evidence of the superiority of a Hampden-Sydney education.
 

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