Re: egypt
What a fascinating question, Realspeed... How did they raise the 'needle' out of the ground..???
First of all, how did they manage to cut the lower (and concealed) edge? They must have found a method to undermine it - yet leave the cavity with a level base. How?
Then the lifting of the stone out of the hole. A-frames, perhaps?
There are so many unanswered questions here....
1994 and 1999. First Hopkins and Rais Abdel Aleem organized an experiment to tow a block of stone weighing about 25 tons. They prepared a path by embedding wooden rails into the ground and placing a sledge on them bearing a megalith weighing about 25 tons. Initially they used more than 100 people to try to tow it but were unable to budge it. Finally, with well over 130 people pulling at once and an additional dozen using levers to prod the sledge forward, they moved it. Over the course of a day, the workers towed it 10 to 20 feet. Despite problems with broken ropes, they proved the monument could be moved this way. Additional experiments were done in Egypt and other locations to tow megalithic stone with ancient technologies.
One experiment was to transport a small obelisk on a barge in the Nile River. The barge was built based on ancient Egyptian designs. It had to be very wide to handle the obelisk, with a 2 to 1 ratio length to width, and it was at least twice as long as the obelisk. The obelisk was about 10 feet long and no more than 5 tons. A barge big enough to transport the largest Egyptian obelisks with this ratio would have had to be close to 200 feet long and 100 feet wide.
You can read more details at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obelisk
Please do not bring in alien technology to this thread. Unknown technology, OK.