Science Daily: A riddle greater than even the Sphinx

Some myths say that Hera or Ares sent the Sphinx from her Ethiopian homeland (the Greeks always remembered the foreign origin of the Sphinx) to Thebes in Greece. The Sphinx asked all passersbys the most famous riddle in history:

Which creature in the morning goes on four legs, at mid-day on two, and in the evening upon three, and the more legs it has, the weaker it be?


She strangled and devoured anyone who could not answer the riddle.

Oedipus solved the riddle by answering: Man—who crawls on all fours as a baby, then walks on two feet as an adult, and then walks with a cane in old age.

Michel Barsoum, professor of materials engineering, wrote a peer-reviewed paper to be published in the Journal of the American Ceramic Society how the Egyptian builders of the nearly 5,000-year-old pyramids were exceptional civil and architectural engineers as well as superb chemists and material scientists.

His conclusions indicate the ancient Egyptians used some concrete in the construction of the pyramids.

The ancient builders cast the blocks of the outer and inner casings and, most likely, the upper parts of the pyramids using a limestone concrete, called a geopolymer.

To arrive at his findings, Barsoum, an Egypt native, and co-workers analyzed more than 1,000 micrographs, chemical analyses and other materials during a three year period..

See http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/12/061209122918.htm

soruce: Wikipedia

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