Where the Pyramids and temples of Old Kingdom Egypt constructed using agglomerated limestone?
Since the early eighties, Prof. Joseph Davidovits is proposing that the pyramids and temples of Old Kingdom Egypt were constructed using agglomerated limestone, rather than quarried and hoisted blocks of natural limestone. This type of fossil-shell limestone concrete would have been cast or packed into molds. Egyptian workmen went to outcrops of relatively soft limestone, desaggregated it with water, then mixed the muddy limestone (including the fossil-shells) with lime and tecto-alumino-silicate-forming materials (geosynthesis) such as kaolin clay, silt, and the Egyptian salt natron (sodium carbonate). The limestone mud was carried up by the bucketful and then poured, packed or rammed into molds (made of wood, stone, clay or brick) placed on the pyramid sides. This re-agglomerated limestone, bonded by geochemical reaction (called geopolymer cement), thus hardened into resistant blocks. In 1979, at the second International Congress of Egyptologists, Grenoble, France, he presented two c
