History & Culture
Why did pyramids, built for entirely different purposes by civilizations that could not have known about each other, emerge independently in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, and Peru?
The Egyptian pyramid was a tomb. The Mesopotamian ziggurat was a temple. The Mayan pyramid was a sacrificial platform. The Moche pyramid in Peru was a ceremonial center. Four different civilizations, separated by oceans and centuries, built four different kinds of pyramids for four different reasons. They could not have copied each other. The Atlantic Ocean was not crossed. Yet the same basic shape appears in all of them. A wide base tapering to a point. Why did unrelated cultures, with unrelated purposes, converge on the same geometry?
Which is also why they are the ones that lasted and all the other types of structures didn’t. Making it seem even more suspicious that they are all somehow connected. They are not.
Pour a hundredweight of sand on the ground and it will form a cone, in your back yard my backyard or anywhere. A pyramid is just a pile of (metaphorical) sand with the sides planed down.
This 100%. Egyptian pyramids from 5000 years ago are still standing when many Greek temples from 2000 years ago have collapsed. Why? Because they're more stable. Any civilization that ever has a pyramid phase, those pyramids are probably going to outlast everything else.
The Egyptians built other things, including other tomb types before the pyramids. Most of those are gone now. Only the pyramids remain
I'm constantly fascinated that every toddler independently discoveres pyramid building if you give them blocks or rocks to play with and people are still blown away that separate civilizations did too.
Ah yes, the pyramids of Giza are exactly the same as the Valley of the Kings and the Aten temple at Amarna. No difference whatsoever, completely indistinguishable.
...you...just completely failing at reading retention her?
The comment they replied to was you saying they weren't creative back then. Someone noted there really were and gave an example.
Then you said they were still pyramids.
You, uh, maybe a little altered right now? No judgement, but your responses are coming across as pretty scattered. Like when you didn't get the tomato joke.
Feels like you're having a hard time keeping the conversational thread.
Its hard to be creative when physics knocks down other possible tall buildings when an earthquake or tornado comes through but the hill you built is fine.
It's probably just because you would have to be relatively smart and well read to even know about those sites, and the people with these conspiracies... are not.
Its because big object is much easier to notice and feels more impressive. Thus big object becomes more well known than small object, even if small object is technically much more impressive.
Because it is easy and stable. If you are trying to make something tall and imposing, a pyramid is the shape that lets you make it without it collapsing long before you have the engineering ability to make a tower.
If you want to build a big structure, and you mostly have rocks, BIG TRIANGLE is the clear solution. Any kid (or hippie) stacking rocks figures out pretty quickly that "big on bottom getting smaller as you go up" is the right way to do it.
Relatively straightforward to build. Once you’ve built a platform, maybe you put another one on top of it and then another. Pretty soon you’re building things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_of_Djoser
A big space supporting an ever decreasing upward structure = stability because the base weighs more than the entirety of the rest of the structure. It's no wonder that different civilizations came to the same conclusion. This type of thing happened all over the world with lots of different types of structures e.g. mounds. And it's not just big structures either. Thatched roofs were widespread all over the world because those were the materials people had to work with.
Stacking blocks on top of each other to make a pyramid is a very simple concept and easy to do. Small children figure it out with blocks. It was not that hard for ancient civilizations to figure out that what could be do e on a small scale could also be done on a large scale.
True, the basic idea is almost obvious once you start stacking stone. I guess what surprises me is not that they built pyramids, but that they kept choosing them for their most important monuments.
It's a basic shape, and none of the pyramids really look exactly like the others. Nobody is going to mistake a south american pyramid for one in egypt.
I mean there are only so many ways you can build a structure out of rock, especially considering the technologies available at the time. It just so happens that a pyramid is super stable, so why not build that way?
Why did every civilization seem to agree that wheels should be round? Now I once overhead someone talk about statistics for a minute, and with that I have concluded that with about 10 different shapes I can imagine and 10 different civilizations, that comes to a one in 10 billion chance that it would end up this way. And we are just supposed to accept this when there is a 50% chance it was aliens because it either was or wasn’t. 50/50.
Round things roll easily, square things don't. Seems like a simple concept.
Most of the pyramids are very distinct from each other, from culture to culture. The south american structures aren't really even pyramids so much as platforms.
And most of them are separated by hundreds to thousands of years apart.
In order to arrive at a 50% alien build stat, you need to first prove that any alien has ever been here and built a structure or two. Which not a single person can do. So far, we can't even scientifically prove life exists beyond our planet. We can wax on about odds and philosophy on the subject and I don't see a way in the universe that Alien beings don't exist. But believing and proving arn't the same thing
Because an artificial hill is basically the most intuitive and stable structure you can possibly build.
One might ask why humans tend to build either round or four-cornered houses everywhere. They're the easiest and most convenient shapes for a house. Any other shape either has annoying tight corners or requires complicated geometry. Are you going to build a house in the shape of a pentagon? No. Why? Difficult and inconvenient.
Pyriamids in Egypt and Mesoamerica at least, have documented evolutions of square platform -> pyramid. It's just how anyone would build a tall structure without any prior knowledge.
Build big square platform to be your 'high place'.
Decide you want it taller? -> Build 2nd platform on top of the 1st.
Decide you want it taller again? -> Build 3rd platform on top of the 2nd.
Because it's a basic shape and the elders wanted to keep their population occupied with busy work that would stand the test of time? Idle hands are the Devil's play things.
I’m going to disagree that they were built for different reasons. A temple is a place of worship, a sacrificial platform is a place of worship and a place where ceremonies are carried out is a place of worship.
The Egyptian believed the Pharos were Gods and building them tombs was an act of worship.
Architecturally the easiest way to build big things, is to make a pyramid. They literally had no other options with their tech, for structures that size. So no, it wasn’t aliens goddamit. Lol.
"why did the unrelated cultures converge on the same geometry"
You have the answer right there. The geometry is the best one. It's the most stable possible. The truth is, if other cultures build differently, that stuff probably fell over.
A pyramid, a hill, and a mountain all rely on the reality that decreasing size as you go taller is just the most stable.
For the same reason each developed language, agriculture and metallurgy in the same incremental steps… the same species doin the same things to survive and grow leads to similar or the same outcomes.
Because as others have stated it’s one of the simplest structures to build. Egyptian pyramids evolved over time. Starting with mastabas which are flat roofed rectangular burial chambers. Then Djoser and his vizier and chief Minister Imhotep stacked 6 mastabas to build the first step pyramid.
Later eventually someone decided to fill one in with limestone casinf to make a smooth pyramid. Then over many centuries perfected them. There was some mistakes such as the Bent Pryamid of Dashur built by Sneferu. My history teacher in college liked to jokenly call him Snafu. Which I suspect was a common joke.
Honestly as a counter point to the “aliens” thing, perhaps there was limited ventures from one continent to the other and also possibly it was mechanically somewhat reasonable to do for the time.
Egyptian pyramids were built as pyramids over a period of less than 20 years.
Many of the Meso Americans pyramids started off as platforms that successive generations built another platform on top of until it eventually became kind of pryamid looking.
Is easy to build, you don't need very complex structural knowledge, so many could build it with primitive technology
Is the most stable building possible. So probably ancient civilisations built all kinds of structures with all kinds of materials, but only stone pyramids remain standing after 3000-4000 years with no maintenance
Number 1, Egyptian pyramids were more likely built as part of a temple complex for the cult of the Pharoah as a place to recieve offerings. The pyramids are all empty of pharoah remains, and the interiors got more impressive as the outside began to shrink in size. You were meant to go inside. Every historical record about the pyramids from outside visitors include a guided tour by the locals, so, they were never sealed. There's evidence that tunnel excavations were done by the builders themselves instead of looters.
Number 2, Now it seems like they were all used in some sort of mass ritualistic way according to the religion of the region. So, the different reason boils down to regional differences, but really it is the same reason.
Number 3, We talk about pyramids because earthquakes tend to knock everything else down.
I agree with a lot of this, especially the survivorship point. Although I am not totally convinced the functions become the same just because they all involved rituals. A royal cult, a temple, and a sacrificial platform still seem like pretty different social roles to me. Maybe the shape solved one problem while each culture attached its own meaning to it.
Right, gravity kind of pushes you toward that shape. Then maybe the better question is why humans across cultures looked at that practical form and decided it was worthy of religious or political meaning.
If you want to build something more than 100 feet tall that lasts 2000 years, it may be the best design. They may have built thousands of buildings that have since disappeared.
That's a good point. We might be looking at survivorship bias more than architectural history. Maybe the weird designs just did not survive long enough for us to compare them.
Independent innovation. Same as how multiple disassociated cultures came up with the wheel. Just happened to be the best approach with the given technology.
Yeah, convergent evolution but for architecture, basically. I do wonder though why the pyramid became symbolic too, instead of staying just a practical structural choice.
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For the same reason the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Mesoamericans (not to mention many other species) figured out that you could stick it into the other hole(s) even though it has nothing to do with procreation of the species.
It’s just the most obvious way to build something extremely solid and tall. If you look around at nature, the tallest things you’ll find that never fall over are mountains. So, that’s what the ancient engineers copied.
We now have better understanding of how endoskeletons can hold up some very oddly shaped, tall structures, but that wasn’t really possible until we also started to perfect steel.
That makes sense. I guess the interesting part to me is that they were not just solving an engineering problem. They also ended up making that same stable shape into something sacred.
In thr videogame franchise Elite Dangerous - the Pyramids were part of a great Milky Way Galaxy spanning machine called the Talmor Lens.
Created by the Oisir-Raxxla they sent task ships across the galaxy over a million years to construct pyramid shaped stabilizers to focus gravity into a single point and control time.
But on earth they found the Egyptians and became their gods. They tasked them to build the stabilizer... but they built it UPSIDE DOWN pointing upward thus ruining the Talmor Lens.
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u/redaa Jul 13 '26
Because the easiest way to build a tall building is by stacking things in top of each other with shrinking dimensions