Surely the way to test this theory isn't to make a model of a sledge, and bake some wet sand in an oven in your lab in Amsterdam! Go to Cairo, build a wooden sledge, get some water and fifty men for an hour and see whether one can sledge two tons across wet sand. I quite fancy testing it out myself. Perhaps I could run a Kickstarter to build a pyramid.

For those of you that haven't read the article yet, I suggest you study the picture with the hieroglyphics in detail first and then read the conclusion!

Edit:

Just to be clear, I wanted others to have the benefit of seeing the picture before the explanation, because after the fact I had no idea whether I had been biased by what I had read first! I wasn't trying to suggest it was biased per se! I have no idea whether I was biased or not. I can't undo history.

"Ancient engineers used text editors to write machine language."

"But how did they construct network packets?"

"With Emacs macros. And purification rituals involving Python."

"No way. It had to have been aliens."

A new theory says wet sand was used to build the pyramids. But where did the aliens get all that wet sand???

I wonder what happened when the water wasn't wet enough.

>“In fact, Egyptologists had been interpreting the water as part of a purification ritual, and had never sought a scientific explanation. And friction is a terribly complicated problem; even if you realize that wet sand is harder – as in a sandcastle, you cannot build on dry sand — the consequences of that for friction are hard to predict.”

Makes me wonder what other practical things we might be misinterpreting as rituals. Are we constantly ignoring ancient cultures' innovations because we assume they have no practical purpose?

Wheelwrights hate him! Use this one weird old trick to make your pyramid bigger!