I suspect the main cost would be the materials. Every block of the Great Pyramid weighed about 2.5 tons. It has an astounding 2.3 million blocks. That would be incredibly expensive to purchase and transport to the site, even today. For comparison, building the Great Pyramid would require moving about 10 times the mass of a giant skyscraper like the Bhurj Khalifa.
You could probably build all of the other 6 wonders of the ancient world today, side by side, for less than the cost of building that one pyramid. I'm fairly confident it'd be a billion dollar project.
That said, I'm not in construction. Perhaps someone could correct me?
That's quite humbling. Thousands of years later, we could build it "cheaper" (relative to our sum societal output), but not a lot cheaper.
Then again, the proportion of basically good people probably hasn't changed much over the millennia either.
"""One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.
The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.
The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.
All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.
All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
"""
Well, yeah. But also some things are just that hard. There's lots of talk here about the rocket equation. Doing X requires at least Y effort. Maybe building a railroad from the quarry to the monument site will save you a bit, but you still have to move a lot of really big rocks.
Not biblical, but in the same spirit
""" And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' """
In some ways, it's humbling, but really, i'll never be as rich as the wealthiest among us. I can't have this sort of vanity project.
In some ways, it's comforting. No matter how powerful you are, as time passes you will be forgotten. Everyone will be forgotten. I'm clearly not Ozymandias. But we all end up the same.
Most importantly (in my humble opinion) it's just sort of sad. So much blood sweat and tears devoted to vanity.
I wept when i saw the 5k year old linen at the met. So much time and effort to produce cloth, with such primitive tools. Perhaps the pyramids were a public works project, which has some redeeming value. But a road, or a waterway, that's a thing that would ease the burdens of hundreds of generations.
i suppose i'll take your much more modern view (by like 3k years!) "All things are full of labour"
perhaps it's best to labour for the benefit of our collective decedents.
That's not fair. We find lots of ways to make BETTER, cheaper things that perform similar functions. We could build a mostly hollow Great Pyramid, full of livable housing for thousands of people, for a tiny fraction of that cost.
I like the comparison with the Bhurj Khalifa. If we take 10x as the metric, that would be 15 Billion (based on an estimated 1.5 Billion for the Bhurj Khalifa) which seems in the right ballpark.
Another way of looking at it, is that the Bhurj Khalifa is an arguably pointless vanity project by a small but wealthy state. Building a Great Pyramid replica could be a pointless. vanity project for a slightly more wealthy state. Maybe that's all the original was, a vanity project for a wealthy state
I've also seen some arguments that the pyramids and other monuments were de facto public works programs, as it was a source of paid employment for farmers during the slow months of the year, and the same construction efforts would have gone into the roads, quarries, central housing, etc to support the staggering amount of manpower needed.
Interesting. A truck arriving every 10 minutes means 144 trucks per day (3 shifts). If a truck can carry 10 blocks, it means 1440 blocks per day and about half a million blocks per year, meaning four years to transport the blocks.
The string of trucks traveling at 60 km/h at 10 minute intervals would mean one truck every 10 kilometers. A distance of 100 km from a quarry to the construction site would mean 20 trucks in rotation (10 going each way).
Probably using a railway would make more sense.
The Mount Airy quarry produces 82,000 tons of stone per year so 5 million tons would take about 60 years. The pace would need to be increased more than ten fold or multiple quarries utilized for the 5 year target.
The vast majority of the blocks were hauled from just one or two hundred meters away. So you just need to buy a big chunk of land that has good stone for quarrying.
I imagine it would probably cost more than a billion. I mean, we have football stadiums in the United States that run about that. If there's 2.3 million blocks, well, I can't imagine that these 2.5 ton blocks would cost any less than $1000 each (assuming you're not cheating by using cheaper material like concrete). The cost of materials alone would probably cost a few billion.
It's interesting to think about how an ancient society was capable of what would be a billion dollar project today, even with modern tools and methods.
My thinking is that the biggest advantages we'd have as a modern society is that it would be faster to build and take fewer people. That only makes their accomplishment far more impressive, though.
Well, to my mind the biggest difference should be how you treat the people working on the project.
I have heard different gospels about how people were treated and felt either compelled to their horrible slavery tasks or honored to be part of the construction of a holy monument of your revered living-human-deity.
Now the biggest challenge today would be probably to sell the project politically: even Mao and Stalin didn't have the political power (or will) to waste so much resources on such a useless rock pile – tourism and archeological documentary apart.
Yes, I can correct you. 100% of the cost would be labor. The materials are stone, it's free for the taking. Paying for the blocks and transport is paying someone to get stones from where they sit, shape them, and transport them.
A billion dollars would be dirt cheap, may as well be free at that price.
You could probably build all of the other 6 wonders of the ancient world today, side by side, for less than the cost of building that one pyramid. I'm fairly confident it'd be a billion dollar project.
That said, I'm not in construction. Perhaps someone could correct me?