Djoser's Pyramid Was Built with Giant Hydraulic Works, New Paper Claims

​A preprint of a new scientific paper to be published in an upcoming edition of PLOS One made news this week when a team of interdisciplinary researchers led by Xavier Landreau of the Paleotechnic research firm claimed to have evidence that Djoser’s step pyramid at Saqqara had been built using a hydraulic lift. The authors claim that a large stone enclosure near the pyramid, known as Gisr el-Mudir, was a water treatment facility and served as a dam, allowing purified Nile water to travel along channels to the site of the pyramid, where, in “volcano” fashion, the water mover through a series of shafts and pushed stones up to the top of the pyramid while it was under construction. 

​I have no experience or training in hydraulics, so I cannot evaluate how plausible the claims about water movement at the site might be, but it seems like building all the underground waterworks would be more work than other proposed methods of moving blocks, since you could only raise one at a time and then have to drain the water. Indeed, the authors even say that they think this elaborate, expensive system was only used for a fraction of the blocks.
 
I will note, though, that while the authors say that their idea has never been proposed before, it is not entirely unique. Edward J. Kunkel infamously declared the Great Pyramid to be Pharoah’s Pump in a 1963 book of that name, alleging that the pyramid was used to pump water in a somewhat similar way to how our authors allege Djoser’s pyramid worked, except Kunkel imagined giant valves and the use of air rather than water pressure to control the water flow.
 
Before that, L. Vernon Harcourt in his Doctrine of the Deluge (1838) claimed that the pyramids were water purification devices that pumped water through their passages.
 
Going back as far as we care to look, old Arabic-language legends attributed great waterworks to the Egyptian. A popular story held that Hermes Trismegistus, who was a pharaoh, had built a massive hydraulic work at the source of the Nile, using gigantic statues to direct its flow. Before that, the Greeks falsely believed that Lake Moeris was an artificial construct, so impressed were they by the Middle Kingdom waterworks that transformed it into a freshwater oasis.
 
The authors finish with a feint toward lost civilization speculation:

When these structures were built remains the priority question to answer. Were all the observed technologies developed during the time of Djoser, or were they present even earlier? Without absolute dating of these works, it is essential to approach their attribution and construction period with caution. Because of the significant range of techniques used to build the Gisr el-Mudir, Reader estimates (70) that the enclosure may have been a long-term project developed and maintained over several subsequent reigns, a point also supported by the current authors. The water treatment facility follows a similar pattern, with the neatly cut stones being covered and filled with rougher later masonry. Finally, the Djoser Step Pyramid also presents a superposition of perfectly cut stones, sometimes arranged without joints with great precision and covered by other rougher and angular stones (3). Some of these elements led some authors (6, 100) to claim that Djoser’s pyramid had reused a pre-existing structure.

​While they don’t come out and say it, they clearly imply a decline from some mythical prehistoric level of perfection to a crude, degraded Old Kingdom squatting atop its ruins. In that claim, they are no different than the fringe theorists writing about lost civilizations or medieval historians chronicling the imaginary greatness of Egypt’s antediluvian period.