🚨NEW: Joe Rogan just had on a pissed off Independent researcher Dan Richards who says the accepted “28 YEARS” timeline for building the Great Pyramid is completely absurd: RICHARDS: “Go build a f**ing fire pit with cinder blocks and get back to me. You guys don’t own a f**ing tool belt.” ROGAN: “There were MILLIONS of stones. We’re definitely missing something.” CONTEXT: Here’s why the construction timeline sounds so absurd when you turn it into arithmetic. The Great Pyramid originally stood roughly 481 feet tall. Its base covers about 13 acres. And the standard estimate is approximately 2.3 million stone blocks. Now take Richards’ 28-year figure. 2.3 million blocks ÷ 28 years = roughly: 82,000 blocks per year. 225 blocks per day. About 9 blocks every hour, 24 hours a day. Or averaged across the entire construction period: ONE BLOCK ADDED ROUGHLY EVERY 6½ MINUTES. For 28 straight years. And if you use the traditional approximately 20-year estimate, the arithmetic gets even crazier: roughly one block every 4½ minutes. But there’s an absolutely crucial caveat. That does NOT mean Egyptians had one crew placing one finished block every five minutes like an assembly line. Thousands of people could quarry, shape, transport and place blocks simultaneously. And archaeology has uncovered evidence for exactly that kind of enormous organized workforce. Harvard’s Digital Giza project says excavations of the builders’ town and tombs indicate a workforce probably on the order of 20,000–30,000 native Egyptians, including skilled craftsmen and large numbers of manual laborers. That changes the fire-pit comparison considerably. Richards is comparing one guy building something in his backyard with an Egyptian state mobilizing tens of thousands of people around one national megaproject. And there was another huge advantage: most of the pyramid wasn’t being dragged hundreds of miles. Archaeologists have identified a massive quarry immediately south of the Great Pyramid that appears to have supplied much of its limestone core. AERA says its quarry channels preserve evidence of workers extracting pyramid-sized blocks in roughly the one-to-two-ton range. But some of the most important stone really did travel enormous distances. The brilliant white limestone used for the outer casing came largely from Tura across the Nile. Granite used inside Khufu’s complex came from Aswan which was roughly 933 kilometers south of Giza. And this is where one of the coolest discoveries in all of pyramid archaeology enters the story. We actually have paperwork from somebody involved. IMPORTANT NOTES: In 2013, archaeologists uncovered the Wadi el-Jarf papyri. Among them was the diary of an Egyptian official named Merer. Merer commanded a crew of roughly 200 men and recorded trips carrying fine limestone from Tura toward Khufu’s pyramid complex. He literally logged his work in half-day increments. That diary dates to very late in Khufu’s reign around Year 26 or 27 when the pyramid appears to have been approaching completion. So Richards’ “28 years” isn’t simply some random number archaeologists invented. There is contemporary Egyptian evidence showing crews transporting casing stone to Khufu’s pyramid near the end of roughly that span of his reign. But there’s another important correction: “28 years” is not a universally established stopwatch measurement for the pyramid’s construction. Modern estimates vary, often clustering around roughly two decades to the high 20s, partly because we do not possess a document saying: “Construction began on this exact date and finished on this exact date.” So archaeologists have evidence for WHEN it was being constructed. They have evidence for WHO was organizing parts of it. They know where much of the stone came from. They have quarry traces. They have a massive workers’ settlement. They do NOT have a surviving ancient construction manual explaining every engineering step.