College is all about being curious, coming up with assumptions and challenging the conventional way of looking at things.
This is exactly what lecturer Craig B. Smith did Thursday, as he explained his theory of how the Great Pyramids of Giza were made.
The lecture was held in the Performing Arts Center. The room was so full, people had to sit on the floor or stand in the back just to hear Smith speak.
Dean R. Thomas Jones of the College of Architecture and Environmental Design (CAED) said, “The guy, even though not a Cal Poly graduate, exemplifies everything that we stand for.”
Though his ideas “did not jive with what archaeologists had told us all, he talks about how (the old theories) didn’t make sense and how (they) didn’t quite compute,” Jones said.
“(Smith) is a very versatile fellow,” said Ray Ladd, associate director of Advancement and Alumni Relations for the CAED, when introducing Smith on stage.
Smith is a world-renowned engineer with more than 40 years of experience. He has authored many books, including “How the Great Pyramid was Built,” and has appeared on A&E, PBS and the History Channel.
He has also appeared in National Geographic magazine and said when the magazine first approached him about being featured, the editors wanted him to determine how much a pyramid would cost in the year 2006, in addition to outlining his theory.
He faced this task head-on by figuring out the construction sequence that would be used today, and even contacted some of the biggest limestone and concrete companies in the United States to get price estimates.
In the end, Smith estimated it would take 105 people four years to create a pyramid today. The costs for concrete would be $1 billion, and the limestone would cost $4 billion. He was even able to determine that the workers’ food and drink would cost around $1 billion.
Through his extremely detailed and in-depth analysis, Smith discovered that the ancient pyramids took about 5,000 skilled overseers, 20,000 to 30,000 workers, and 11 years to build.
Within the hour-long lecture, which seemed to fly by with the jokes he interjected between his slides of the remarkable pyramids, Smith talked about the construction of the pyramids, how long each took to build, the tools used and the processes he went through to develop his theory.
While saying many people believed that only slaves were used to build the pyramids, he said jokingly, “Like our grad students, they were paid in beer and bread.”
He went on to discuss that there must have been a highly educated class of people that had to build a whole city of workers to even be able to attempt to build the pyramids.
Though the lecture appealed to many, the topic at hand was so large that it seemed there wasn’t enough time to fit in all the information.