Peruvian Pyramid Quest

There is a proverb circulating in Arabia in the 9th century AD: "People are afraid of time, and time is afraid of the pyramids." This refers to the Egyptian pyramids. However, at the same time as the Egyptian pyramids appeared, the "New World Pyramids" in Carla, Peru were also erected one after another, becoming a competitor of the same era.

New discoveries that rewrite history

In 2001, archaeologists made a shocking announcement when they discovered what is said to be the earliest urban ruins in the Americas in Peru, enough to rewrite the history of the New World. Located in Caral, 200 kilometers north of Lima, it is all made of stone, with six ancient pyramids scattered in the city center, and an amphitheater and complex residential buildings surrounding it. It appeared as early as 2627 BC, almost at the same time as the construction of the Great Pyramid in Egypt. It has no trace of previous or future cultural influences, so it has been called "the cradle of American civilization" or "the birthplace of New World civilization" by archaeologists.

We know that the Great Pyramid of Egypt was built in the Fourth Dynasty of ancient Egypt (2613 BC to 2494 BC) and was the highest man-made stone mountain in the world for more than 4,000 years. The Mayan pyramids of the Americas were built in AD 250, the Cahokea mound in Illinois appeared in AD 1100, and the Aztec pyramids in Mexico were even later, in AD 1400. Although the latter three are all from the Americas, only the newly discovered Peruvian pyramids match the Egyptian pyramids in time.

The ancient pyramids are like a book, telling the dawn of ancient civilizations. But they are also unwritten books. The inhabitants here have left no written records, no pottery, gold or tombs, not even any legends. Everything about it is a mystery to archaeologists. Through the efforts of archaeologists, we have been able to turn page by page of the story it tells. Relatively speaking, although the Egyptian pyramids also left no written records, about 2,500 years ago, the ancient Greek historian Herodotus left us a legend. In order to compare the construction process of the pyramids in Peru, we might as well take a look at the legends and facts about the Great Pyramid of Egypt.

Legends of the Egyptian Pyramids

Herodotus personally inspected the Great Pyramid, which was originally 146 meters high and 230 meters long on the sides of the base, with 2.6 million cubic meters of stones piled up. According to legend and measurements, Herodotus sketched a construction scene in which slaves were forced to labor: some were forced to drag stones from quarries in the Arabian hills to the Nile, where they were dragged across the river and by others to the hills of Libya. The work rotates every 3 months, once 100,000 people. So a year is 400,000 people. " The idea of "coercion" has entered Hollywood films, and it is often held in textbooks, but this is just a hypothesis circulated more than 2,000 years ago. For such a large number of laborers in the legend, although Herodotus did not see it with his own eyes, he seemed to believe it. In addition, Egyptian monks had told him that it cost a lot of money to build the pyramids, so he speculated that the consumption of iron and clothing and food was also huge.

In terms of time, it took forced laborers 10 years to build the "track" to transport the stones to Giza, and 20 years to build the Great Pyramid, a total of 30 years. Herodotus speculated that the construction method was "stepped", in which the stones were accumulated layer by layer through a lever "crane" that lifted the stones. However, archaeologists today believe that neither "100,000 crowd" nor "wooden levers" are realistic.

Herodotus believed that the builders of the pyramids were slaves, but archaeologists believed that they were paid workers. Of course, their remuneration is not wages, but grain, bread, beer, cooking oil and cloth, etc., which are paid every 10 days. Judging from the scales found, the amount of remuneration does not look like treating slaves. Zahi Hawass, chairperson of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, believes that the king at the time also allowed those workers and poor Egyptians to be buried next to him, and "this is exciting", which was also uncommon in ancient Egypt, "they are not slaves".

For centuries, people have wondered how the ancient Egyptians accumulated huge rocks, and it had to be done before the pharaoh died. In the 1990s, an expedition of Egyptian and American archaeologists examined the construction of the Great Pyramid, unraveling a centuries-old mystery.

According to the estimates of the expedition team, the number of 100,000 people seems too high. They estimated that the average labor force of the whole project was 13,200, and the peak reached 40,000 people. It took two or three years to prepare, and it took five years to complete the construction, and another two years. Carry out slope demolition, decoration and other auxiliary work. They calculate based on 280 days of work a year, and it only takes 10 years and a generation to complete.

Rehner, an archaeologist at the University of Chicago specializing in Egyptology, is a popular scholar among Egyptians. He once experimentally built a pyramid about 9 meters high in Giza, with 12 people accumulating 2 tons of stones. As a result, he estimated that the pharaohs only needed 10,000 laborers to build the pyramids. The Egyptian population at that time was 1 million to 1.5 million, as the ruins of bakeries, beer breweries, and village drainage systems that remained at that time can prove this, and there is no problem in completing this project.

In the past, it was thought that Egypt had no cities and that the inhabitants just lived along the Nile. But Rehner speculates that the pyramids may not be just a project in the desert, but the urban center of Egypt at that time. The population of this "pyramid city" was at least 30,000 people. The construction of the pyramids became the engine of the economic development of ancient Egypt.

If 100,000 built the pyramids, according to Herodotus, it would be the "largest Egypt" in history. Even if it is only half of this number, the ruins cannot disappear without a trace, they will leave behind garbage, pottery, bones of animals and poultry, and more. To test this claim, Reichner dug around over the years, and found details such as fish hooks, barns, bakeries, tunnels, pottery, etc., that allow us to imagine how people lived at the time. As for how people moved the stones to high places, Herodotus believed that it was a lever system made of wood, but archaeologists believe that this is not feasible in practice. However, even today, archaeologists do not fully understand how the pyramids were built, and there is no unified explanation. In Herodotus' story, it is also mentioned that there were iron tools in the tools at that time, but archaeologists believe that there was only copper and no iron at that time.

Perspective on the pyramids of the New World

The silent stone doesn't speak, but the silent pyramid tells the story of the year. Although there are no fascinating ancient legends, archaeologists still give us a picture of the construction process of the Peruvian pyramids, and they were built in a completely different way from the Egyptian pyramids.

The ancient Egyptians used bronze tools to build the pyramids, while the ancient Carrals did not have the help of any metal tools. They used reed-woven bags to collect rocks weighing about 32 kilograms from the riverbed 800 meters away and piled them on the foundation of the pyramid, just as people today build sandbag embankments. The foundation was larger than two football fields today, and was built up to the height of a six-story building in a stepped shape. At the same time, they filled small rocks in the river in the middle of the earth walls erected by the stones. And it was these fragments of reed bags, discarded in the rubble of the pyramid, that allowed archaeologists to measure the precise time it was built.

Because more than 4,000 years of wind and sand have covered these ancient pyramids, they have no obvious features at first glance, but are very similar to huge mounds. The largest of them is 152 meters long, 137 meters wide and 18 meters high, which is 1/8 of the height of the Great Pyramid of Egypt.

These pyramids, nestled in the foothills of the Andes in South America, predate the urban civilization of the Americas as we know it by 1,500 years.

At the same time, archaeologists have also given us a picture of the social conditions of this ancient civilization. On the flat tops of these pyramids are rooms and fire pits, presumably where religious ceremonies were held. Because at one of the foundations, archaeologists found the remains of a boy who was only 18 months old, reflecting that they had the same custom as other Incas of sacrificing little boys to their gods. If this statement is correct, it means that the community here is under theocracy. When the pyramids were built, the ancient Carals covered them with mortar of different colors, pink, beige, light gray, white and yellow, etc., which may have been some kind of mark of glory.

At the same time, they may also reflect emerging social hierarchies, each of which may belong to its own pyramid of varying sizes. This is because near each pyramid there is a group of artificially designed residential buildings inhabited by community residents of different social status. The circular square at the foot of the pyramid can accommodate hundreds of people. Those large stone houses with views from the outside may belong to the upper class, the houses built of bricks may belong to the middle class, and the surrounding houses built of rattan and mud may be slaves. Or the residence of ordinary farmers.

At the same time, these stone buildings also show a considerable level of knowledge of architecture, engineering and geometry of the ancient Karals. They were built in the same period, indicating that there was a centralized center in the construction of these pyramids, and they were capable enough to persuade people to build the project.

Although archaeologist Ule knew as early as 1905 that Caral was an archaeological site, it was long ignored because the search for sites with gold treasures was more attractive to people at the time. It wasn't until 1941 that the first excavations of it began, the rectangular stepped pyramid structure piled up by these stones was identified in the 1970s, and the ancient history of South America was rewritten in the 1990s.

This is what we initially learned about an unknown ancient civilization. Like the Egyptian pyramids, the Peruvian pyramids recorded the great creations of the ancient Americans.