You don’t need thousands of people to powder some limestone, create a concrete mix, and pour it into a wooden mould.
Even if that’s what happened, you’d still need dynamite to excavate the hole in the mountain that it was poured into.
And how come we haven’t rediscovered the recipe? You’d think it would be fairly basic chemistry.
Do you mean removed from? We know that quarrying stone is possible with ancient tools. Expanding wood can be enough to break off huge chunks of rock.
The temple is set into a big hole in the mountain.
In any case, I assume the first thing the archaeologists must have done would be an analysis of the building rock compared to the surrounding rock. It’s pretty clear, I think, they’re the same material. The buildings were not cast.
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The Romans had better concrete than we have now. The recipe was possibly obtained from the Greeks. It’s possible that the recipe originated in Egypt.
But it was still identifiable as concrete. Superficially, it looks similar to modern concrete. It’s impossible to confuse it with igneous rock.
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Google some pictures of limestone concrete.
I’m sure they would have done a little more than just a cursory visual inspection.
Have you ever mixed concrete the old fashioned way without machinery? Some of of these stones are hundreds of tons. How are they mixing that much and pouring it with the consistency of what they had.
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yeah, I get the feeling some of the commentators have never physically built a human-scale project. An unaided man, even fairly fit, can’t shift much more than a quarter of a cubic meter of earth or rock per day. The volume of the excavated area at Ellora is 26000 cubic meters.
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The mixing of the limestone is even more ridiculous than cutting them.
These blocks are hundreds of tons. Even modern day cement mixers would have trouble doing this. If the mix is to dry, too wet, become hardened to early or inconsistent they would not hold. Modern cement pouring is incredibly difficult with machinery. They have a short time window, exact balance of the mix, and had to be consistent. None of this is even feasible imo.
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/world/africa/23iht-pyramid.1.12259608.html
Draw your own conclusions. More likely than aliens, if less exciting. The colosseum is quite a big thing.
Just a few years ago it was accepted that modern humans could not breed with Neanderthals.
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Cast buildings are indeed much easier to construct, as I said earlier, and many civilisations independently discovered the techniques. So my query was: why didn’t they do exactly that? Why did they do things the hard way?
A cast building is instantly recognisable. The architecture is fundamentally different. Casting blocks and moving them into place has certainly been done, but cast-in-place is easier. It also avoids cold joint, which represents structural weak points.
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I’m not saying it’s aliens. I wonder if doctor Hobbs has ever made anything completely old fashioned.
I went on a trip to build an orphanage, we mixed concrete from digging dirt and rocks to shoveling them into a truck. Then we bring the the dirt and rocks to mix with the concrete mix in a ditch we dug. This was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, and most of the guys were in fairly strong shape. Probably in better conditions than Egyptians back then. Took like almost 2 weeks to just cast the floor of a tiny orphanage. The floor couldn’t have been more than a few inches
I’m not suggesting you are saying aliens, although I’d bet money that’s where this thread will end up.
I’m only putting forward a possible solution to the conundrum you have raised.
Limestone actually forms into blocks naturally. And they had Copper chisels, its not impossible to imagine.
But that’s boring so I say Alien concrete and wormholes
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I’ve never heard of this theory. I’ve thought about it, and with what knowledge of pouring mixes into cast. It would seem incredibly hard. If I was to make a 10 ton block, I must mix 10 tons to pour at once. One solid block from what I know must be made at the same time. How exactly are they mixing 10 tons of material keeping it from being solid too quickly. Getting the consistency of them correct from block to block mixing such large amounts at one.
If they were doing casts, why not just make a bunch of smaller blocks?
OK, let’s go down the advanced technology argument road. They had a limestone concrete recipe that was so ahead of its time that we can’t spot it.
Roman concrete is still better than we can produce now. No concrete cancer with those boys, and it looked like igneous rock.
I’m no expert, but it would be a lot easier than cutting through the rock to a smooth finish and then hauling the blocks to the site. Oh, and then building a ramp to get the block up to the top.
Not to a x-ray spectrometer it doesn’t. I’m pretty sure they’ve analyzed those rocks to death. It’s the simplest way of showing exactly where they came from … or if they’re synthetic.
To duplicate an actual rock you’ve have to use the same processes: ie., enormous temperature and/or pressure for several centuries. Unless you had some alien technology to speed things along …
I completely agree with you that it would have been easy to do what you’re suggesting, and delivered a result that would be indistinguishable from a human point of view. But all the evidence is that they didn’t do that.