The Egyptians use ramps to lift blocks and limestone.

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Diodorus Siculus, provides another view of how the ancient Egyptians lifted construction material:

"It is said that the stone was brought over a great distance, from Arabia, and that the construction was undertaken with the help of ramps, since at that time cranes had not yet been invented."

Today, much of the scholarly work regarding material placement in pyramids revolves around the use of ramps, as per Siculus, with perhaps some of the smaller masonry also being lifted into place with other ancient lifting devices such as those of Herodotus. Egyptologists, with their careful analysis of pyramid sites in Egypt, leave us very few alternatives beyond these types of devices, so the main questions asked by scholars today is what form the ramps took, and what sort of other simple lifting devices might have been employed for smaller objects.

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