Hey there, Welcome to Play Noggin, I’m Julian,
your brain’s player two.
Assassin’s Creed is back at last, which
is a sentence I never thought I’d say.
For a while Ubisoft was churning out new installments
in their historical action-adventure stealth
stabby stabby franchise with such regularity
you could set your watch to it.
And while the scope of the games got bigger
and more ambitious, keeping up that relentless
release schedule wasn’t easy and the overall
quality started to suffer.
So Ubisoft decided to take a gap year, and
the result of the longer gestation is Assassin’s
Creed: Origins.
The latest game is set in ancient Egypt, and
while there’s all the usual parkour and
murder and hard-to-follow-subplot-of-a-mysterious-forerunner-race,
the setting is what really steals the show.
Finally we get to see Egypt in all its glory,
and there is no monument more glorious or
synonymous with Egypt than the Great Pyramids
of Giza.
Even today the Great Pyramids still captivate
us.
Despite years of obsessive study, we’re
still not completely sure how they were built,
and there are a lot of factors that contribute
to that mystery.
For one thing, the pyramids are absurdly old.
For some perspective, the events of Assassin’s
Creed: Origins take place around 49 BCE, during
the reign of Cleopatra.
Cleopatra wasn’t an Egyptian as we tend
to think of her, but actually one of the last
in a long line of ancient greek rulers of
Egypt who descended from one of the Alexander
the Great’s generals, Ptolemy.
Even though the Ptolemaic dynasty started
250 years before Cleopatra, there were still
THIRTY Egyptian dynasties before it.
The great pyramids were built during the fourth
dynasty, with the first and largest Pyramid
constructed in just 20 years around 2560 BCE.
*Which means that even though Assassins Creed:
Origins is set over two thousand years ago,
our proto-assassin Bayek and the cast of real
historical characters actually lived closer
to the invention of facebook than to the construction
of the great pyramids.
When you realize just how old the Pyramids
are you start to understand why their construction
is such a marvel.
Their builders didn’t just lack modern construction
tools like cranes and power drills.
They lacked ancient tools like wheeled carts.
Sure, working wheels have been found that
date back before the pyramids, although none
have been found in Egypt.
The wheel probably blew people’s minds when
it finally showed up.
I bet some ancient egyptian actually said,
“This is the greatest thing since the Pyramids!
Also this bread is hard to slice.”
So without the aide of wheels how did they
get 2.3 million limestone blocks, each weighing
2.5 tons on average, to the site?
This has been one of the most vexing questions
and it seems like a new “solution” to
the problem is posed daily.
The most popular theory du jour right now
is that the Egyptians used sleds to haul stones
across the desert.
Most of the stones were quarried from a few
hundred meters away where a prehistoric sea
had deposited the skeletons of marine life
that over time would be compressed into limestone.
*Being so close to the main building material
is probably why the great pyramids are where
they are.
Although a few hundred meters is easy on camelback,
it’s not so easy if you’re dragging a
two and a half ton block of limestone.
Even on some kind of sled, piles of sand would
immediately build up in front of the runners
and it would be difficult to overcome the
friction with sheer muscle.
There is evidence that the ancient builders
used their brains, not just their brawn.
Archeologists have discovered an image of
workers dragging an enormous stone statue
on a wooden sled, and one worker in particular
appears to be pouring water on the sand ahead
of the runners.
When scientists tried this method for themselves,
they found that with just the right amount
of wetness, the sand stayed smooth and the
amount of force needed to drag the block was
half the amount they would have needed if
the sand was dry.
Not all stone could be dug up from around
the corner though.
Remember that the Pyramids were not just piles
of stones, they were tombs for Pharaohs, and
so they had passageways and chambers inside.
While there were no crazy booby traps and
parkour puzzles like in Assassin’s Creed,
they were still impressive works for their
time, and the ancient architects knew that
to keep their king’s tomb from collapsing
and getting a tongue lashing in the afterlife,
they needed some strong interior materials
like granite.
However granite wasn’t anywhere near the
pyramid site, and dragging the blocks from
where they were quarried over 500 miles away
was too impractical, so the Egyptians did
the lazy thing and diverted the Nile River…
Obviously.
They dug canals right up to the building site
and used water from the Nile to flood them.
Then they could float the blocks on purpose
built barges right to the pyramid-in-progress,
and offload it onto a sand sled.
From there they had to get all the materials
up the rising structure, and the simplest
and most popular idea is they used a ramp.
Nobody can agree on exactly what this ramp
would looked like though, because all the
different ideas have their own benefits and
drawbacks.
It could have been one enormous ramp to the
top, or one that zig zagged up one face, or
a ramp that spiraled around the whole structure,
or some combination of these ideas.
Once the interior of the pyramid was complete,
it was finished with a smooth layer of white
limestone.
Workers cut and polished these to a brilliant
white, and fit them together so tightly that
not even a credit card could slip between
them.
When the pyramids were brand new, they would
have been enormous dazzling white beacons
in the middle of the desert, and Bayek wouldn’t
have any convenient cracks to shimmy his way
up.
The white limestone has since been pilfered
to make other structures, and just a bit of
the original remains atop the second oldest
Great Pyramid of Giza.
Looking beyond just their scale, even the
minute details of how the Pyramids were built
are head scratching.
Without modern instruments they are amazingly
square, level, and deliberately positioned.
While this has lead some to believe that they
could have only been made with the help of
aliens of precursors, there are plausible
explanations that don’t involve either.
Though compasses hadn’t been invented yet
and our modern day north star, Polaris, wasn’t
in the same Northern position 4,500 years
ago, ancient people could still find north
by watching any star move across the sky and
cutting it’s path in half.
They could have made accurate right angles
by drawing overlapping circles, running a
line through the circle centers and where
the circles overlapped.
And they could have used a plumb bob to determine
if the foundation of the pyramid was level.
In fact, an ancient plumb bob was found at
giza, so sorry tin-foil-hatters, no precursors
necessary here.
It also helps to remember that while the great
pyramids are crazy old, they were not the
first in egypt.
The oldest known pyramid dates back about
100 years before the first Great Pyramid of
Giza and is known as the step pyramid because,
well, look at it.
Before the step pyramid, tombs were made of
clay and mud.
That’s right, the step pyramid is so old
that the stone technology used to build them
was considered an exciting new way to make
buildings.
Eventually pyramids were built with smooth
sides instead of giant steps, but it took
some trial and error, as evidenced by the
Bent Pyramid.
The Bent Pyramid started out at a steep angle,
but when it was clear that would make it unstable
as it got taller, the builders flattened it
out.
When the same pharaoh built another pyramid
right next to it, the Red Pyramid, it was
built at the shallower angle from the start.
Apparently egyptian pharaohs could mess up
a pyramid and just build another one like
it was no big deal.
So with a little ancient technology and some
trial and error, the Great Pyramids of Giza
became the ancient wonders we can still appreciate
today.
It’s a shame that pollution has turned them
brown and stolen stones make them look like
the anti-aliasing was turned off, but if you
want to see what they looked like while they
were still smooth, white, and shiny, Assassin’s
Creed: Origins is worth the playthrough just
for that.
Hey thanks for watching, don’t forget to
subscribe.
If you’re a fan of the Assassin’s Creed
games check out our video on how genetic memory
might be possible here.
And don’t forget to keep on playing!
