Now watch the flat earth documentary.
Just some context: Ancient Aliens is racist. It’s roots are literally Nazi.
You see, it’s only achievements in brown countries that need alien help. The Greeks didn’t need ET for the Colosseum, heavens no. We just scratch our head at Africans or Americans building pyramids and stuff.
In the 30s, Nazi “researchers” believed in something I’ll call “Ancient Aryans” which is exactly the same as Ancient Aliens except it’s pure Germans who are visiting these primitive cultures and raising architecture. What happened to the Germans? They were annihilated by in-breeding with locals of course.
Even if Nazis believed in Ancient Aliens as some sort of weird ubermensch theory, that doesn’t make the idea itself racist at all.
People are fascinated by aliens. Before aliens people tended to attribute giant structures to gods and spirits when they lost the historical records. You don’t need racism to believe in crazy fantasy ideas, you just need to be a bit too credulous.
Yeah Ancient Aliens has always been real weird, and I’m gonna be honest I’ve never heard of the Ancient Aryans thing so… yeah the similarities are weird for sure. Few things to note.
The Parthenon is Greek, the Romans built the coliseum — also, the Native Americans didn’t have a unified name for the Americas. If it makes you feel better you can say indigenous people of the American continents, or even Indigenous Americans, but calling them strictly American is genuinely awful.
My mom was born in Keams Canyon, and I’ve visited. If you went there calling the people there Americans they would not appreciate it. They’re Hopi, or maybe Navajo.
I would think it had more to do with time. Pyramids were built thousands of years before the Colosseum.
I never understood this. Any measurement you do with a wheel you could do with a line of length equal to the circumference. So whether they knew about pi or not is irrelevant?
You’re doing a measurement, and using a wheel to measure. There’s a mark on the wheel, so that one turn = one unit of measure. So if all of your measurements are x turns of the wheel, then all of your measurements will be x/pi.
Wheels are always a fraction of pi. Whether you like it or not. Lengths of string can be arbitrary, but a circle’s dimensions are always tightly related to and proportional to pi in some way. I also recall that wheel measurements are more precise for large scale building because, unlike rope, leather and cloth, a wooden wheel doesnt stretch. Two wheels made similar will stay more between a much tighter error factor than two pieces of rope. The rope might start at the same length but will deform differently as they are used.
I think they are saying that the circumference of a wheel can be any arbitrary measurement, you just change the size of the wheel. So how can that be notably different from having a straight ruler the same length as whatever that circumference is?
Because this was how you did geometry and math in general in ancient times even till around year 500. The biggest problem was to easily construct exact angles. because it is rly hard to construct a triangle ruler with old materials. but a circle can be constructed with a pencil and a string and with 2 circles you can easily construct exact angles.
When I realized that the whole Ancient Aliens bullshit was written by a butthurt Dane who has no real contribution to the civilization other than white supremacy as pseudoscience, that whole conspiracy theory became easier to debunk.
Paleontologist? probably was just there for his “dinosaurs built the pyramids” theory.
Not the mama!
Apparently the show was one of Jim hensen’s ideas, and the concept was what he was working on when he passed away. Wikipedia says it was only greenlit because of the success of the Simpsons, which showed an oddball sitcom could work, which it did for 4 years.
I don’t remember it much other than enjoying watching it.
I also remember playing the theme song for it in my middle schools band.
The ending was pretty dark, and came a bit before the widespread acceptance of the Chicxulub impact.
For those interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changing_Nature
Quite sad, but really well done and very realistic.
Holy cow that was 1994‽
A wheel, no! They just had 1 guy with a really long tape measure
And maybe a rope or two.
Tiered looking. Dog was in full German chocolate cake mode. That’s how he remembered the circles.
Yeah using circles to make tiered blocks is impressive!
Are we implicitly using their units? Metric factors of pi would be quite surprising.
If you compare distances like 14 wheel rotations to 5 wheel diameters, then the size of the wheel does not matter. Your ratios will be related to PI.
I don’t think that’s true though?
Like, if you have a wheel who’s diameter is 3.18m (10/3.14), it will have a circumference of 10m. So 14 wheel rotations will be 140m, and 5 wheel rotations will be 50m.
Comparing 14 rotations to 5 rotations (140m to 50m) doesn’t seem to yield pi in any meaningful way?
How are you suggesting that pi would emerge?
The second distance is 5 diameters not 5 rotations.
Ah, reading is hard. My bad.
Though, it seems like if you were measuring using wheels, to use the diameter to measure something would be a little odd? It’s way easier to roll a wheel a certain number of times vs trying to use it as a circular yardstick.
And if rotations isn’t giving you the granularity you want, just use a smaller wheel?
Hypothetical example:
You have a standard measuring stick of length 1u. The guy at the quarry cutting blocks cuts them to 1u (or 2u or some other small integer multiple of u) because that can be conveniently measured by stick. The guy making measuring wheels makes them 1u radius (or diameter or whatever) because, again, that’s convenient to measure by stick. But the guy responsible for surveying the whole pyramid base uses the wheel because it’s easier to go “100 wheel rotations that way” than mess about putting sticks end on end hundreds of times.
Several millennia pass and some conspiracy nut looks at the number of blocks per side and it comes out to a round number of multiples of pi. OMG, what were they trying to tell the aliens etc.
That’s fair. A standardized stick measurement for shorter lengths, and a standardized wheel of diameter 1-stick for longer lengths. That tracks.
Yeah measuring in diameters is pretty strange but it was the first thing that poped into my head that would yield factors of pi.
Could also be that they a standard unit (1u) and would use both 1u radius wheels and 1u circumference wheels.
Or its all derived measures like “the length of a wheel spoke” and “the length of a string around the same wheel” so never the actually physical wheel is used for the measuring.
Maybe we should ask the tired archeologists?
So your example starts with a wheel who’s diameter is a divisor of pi, which I think it a flawed example (since pi gets divided out in C = [pi] * d)
I wouldn’t expect a craftsman to deliver a wheel who’s dimensions are specified by its circumference, I’d expect them to make a wheel based on diameter (or maybe radius). We can see that even in today’s measurements (e.g. a 8mm bolt has a diameter of 8mm).
So with that, a 1m wheel would have a circumference of 3.14 ish meters (which would then emerge when doing math on the side length of a structure).
My thoughts then go to the units (at top level commenter noted. If they used an arcane ancient unit of measure like the Roman pes (using cause I’m most familiar with that one) to measure their wheel and say the wheel is 5 pes in diameter, their wall will be 5 * [pi] * [rotation count] pes long.
But a pes is .296 meters. So assuming the wall is 10 rotation counts long; we come along and measure the wall as ~4.67 meters long…I don’t see pi in that number.
…so how did the “ancient astronaut theorists” conclude pi was involved in this at all? I suppose that means they knew the units the Egyptians used to build the pyramids? But that doesn’t seem very likely.
I wouldn’t expect a craftsman to deliver a wheel who’s dimensions are specified by its circumference, I’d expect them to make a wheel based on diameter
it would be hard to make such wheel in practice, but it doesn’t change their point.
If you find both circumference and diameter based measurements then searching for a ratio can uncover the unit size of the wheel. Which is probably something you do when you already expect pi to appear.
Yeah, I missed that he said 5 diameters, not rotations.
Though, it strikes me as odd that people would be making diameter based measurements with a wheel tool for the same reason it would be weird for people to be making measurements with the short side of a yard stick. Seems like a needlessly difficult way to get a measurement when your existing tool already has an easy and codified way of getting measurements.
I’m no historian or whatever, so maybe that’s something they did do in antiquity. But it seems unlikely to me, and if we have evidence that they did, I’d be interested to see it.
The unit is arbitrary. Let’s say 1 unit of measurement equals the radius of the wheel. As long as they used the same wheel for all sides of the pyramid, each side will follow the formula: n * 2 * pi where ‘n’ is an integer (whole number). The formula could easily be written in any other unit of distance by multiplying by the conversion ratio.
Was it by any chance Ancient Aliens and the guy with the shit haircut?
Every number is divisible by pi.
No, the pyramids bases and its height have an relation which is exact Pi, but only because the Egyptians used a Wheel to measure with x turns 2 sides of the base and the height with x diameters of this Wheel, so the relation of 2 sides/height is automaticly Pi, without knowing the value of this number. They did it because the Wheel was a sacred symbol of the Egipcians.
I don’t think that’s the case. Weirdly enough, I think it’s a coincidence.
Who would use circumferences of a wheel in one axis, but diameters of a wheel for another?
See…have you ever laid out a roof? Here in inch land, the slope of a roof isn’t given in degrees, it’s given in rise over run, and run is typically 1 foot or 12 inches. So a slope of 45 degrees works out to 12 in 12, it rises 12 inches for every 12 inches. You’ll find a lot of American roofs have a 33.69 degree angle. Why that weird number? It’s a slope of 8 in 12.
Pause for the Europeans to cope with being carried through the industrial revolution by the English and Americans by pontificating about metric. Are we done? Good. Moving on.
The ancient Egyptians didn’t have feet and inches, they had cubits, palms and fingers. Four fingers to a palm, seven palms to a cubit. The Egyptian unit of slope is the Seked, palms of run per cubit of rise. Notice that: We’re now in run over rise, not rise over run.
The first (attempt at a) smooth sided pyramid is the Bent Pyramid built for Sneferu. It starts off at a Seked of 5, which works out to a smidge over 54 degrees. The popular lore is the building started showing cracks, so to save weight they reduced the slope to a Seked of 7.5, which works out to 43 degrees. The nearby Red pyramid, also attributed to Sneferu and apparently built immediately after, is built entirely at that 43 degree angle.
The pyramid at Meidum, Sneferu’s other pyramid, was first built as a stepped pyramid like Djoser’s, and then modified into a smooth sided pyramid, with a Seked of 5 palms, 2 fingers, or about 51 degrees. This worked, at least in antiquity (the Meidum pyramid is heavily ruined in the modern day).
So when his son Khufu decided to build the biggest pyramid of all time (and nobody has proven the magnificent bastard wrong yet), that’s the slope he used. 5 palms, 2 fingers. 51 degrees.
So the ratio of the Great Pyramid’s height to the distance from the center to the middle of a base edge is 7 to 5.5. That means the ratio of the height to the length of a base edge is 7 to 11. Which means if we take the length and width of the pyramid’s base, and divide it by the height, we just so happen to get 22 / 7, which about a millennia later the Greeks would discover is a pretty good approximation for Pi, but the 4th dynasty Egyptians didn’t know about that.
That’s not what Khufu’s son Khafre did. Khufu was a magnificent bastard but Khafre was clever sumbitch. Khufu built the world’s biggest pyramid. Khafre built his slightly smaller pyramid uphill from his dad’s so his would look bigger. And, he built it very slightly steeper, with a Seked of 5.25 (about 53 degrees). That works out to the same slope as a 3-4-5 triangle. 3/4 is 0.75, and because Seked is given as palms per cubit we multiply by 7, 0.75 * 7 is 5.25. And they DID know about that in the 4th dynasty. Clever sumbitch.
I’d like to subscribe to pyramid facts
Couldn’t you use a straight line equal in length to the circumference of said circle? Or a rope of such length, or a multiple of such length?
To get a pi ratio, you need one measurement to be made with the diameter of the wheel, and another made with the circumference of the same wheel. You can certainly use ropes, but one of those ropes needs to be a multiple of the diameter, and the other a multiple of the circumference.
You might be measuring short lengths with a particular unit, say, a “stick”. To get consistent longer measurements, you might measure 100 turns of rope around a spool one cubit in diameter. The length of that rope might be called a “string”.
The architects of a building might pound two sticks into the ground, one “string” apart, and tell the masons to construct a wall between those sticks. The architect wants a wall; the architect doesn’t particularly care how long the bricks are. The masons don’t particularly care how long the wall is going to be, just where they need to start and stop. The brickyard workers don’t care how long a string is, they just need a consistent measurement for their molds.
Nobody involved particularly cares about pi, and yet the resulting building will have pi ratios all over the place.
Sure but wouldn’t a wheel be easier?
Maybe. But my point is what does it have to do with pi?
What episode was that?
They’d also have to have used ɸ, ℇ, 365, the circumference of the earth, and the speed of light to build it.
But hey, who’s to say they didn’t? Not me! Them ancient Egyptians was wily.
Or they carved the pyramids from the top down after overbuilding a sacrificial structure, That makes it much easier to maintain those sharp lines and accurate angles.
https://www.openculture.com/2026/02/were-the-egyptian-pyramids-not-built-up-but-carved-down.html
Which is a technique even wilier than previously mentioned.
