How megaliths were moved?

Ancient Construction Techniques

Hello friends,

You all might have seen many ancient construction wonders like  Pyramids of Egypt, Forbidden City of China, Great Wall of China, Angkor wat etc...
But have you ever thought of how such massive blocks of stones are moved or lifted to the construction site?

Yeah, in the today's post we are going to discuss some such interesting techniques used by our ancient engineers.let us head to the topic.

Forbidden City 

 As a matter of fact, the construction work of Forbidden City took 14 years to get completed.Some of the stones used for this construction weighs hundreds of tons which were quarried from the nearby quarry which is 70km away.
So the question we are getting is how did they move them to construction site from the quarry?

For this, the engineers of those times devised many plans.

• One of the down to earth technique is ice lubrication.During winters they use to lubricate the ice roads with water.Which would facilitate in easy sliding of huge stones over ice roads.
• The basic science involved in this is ,the addition of water to ice would cut down the friction in such a  way that  if we consider friction for normal ice roads as 100 then the friction for the water lubricated ice roads will be just 14.3(approx) so the need for large number of labour and time required in bringing the stone to construction site is greatly decreased.
• From the research work, it is known that in those days the temperature during winters in China will be around -3.7 Celsius which would produce a hard ice that is capable of bearing the weight of large stones.

Pyramids of Egypt

According to a research, the construction work of pyramids lasted for about 22 years.And some of the stones involved in construction work weighs up to 400 tons which are almost impossible to lift to such great heights of pyramids.
But they made it possible and constructed a lot number of structures of that kind. All with some simple applications of science and with some basic logic.

• The larger part of Egypt is covered with sand and moving something on sand is horribly tough.Since when something is moved over the sand the sand is likely to form lumps of sand as clumps which would act as added weight to the original weight.

• As a solution for this Egyptians started adding water to the sand during their pull work, which makes the sand stiffer and ultimately making the job of gliding over the sand easier.
• Too much wetness or too much dryness would result in making the job tougher so for a successful gliding optimum wetness is necessary and this optimum value varies with various types of sands.

The scientific reason behind this technique is dampening the sand in front of the contraption reduces the friction to a greater extent.

Pontoon System:

Romans are good at sciences related to canals and aqueducts and they are very good at making pontoons and designing water systems.Since these constructions are very near to the river Nile they used those waters in a quite effective way by constructing pontoons and canals.

• Pontoons are the floating structures as a flat bottomed boat that serves as a dock or a sea plane.

By the usage of these canal systems and pontoons, construction work with the huge stones was made easy.

• At first quarry site is flooded with water and the water level is raised accordingly to the necessity, using the water gates.The pontoon system arranged will carry the huge stones from the quarry to the construction site with ease.

                                           The basic principle involved in this technique is Archimedes principle 

• For a huge block placed in water the force required to make it float is very small and the force required to make it move horizontal is also very less by the usage of some buoyancy devices that are made up of Cedar  of density 581kg/m3,we can lift a stone of weight 1000kg by using a 1.2m3 of wood.

Wooden Rollers

The basic thing about this is it looks something, like a stone or an object placed in between two wooden wheels which roll.Since the area of contact is lesser the friction is also lesser when compared to a stone block resting on the land and is being pulled.

• Coming to the basic structure the wooden roller though it looks like a whole wheel, it is not! It is the combined structure of many segments of a circle and with some holes over it for tying the stone in between the two wheels.

And as a matter of fact, many such circle segments were found in the excavations carried out in the Egypt

Besides all these techniques, if the stones involved are not so huge, then practices like using the man power and animal power(elephants..) and usage of levers, rollers, and gear systems are widely practised.

That's all for the post.
THANK YOU.