Scholars generally suppose that the ancient Egyptians built pyramids, those mysterious monuments of prodigious toil, with the help of earthen ramps buttressed by mud bricks. Pyramid stones are heavy, after all: two and a half tons apiece, on average. A nice draggable slope could explain how, if not exactly why, people stacked millions of them toward the sky, without cranes or internal combustion. Count Elon Musk among the skeptics (“Aliens built the pyramids obv.,” he tweeted last year), along with Roger Larsen, a former newspaper editor in Columbus, Mississippi. Though not a conspiracy theorist, Larsen likes to say that, given a choice between an explanation of ramps or aliens, “I’d have to go with aliens,” noting that an eight-per-cent incline leading to the top of the Great Pyramid of Giza would need to be more than a mile long, its volume possibly exceeding that of the pyramid itself. And where, then, did all the debris go after demolition?
Like many amateur Egyptologists, Larsen, who was a woodworker before founding Mississippi’s best-selling weekly, the Columbus Packet, has his own construction theories, nurtured over hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of reading and tinkering, and he has gone so far as to fashion a homemade device that he thinks could have done the job, by enabling lifting rather than dragging. It resembles a mashup of a giant wooden rowing machine and a catapult, and uses technology that he believes is depicted on the walls at Abydos—notched Djed pillars and knots of Isis, for managing stretch in the many fathoms of required rope. It sits in Lowndes County, atop a cliff of so-called Selma chalk, or soft limestone, belonging to Larsen’s friend Leon.
On a recent Saturday, Larsen attempted a demonstration of his contraption’s worthiness. A block of concrete topped with slabs of marble, weighing around forty-five hundred pounds, served as his stone. The slope of Leon’s cliff is forty-eight degrees, just shy of the Great Pyramid’s fifty-two: close enough.
Larsen, by his own account, has the frame of a parakeet and toothpicks for arms, though he is prone to making bold claims, such as “If society collapses and we’re back in the Stone Ages, I’ma be king of the heap” and “I think nothing like this has been tried since antiquity.” For muscle, he conscripted friends of friends for fifty bucks apiece. He assigned four men to each of two tree-trunk oars, or levers, which he’d cut from the surrounding woods back in February. They had slotted ends, for ropes. The men stood on staircases flanking a central frame, first walking the levers up and then grunting and pushing them back down, while two others attended to skis carrying the block up a kind of railroad track, made of poplar, on the chalk face. With each cycling of the levers, the block climbed about a foot and a half, amid jackhammer-like groaning from the ropes. Occasionally, Larsen poked at a knot with a crowbar—his version of a “was scepter,” which he believes the Egyptians used to maintain tension. “It’s a little tedious, isn’t it?” he said at one point, addressing a small audience watching on FaceTime. (“Hello, New York!” one oarsman shouted.)
After nearly two hours, with the late-morning sun acquiring a Nile-side potency, Larsen’s block reached the top of the cliff. It had veered slightly off its track and rested precariously on the lip. “Y’all come over here and hold this thing,” Larsen said, calling the men off the staircases and inviting them to grab the central rope in a tug-of-war stance. “O.K. Bring it up!” The block didn’t budge: more grist for the argument against dragging. Back to the levers they went to finish the job safely.
The laborers celebrated with fist bumps and Newports, perhaps the first humans in more than four thousand years to have raised such a heavy object using plausibly ancient technology, but their supervisor, ever wary of being dismissed as a Gyro Gearloose, couldn’t mask a Sisyphean resignation that the academic establishment still wouldn’t be impressed. Larsen had spent years trying to interest Old Kingdom experts in video footage of previous demonstrations, with limited success.
“I’ve been giving him some encouragement in this not because I think he’s necessarily right but because I think he might be right,” James Harrell, an archeological geologist with the University of Toledo, e-mailed. “Some of the ideas I’ve seen are pretty loopy, such as using large kites to carry the blocks up the sides of the pyramids, building water channels with locks to float the blocks up on rafts, or that the blocks are actually made of concrete that was cast in place. Roger’s idea is not like these. It’s sensible and well within the technological capabilities of the ancient Egyptians.”
“I just thought it was something worthwhile, that’s all,” Larsen said. “I’ve got lots of other projects to get started on.” ♦
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