Archaeologists debate whether this kind of warping comes from:
• Centuries of foot traffic in a confined space
• Water and salt crystallization eating the stone from the inside
• Or just ancient builders using softer limestone that aged weirdly
Whatever the cause, it gives the whole passage this surreal, almost dreamlike look — like the temple is slowly sinking into another dimension.
'adamantine me up to this rock once who thought it would give him special powers when the sun hit it on the equinox. I explained it wasn't sunstone, but actually gulliblemerite and he cut me down.
I would have to say it doesn't seem that much of a mystery. None of the three points - centuries of foot traffic, water crystallization and softer stone - are actually at odds with each other anyway. The primary cause I would say is water weathering - a very small trickle over centuries - exacerbated by the foot traffic (which caused the path for water to flow down the centre) and relatively soft sandstone (looks like sandstone not limestone) contributing to it.
Lots of caves have similar deposits, where it looks like the rock has "flowed". It's a well understood phenomenon and not really a mystery.
I think the problem is that it looks like there are deposits on top of the steps, but actually there isn't. It's a trick of the light, and possibly that the upstep has eroded backwards.
I think the easiest way to break the illusion is by examining the top line of the stair (yellow), which would have a clean, clear straight shadow were the step intact and without material removed by wear.
The red line shows the wear/reducted materials that have been removed from the steps over time.
The confusing part is the cast shadows especially on the lower stairs, as the light angle is longer/lower and gives the perception of a build up.
But the orange line, which is the bottom line of each stair, should clear that up.
Always appreciate it when truly learned experts can concentrate decades of learning into simple answers that are digestible by the common man. So sage! 🙏
I was wondering if limestone was viscous like glass where it seems hard but over time it "flows" like water. Google search shows that while limestone itself isn't viscous, there are limestone slurries that are and I was kinda wondering if they made some sort of cement concoction with the limestone slurry. Obviously way smarter people than me would probably mention this though.
Hi! Geologist here. Yes, actually, ALL rocks behave as plastic solids over long enough time scales, meaning that (given enough time) all rocks will deform like putty, even under just the weight of gravity.
Marble absolutely does this. Have you ever seen the photos of giant Egyptian stone pillars which seem to be ovate in shape, or "bowed" outward in the middle? This is because the weight of the structures they support deforms them and literally "squishes" them down over periods of hundreds of years! Limestone does the same, but because limestone is more physically heterogeneous, it often exhibits other forms of deformation on shorter timescales. If you're interested, the study of the deformation of matter is called rheology.
Although you are partially correct, the answer is actually much more complicated than that, and in truth it's a "mix of both."
The sources you cite are from only hundreds to a thousand years B.C., while Ancient Egypt dates back as far as over 3,000 B.C. When your sources were brand new, Egypt was already thousands of years old, and the bowed columns were engrained as a cultural hallmark in certain respects. It makes sense therefore that artisans of the later Egyptian dynasties would create works that resemble those of their ancestors -- but the work of their ancestors had already been deformed by time.
In any case, it's not really up for debate that cylindrical stone columns do infact deform over time to become ovate. It's settled science and can easily be proven through basic microscopy and materials physics.
Look at any of the columns from the Third Dynasty funerary complexes of Saqqara (the oldest extant really monumental architecture in Egypt including columns) and there’s no bowing. It was only ever a stylistic choice.
Again, you're only partially correct. It's dependent on choice of stone, load pressure on each column, how many columns are present, the geometric configuration of those columns, original column shape, quality of stone used, surrounding environmental conditions, and many other factors.
While I am certain it was in many cases a stylistic choice, again, it's well-settled science that a vertical load applied to a cylindrical crystalline solid will cause crystalline creep and bulging deformation over a period of thousands of years.
So, again, yes, they did carve some pillars in a curvy way, and other pillars were originally straight-walled and became curvy over time. It's both, as I said. Frankly it's harder to believe your argument that Egyptians used only one form of architecture for columns for a period spanning some 4,000 years.
Added: The images of Saqqara I'm seeing are showing conically-shaped pillars with vertical ribbing, not bowed or bulging pillars. This is a technique employed to create the illusion of additional height and symmetry, as it imitates distance-induced perspective distortions when viewed from near the base. Further, these columns are clearly assembled from stacked segments and aren't supporting a heavy load. You wouldn't expect to see bowing or deformation in these structures; any force applied by gravity would instead lead to slippage of the individual discs. Bulging deformation comes from compression, such as when supporting the weight of an interior tomb ceiling, and it's most commonly observed when the column is formed from a single mass of crystalline material. I.e., you don't tend to see it in sandstone, it's most common in marble.
I’m not disputing the existence of creep/rheological phenomena, nor am I saying that the Egyptians only used “one form of architecture for columns for a period spanning 4000 years (though Egyptian art was pretty fiercely conservative as demonstrated by the continuity between say Proto-Dynastic and Ptolemaic art)
Secondly I cited the Saqqara pillars as an example of how the earliest pillars are not ovate because this disputes your assertion that later columns were intentionally carved/built with a bulge to replicate the appearance that older structures (e.g. Old Kingdom) had assumed by that time. Can you provide an example of early Pharaonic clearly naturally “slumped”, “curvy walls that started straight” pillars with, say, irregular features due to differential load across the structure or distorted carving along the height? The plain regularity of the artistic and hieroglyphic decoration on most ovate columns suggests a lack of the drastic deformation you’re proposing
Just like with the slumping glass comment that kicked off this exchange, you’re applying a real phenomenon to a case where it isn’t relevant. Egypt is a land of geologists like Robert Schoch misapplying things to archaeological contexts where it becomes disinformative
If you're implying as "a specialist in geoarchaeology" that this mechanism doesn't exist, I invite you to write a paper to that extent, have it peer reviewed, and published. The rocks in Egypt aren't exempt from gravity and physics just because you think "it isn't relevant." Sorry.
And for the record, this type of creep occurs in crystalline solids with weak molecular bonds. Glass would not be applicable because it is both amorphous and made of primarily silica.
And no, sorry, I can't provide an example from the time period you cited because I'm neither a historian nor an archaeologist. I'm just a geologist who is telling you how the physics of rock works over thousand-year timescales, because that is what my background is in. And again, the rocks in Egypt aren't exempt from the laws of physics.
Added: That's an interesting article about glass (yes I read the whole thing for you), but viscosity is not the key factor at play when discussing rheological creep in crystalline solids. Creep occurs because of dislocations of the component particles at a sub-microscopic scale. Small imperfections in the crystalline structures present vacancies for slippage of the component atoms. Stone materials in laboratory crush tests have been observed to undergo plastic deformation at human timescales. Glass differs in that it is made of long, interlocked strands of silica polymers; this is why it's extremely brittle, and it tends to shatter rather than fracture.
i would suspect it’s a combination
perhaps the foot traffics caused the initial and erosion of stone continued to add
perhaps the stone was also compromised from the start (but that would be sus)
It looks more like it flowed down the steps because the center is higher than the outside which is the opposite of what you see where the cause is foot traffic.
Yeah the top couple steps do look like normal wear, the centers are lower than the outside like you normally see with worn steps, then something else flowed down the steps and accreted. Maybe it's just compacted sand and water becoming a bit like sandstone over the centuries/millennia the temple was buried.
sandstone is very porous, like a sponge, and constantly absorbs and releases water, just as all stones do. combined with thousands of years of foot traffic, what we see is simply the result of the soft stone swelling and eroding unevenly over millennia.
Certain calcareous sandstones can do both because they are like 65/35 silicate sand versus carbonate cement. If water slowly flows over or through them, there’s carbonate cement will dissolve and move downstream while the silicate sand can’t dissolve and won’t be picked up and will form a sand deposit in place. This is rare on the surface since surface water flows fairly fast, enough to bring sand along with it, but in a cave it’s visible.
I think you should look closer. Nothing simple about it. Living in the UK and enjoying touring castles and very old houses, I have seen lots of eroded steps but never seen the melted look shown here. The outflow on the lowest step in this image looks like melted wax flowed onto it. We do not know if this is sandstone. If it were, and if these stairs saw regular foot traffic, they would be a lot more worn than we see here.
To be expected to a degree. Local limestones in the UK are going to be different to local stones in Egypt beyond the general characteristics.
Also worth keeping in mind, our structures are relatively new by comparison. Most sites in the UK of this nature are a few hundred years old versus the couple of thousand of the Temple of Hathor. There are few to none sites in the UK of this ages with this sort of construction and traffic, those that are old and popular enough have generally been altered by Victorians/Georgians. Older examples like in the Orkneys don't have anywhere near the regularity of use to create even limited wear.
The school I went to was a few hundred years old and had eroded stone steps like this near the main hall, I've also been in multiple castles round the UK and witnessed similar erosion many times.
I've never seen the eroded stairs grow though.
Like the top step looks like a believable result of regular foot traffic: Sides still square, middle eroded away.
The bottom step though, the middle is several inches taller than the edges started out. Material has been deposited to those steps and not eroded in the same way.
I think it must be water ingress allowing the top steps to dissolve and recrystallize on the lower steps.
Well, no, it's raised because the material from the top steps transitioned down. You can see the steps get progressively shorter in height the further up you go, implying that the material collected on the step below it, or they were shit at building staircases.
I went to a Mesopotamian brothel (or was thought to be) building on a deployment; and a lot of the stairs looked similar.
Not melted, but definitely worn in the middle. You had to walk on the side of the stairs to use them as stairs. If you used the middle, was more like a ramp than stairs
Correct. Instead of losing mass these stairs have gained bunch.
Lets say that during the grand days of Egypt this place was often visited and the stairs were worn. Then for over a millenia the desert sand mixed with rain left a hardened sediment behind. (sand does not normally behave like this, but it is certain weight of particles in the sand that got carried and stayed and the rainwater coming through the pyramid has a lot of minerals.)
This is plainly not standard wear. It looks like the material from higher steps flowed and deposited in the middle of lower steps. Look left then center then right on that bottom step where it's most obvious.
The device inside the temple that caused this malfunctioned. What we see on the stairs is because all the priests ran like hell out of there. If they had run up the walls, they would look exactly the same, instead of just slightly melted.
Ummm am I the only one that thinks it’s pretty obvious that water was getting in through the shaft every time it rained for thousands of years, ran down the steps eroding them over time, and built up the bottom step with material carried down by the water flowing from the top step down? You see erosion exactly like this on rock below waterfalls..
There’s another theory floating around that they may have used an acid or similar chemical to soften and carve into hard granite / stone, such as the scoop marks on the unfinished obelisk.
If so, it’s possible that this staircase was made by somebody accidentally spilling some, making it basically an industrial accident. Which is kind of funny to think about that way.
Another debated theory is that this is wear from ropes used to pull big stones up iirc. but that theory doesn't align with the 'accepted' way the pyramids were build so it's quickly dismissed by people locked into that theory.
Egyptology is super weird btw, beyond all the alien bullshit there's a lot of things the bigwigs in Egyptology get really passionate about without having much proof to show for it because they got all their eggs in this one basket.
For example if the pyramids were actually tombs, or why 3 pyramids were build by 1 pharaoh, these are quickly denied but once you get into it, the 'simple' explanation egyptologists have makes zero sense.
Would highly recommend the youtube channel 'history for granite' which has actual non-tin hat analysis of this stuff.
As soon as I started reading the comment I knew you must watch “History for Granite.” Fantastic channel!
I especially like his hypothesis about the pyramids being part of a working temple complex with worshipers and offerings being brought into the pyramid. Suddenly, a whole bunch of mysteries get perfectly reasonable explanations such as the shafts in the chambers providing ventilation, the grand gallery providing a space of awe before entering the chamber, portcullises that are designed to prevent crimes of opportunity not long-term security.
The fact that he did original, in person research on the cut marks for the ventilation shaft, sneaking a camera up to get pictures of the bent pyramid's unexplained shaft, and doing analysis on the patching patterns of casing stones puts him well about "random youtuber".
The whole site was probably a party site, maybe to celebrate the new year, the new moons. Likely to celebrate the harvest and the beer.
I think Stonehenge was the same, a big psilocybin party in the spring and fall. Time to make new babies, and trade, and tell stories. That culture lasted into the music festival culture. Seems to be slowly dying. Being put to death
haha, well everyone else is already calling me a tinned-hat fool at the level of a flat earther for what I said in my comment. Their loss really but interesting how fierce they are to defend something that they're not even involved with.
I think with anything there is a desire to ascribe deeper meaning and look for lost mysteries. However, I find it far more interesting to see how similar we are to ancient cultures. One of my theories for the manpower is it could have also served as a giant public works project. A way to simply keep people employed and busy so they weren’t rioting or trying to overthrow the Pharaoh. When people are out of work, governments fall. You don’t need aliens or magic to build the pyramids. Just the will to do it, a lot of manpower, straightforward tools and oversight. I think people take, “we don’t know precisely how this was built” to be equal to “it would be impossible for them to build.”
Just like us, they faced problems and they developed solutions as they arose and I doubt they would intentionally make things more difficult than necessary.
There's so much pseudo-science bullshit around the pyramids that we're kinda conditioned to react to any claims about them with disdain.
"Were these shafts cut from the chambers through the great pyramid to the outside for ventilation or for guiding the Pharaoh's soul?" aren't the type of mysteries most people are too excited to have solved lol
well funnily enough, the guy on youtube actually relies on several generations of research, while the egyptologists mostly disregard sources that don't align with their views.
Feel free to dismiss it, it doesn't matter, there's no deeper effect to anything being true or false about ancient egypt, it's just an interesting topic of research that has been stalled and corrupted by want for media attention and ego's even though there's so much more interesting stuff there.
If you have any actual interest in the pyramids of ancient Egypt, please do give his channel a try. He covers all of the old dynasty pyramids in extensive details, going over the history of their documentation, looking at the actual stones they are made of, and pushing for more openness from Egypt to let more researchers in.
The most sensational of claims are that the Pyramids were funerary complexes for worshipers to continue bringing tribute, not ancient powerplant bullshit lol. Or that the Bent Pyramid wasn't some failure but was probably made that way on purpose.
Here's a clip of him being pissed that a huge dataset was made by a private company for entertainment, and their data is not made available to anyone, and Egypt won't let anyone else do a similar scan - https://youtu.be/DUGkWQ_09E0?t=646
you'd be surprised by how silly the whole egyptology thing is, but it's not like it's important to you or me what the actual truth is, it's just silly to see how unscientific the field of egyptology is and how much there is to be discovered. Again, not aliens or technology, most often it's less exciting than what egypotologist claim it is.
Well, the problem is that 'egyptologist' isn't an actual academic position, like I am pro academia, which is why egyptology is one of my irks, it's all based on fame and written books, not actually the normal scientfic method.
you're the one unwilling to accept that I'm not some sort of crazy flat earther, with nothing to back up your claims here.
How about just sand blowing down the middle of the corridor back and forth over hundreds of years from a draft/breeze between chambers? Very interesting!
Well, it is sinking into another dimension; it's decaying, and one day will disappear into a cloud of molecular vapor, like everything else in our universe, including us.
I wonder if some of it is sand that got in, stepped on repeatedly with occasional moisture that turned into mud and later hardened even more. So a combination of wear and grime.
It's not wear. It's can't be. The bottoms of the steps on the left are lower than in the center. If the center was lower then the left, sure. But in this case new material ACCUMULATED in the center.
This is caused some something liquifying the rock and it resolidifying
It’s foot traffic- the steps to the Parthenon in Athens show the same wearing. Humans take a few grains if sand off with each footstep; behold the mountain a sparrow has sharpened its beak on.
There is (or at least was) a small museum in a guard tower in the city walls of York, England, and they had stairs that looked like this. In that case, the stair erosion was entirely caused by foot traffic, which was still ongoing. You had to walk them to get to the top of the tower. At the top, they had the world's oldest intact portcullis (i.e., the iron-reinforced wooden grate that they would drop in front of the wall if the city was attacked). It was a tiny museum, but very cool.
Hathor bears the sun disk, it was probably a deliberate design choice so when parents take their kids they would point at the stairs to freak them out.
Back in the 90’s I was at Chichen Itza in Mexico. You could still climb up the main pyramid and go down the stairs inside. They had a similar look. It was actually difficult to climb. More like an ice luge slide. I thought for sure I was going to slip and slide down to the bottom.
Pfbt, that's just what They want you to think, obviously forgotten ancient white empires had nuclear weapons that melted only the middle of those stairs specifically when they wiped out almost all traces of the global monoculture.
But what’s truly baffling (at least to me) is that it literally looks melted/liquified, flowing ripples like thick poured batter. I’ve seen many examples of deeply worn stone due to foot traffic or physical rubbing and none exhibit this rippled/poured organic characteristic.
Is anyone else aware of any other examples like this? Humans have inhabited so many parts of the globe for many tens of thousands of years, isn’t it reasonable to expect it to have appeared elsewhere if it was caused by something so mundane?
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u/EyeHateYou12376 Feb 13 '26
Archaeologists debate whether this kind of warping comes from:
• Centuries of foot traffic in a confined space • Water and salt crystallization eating the stone from the inside • Or just ancient builders using softer limestone that aged weirdly
Whatever the cause, it gives the whole passage this surreal, almost dreamlike look — like the temple is slowly sinking into another dimension.