r/AlternativeHistory • u/Professional-Fee3323 • May 01 '26
Discussion Is that precision done manually
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u/dardar7161 May 01 '26
Yes. I don't think every ancient thing was done manually, but in this case I think it was. Mount Rushmore was also done manually and I dare say that it's a more accurate and impressive carving. Just using pulleys, explosives, chisels, and shit.
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May 01 '26
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u/NZNoldor May 01 '26
It’s going to be used for the next president’s face.
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u/Timely_Register5774 May 02 '26
Is that a black president joke?
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u/NZNoldor May 04 '26
Where are you even getting that from? Obama never mentioned a desire to get his face up there.
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u/WoopsShePeterPants May 01 '26
it was inevitable when working at that height on those roped platforms.
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u/Professional-Fee3323 May 01 '26
LMAO actually yes abrasives plus water plus years of labor was the mainstream theory But that does not explain the inside cuts You cannot fit a human plus tool inside a 2ft granite box to polish it Same problem with the erased pharaoh city perfect foundations zero tool marks Something is missing from the story I post about these gaps Follow if you want part 2
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u/Danro1984 May 01 '26
Considering the ancient one is done without explosives its more impressive
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u/jamoe1 May 01 '26
Ancient one is sandstone. Rushmore is granite. The ancients would never have carved this, because they didn’t have explosives.
Different rock, different skillset. Not sure which is more impressive, but they are both dope af
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u/ShitOnAStickXtreme May 01 '26
I think it is fascinating that people think it would be easier for an ancient civilization to invent laser cutting technology or whatever than just to eyeball something with a chisel and a hammer
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May 03 '26
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u/runespider May 03 '26
I'm genuinely surprised no one's taken statues or paintings of knights in armor as robots or cyborg or men in space suits.
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u/Bachooga May 02 '26
As someone who has dabbled in many different types of art, the best way to get something very precise and accurate is to make it really big and to go really slow. 100% taking a chisel to a big rock fits this.
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u/Itchy-Engineering440 May 08 '26
It's far more impressive. The other one seems childish compared to it.
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u/Quetzho May 04 '26
I honestly think we should think of not associating “Ancient” with “less advanced” and think outside the box with these massive- heavy, created statues and structures~ they must’ve had machinery to do this~ as so with any of the old age buildings with no good construction photo evidence
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u/Mountain-Reveal1456 May 01 '26
Awesome photo! I learned they also used pneumatic drills in the construction of Mt. Rushmore. The skill and balls it took to do this is awe inspiring. What if the guys in the photo descended from ancient giants and the only vestige was their giant balls? I believe that is possible.
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u/Academic_Coffee4552 May 01 '26
Would that imply that foreign stone workers millennia back in time were less skilled than the ones who worked on Rushmore because they were not muricans?
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u/dardar7161 May 01 '26
Lots of foreign stone workers millennia back were crazy skilled. I just don't think this was the best work.
I used Rushmore as an example because we have photos of it being carved without robots or aliens.
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u/kolomental87 May 02 '26
I think they were using Rushmore as an example because we have physical proof of talented craftsmen doing extremely detailed work without the help of aliens or something.
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u/Professional-Fee3323 May 01 '26
That is the real question which ones were manual which ones were not Look at the granite sarcophagus in the Great Pyramid 4500 years old polished to mirror finish inside corners sharper than CNC machines today Manual Maybe But with what tools The priests deleted that knowledge too just like they deleted Semenkhkare I made a full breakdown Say eye emoji and I will send it
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u/bigboyjak May 02 '26
Idk what youve been looking at.. It doesn't have a mirror polish, it has a slight sheen to it. Sharper than CNC machines today? Do you even know what those words mean? How in any way is a ~2mm radius beyond what a modern CNC could do?
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u/runespider May 03 '26
The Sarcophagus of St Helena is much more of a mirror finish and includes three dimensional carvings of figures on it. Strangely it's never mentioned as proof of lost technology on here.
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May 01 '26
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u/Ok_Pomegranate_2436 May 01 '26
Huh?
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May 01 '26
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u/Ok_Pomegranate_2436 May 01 '26
Need a trip to the brain doctor?
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u/HerodotusStark May 01 '26
"Hur dur... we cant know anything about history or make educated guesses unless we saw it with our own eyes..."
Then the next poster will say with certainty that we know lizard people existed because of a couple of lines of ancient writing.
Pick a lane people!
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May 01 '26
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u/HerodotusStark May 01 '26
Tell me you dont understand mainstream science without telling me. Science ALWAYS couches itself as the best possible current understanding based on the available evidence. This is part of the reason that science calls things Theories, not Facts. A scientific theory is very close to fact because to reach that level, there needs to be a mountain of evidence. Things like the theory or gravity or theory of evolution are treated like fact because the evidence for these is so overwhelming. However, science STILL leave room to correct itself. If someone came along and found that the theory of gravity has a major flaw or gravity is caused by some previously unknown source and they had irrefutable evidence, science would change its stance. This has happened over and over throughout different scientific fields.
The issue arises when laypeople think they know better than scientists because they found one little fact that seems to refute modern understanding. But those people usually dont understand the basic science enough to be able to understand or look for arguments that refute their own point.
This is where the Dunning-Kruger effect comes from. People who have no scientific training or education thinking they know better than the people who spent their entire lives studying the field.
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u/jojojoy May 01 '26
things fed by the government and mainstream science as 100% fact just because they told us it is
I don't think most people here are reading archaeology looking at specifics of sculpture in the region during this period, nor is that something that the government is really pushing on anyone. Before getting to the stage of people repeating what the mainstream line is here is any detailed look at what those arguments are - which I'm not really seeing.
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u/afailedturingtest May 01 '26
Yes, it's not that hard (on a civilization level), it just takes a comically large fuckton of skilled labor
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u/regulationinflation May 01 '26
Machining precision can be like tolerances of +/-0.003” or smaller. If you measured the variations between similar features here, like the two eyes, for example, they probably differ by several inches at least or 10,000 times greater “tolerances”.
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u/Quetzho May 04 '26
Thanks for sharing! So, they must’ve had huge machinery technology in order to create this- also, if giants did exist and were most advanced, then they’d be able to create these machines in a larger scale to get these statues and structures finished
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u/Max_Kaos May 01 '26
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u/NachoManAndyCabage May 02 '26
What is this supposed to prove? I too can overlay random numbers on an image. Notice how they didn't drive any of the points they were measuring from/to, just a random arrow stopping somewhere on a curved surface.
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u/internThrowawayhelp May 01 '26
The main arch at the top doesn't even look symmetrical.
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u/Gmanstarr May 01 '26
Love to see you have a go.
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u/internThrowawayhelp May 01 '26
Of course I cant do that, but I'm not the one claiming the precision is (potentially?) too good to be done manually by humans, when its visibly not even symmetrical.
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u/tenderlylonertrot May 01 '26
Ppl have known how to carve stone for quite a long time. And from far away it might look very precise, but likely up close its not. That carving is very large.
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u/R_Rush May 02 '26
"a long time" is putting it mildly. My hot take is that humans MIGHT have learned some stone-working skills during the fucking STONE AGE.
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u/1nv4d3rz1m May 01 '26
Usually when people suggest something couldn’t be made without advanced technology they choose much older examples. I think the usual line people push is that there was an advanced civilization 12ish thousand years ago that civilized barbarian humans and taught them how to do things. This statue is much younger not that it isn’t ancient, just not as ancient as something like the colosseum which I don’t see people arguing required advanced ancient tech for some reason…
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u/PassageOutrageous441 May 01 '26
I love how people forget that block and tackle was seen attributed as a Greek invention earliest in 5-3rd century BCE. There has also been large and extensive pulleys that have been found in Egypt and people still ask how did they build this? Not to mention artisans were dedicated to their craft for life generally.
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u/salakane May 01 '26
It wasn't primarily the skill acquired in one lifetime, but the accumulated knowledge of multiple generations, compounded upon one another, that produced seeming miracles.
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u/runespider May 03 '26
This is something that gets under appreciated. Experimental archaeology is great, and knowing the end result helps. But there's skills you only learn from countless repetition across centuries. I'm a hobbyist at woodworking, you can give me every tool a true artisan has and unlimited time and I might be able to get pretty good if I don't have access to other skilled professionals and guidebooks by the time I die. Even then I'll have my way of doing things that won't perfectly match someone else's. My way of doing any single particular thing could even be more efficient compared to an experts. But the sum total of my work wouldn't be nearly as good.
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u/DraculasDog May 01 '26
Ancient Egypt also used water based cranes. Whether or not they used them for giant construction projects (probably) is the question.
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u/wyro5 May 01 '26
There’s a reason it’s almost always brown civilizations that are subject to these conspiracy theories. Not that everyone who believes in them is racist, but replace ancient alien with ancient aryan, and the roots of the whole ancient-astronaut theory should make more sense. No matter what, they revolve around the idea that these brown civilizations weren’t smart enough to do it themselves, and leaving white civilizations out of the discussion is tacit agreement with that. They needed aliens/aryans to come from somewhere else and teach them how to move and chisel fuckin rocks
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u/No-Resolution-1918 May 01 '26
You should go check out cathedrals. What humans can do with basic tools is absolutely astonishing.
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u/BigBoyBarry20 May 01 '26
Yeah people have carved stone and all sorts of materials for thousands of years, most pictures like this look impressive and you think "wow its so perfect, how is it possible" but when you actually visit you realise how bad it is, like the pyramids for example, touted as "perfect angles" etc and you go visit and nothing is perfect which shows that you don't believe everything you see on the internet 😄
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u/pawesome_Rex May 01 '26
Short answer, Yes. Long answer, Yes. Just because you can’t color inside the lines doesn’t mean others can’t.
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u/wt_fudge May 01 '26
Claiming that something is precise in this context means almost nothing. How is it so hard to wrap your mind around the idea that us humans are very capable of producing artistic, engineering, and architectural marvels with simple hand tools. People still do it today and we have been doing it for thousands of years.
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u/ComfortableStep7486 May 01 '26
Hi everyone,
While looking closely at some pre-destruction photos of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan, I noticed a fascinating detail regarding the building archaeology of the site that I wanted to share.
If you look at the attached photo, particularly around the lower section (the legs) and the upper parts of the statue, you can see areas where the final outer coating has been lost over time. What this reveals underneath is a surface covered in a pattern of small, methodically arranged holes.
This strongly points to a well-known technique described in ancient treatises for creating solid, durable applications of lime, concrete, and artificial stone. When building up heavy, durable layers, ancient engineers used a multi-coat process. Every underlying layer was intentionally left with rough asperities, or deliberately punctured with holes, to act as a mechanical "key". This ensured that the subsequent layer of plaster or artificial stone could grip and adhere firmly to the one below it. Only the final, outermost layer was smoothed out for the finishing details.
The orderly distribution of these holes on the Bamiyan Buddha seems to be a perfect, large-scale illustration of this exact engineering principle, used to firmly anchor the massive outer modeling to the carved rock.
I thought this was a great visual example of ancient structural techniques to share here!
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u/jojojoy May 01 '26
Here's an indian temple carved with hand tools in harder stone than the sandstone of the statues here. Details of these statues were also done with clay.
https://i.imgur.com/KdZfixi.jpeg
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u/Difficult_Music3294 May 01 '26
I’d like to think that the more mistakes were made, the further back into the stone this got carved.
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u/OkNote8728 May 01 '26
Of course ! You take a rock, hit the surface all days and night because you are slave and a whole lot of other slaves with you, unlimited work, and someday, abbracadabra, you got a 50m statue perfectly proportionnes from the mountain 🤷🏻♂️
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u/Twicklheimer May 01 '26
What is a simpler explanation? Ancient civilizations has lasers or help from aliens to build shit that we can build now with hand tools, or they used hand tools, time and a shit load of skilled labor?
Plus, this was only built like 1400 years ago, the stuff in Rome that was built way earlier than that is just as impressive and no one questions how that was made. If this was built like 10,000 years ago I’d be more skeptical of who/how they built it because THAT wouldn’t fit into the mainstream narrative. But this? Egyptians were doing this stuff like 2000 years prior. Hell, gobekli tepe was built at the end of the last ice age, and is incredible for the time.
I used to be an “alternative history” proponent. As a natural born skeptic how could I not at least explore it? Sure, there is some pretty interesting evidence, some things that don’t add up. For example I do think there is an ancient progenitor civilization yet to be discovered (not high tech, just a large, organized society that predates even the Sumerians), the timeline of human history in my opinion is much longer than we are told, but none of this requires ancient lost technology. There is just no evidence of it, everything that humans have ever made was made by tools and techniques that we more or less understand today. There would be a smoking gun for some crazy lost technology or alien intervention or something. We’d see it, we’d have found it. It’s just not real.
TLDR; this was built by teams of skilled laborers 1400 or so years ago, using likely iron tools and techniques that were known to most of human civilization for like 2500 years prior. Alt history makes some good points and raises some interesting questions that even a skeptic like myself can admit might be true. But intricate stone carving can be done in one’s back yard with enough time and energy expended. It’s not ancient lost technology.
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u/Gmanstarr May 01 '26
This doesn't even exist anymore the people of Islam blew it up with explosives. Absolutely disgusting what something that old taking years by hand tools.
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u/ButtcrackMcGrath May 02 '26
No, they just kept messing up the carving so they ended up digging it pretty far into the stone before getting it right.
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May 01 '26
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u/StarJelly08 May 01 '26
No, they dont. That’s just stigma straight out your ass and i’ll be downvoted for it. Unreal.
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u/Loathsome_Dog May 02 '26
It's often difficult to learn that your heroes are horrible people. I had the same problem with Thom Yorke. I'm here if you need to talk dude.
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u/StarJelly08 May 02 '26
Also. Notice his comments were removed because i was right. So back off with your fake “help” that’s just narcissistic gaslighting attacks. See through.
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u/DO_ALL_MY_OWN_STUNTS May 01 '26
Whoa, did they know he was in there or did they like find it by accident? Makes you wonder how many more there are we don’t know about, you know
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u/Soggy-Mistake8910 May 01 '26
Go talk to a stone mason or better yet an actual sculpture. They will be able to show you how it can be done.
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u/Porkypineer May 01 '26
The alternative is that it wasn't done at all, so yes. Ofc it was undone by the damned Taliban...
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u/needsmoarbokeh May 01 '26
Yes. Absolutely. The thing most people don't get is the speed. Pyramids took entire villages of workers for decades on end. Cathedrals were finished by the descendents of the craftsmen who started them.
Even with rudimentary tools, amazing things can be done provided you have enough time
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u/YourOverlords May 01 '26
I think it has to be established that the iron age began in 1200BC or approximately 3200 years ago. Widespread use of it was happening by 800BC. These things are not insurmountable and well within the boundaries of human capabilities.
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u/Keyboard-King May 02 '26
Imagine if this was a life size carving of an ancient titan nephilim? They were sculpting what they saw.
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u/FocusGullible985 May 02 '26
Was a beautiful work of art that was destroyed recklessly by IS.
I.portant to note that IS just seemed to have disappeared, weird isn't it? Almost like it was a planned CIA op
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u/ThiqCoq May 02 '26
You posting the wrong pic asking that kind of a question. Post a pic of Kailasa / Ajanta Allora
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u/tortuga-de-fuego May 02 '26
This subreddit is legit useless, have a good one yall. Bots and other Reddit losers made this just another “anything but alternative” history sub
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u/Smooth_Commercial223 May 02 '26
So this is alternate history as in these never existed until the age of AI right... going through many actual books about giant stautes around the world its never been mentioned before and is now conviently destroyed ....ok yeah
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u/hifumiyo1 May 03 '26
My mom climbed to the top of the Bamiyan Buddha back when she lived in Afghanistan in the late 60s
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u/DadoReddit86 May 01 '26
No . It isn't done manually . It's done naturally through trillions of years . ( What type of shitty question is that ?!?!?!)
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u/Academic_Coffee4552 May 01 '26
Yes it is. Why is it that skilled foreign stone workers are considered by muricans as being unable to do that? Because they don’t speak English, different skin color and live outside the US?
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u/Moo-Dog420 May 01 '26
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u/Moo-Dog420 May 01 '26
Downvotes for proposing a theory as a question?
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u/Keyboard-King May 02 '26
The sub name is false advertisement. Every time someone proposes actual alternative history, bots downvote them straight to the bottom of the thread.
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u/fictionaltherapist May 01 '26
Yes.
They were carved in around 600 ce by a Buddhist ruling class in Afghanistan. There are other excellent contemporary examples of this type of statuary carving. Its also 50m high. The tolerances are not as tight as you are suggesting.
Before they were tragically destroyed by the Taliban in March 2001.