Lifting lever in Ancient Egypt: how it worked

Lifting lever

A wooden lever with a counterweight, like the shaduf Egyptians used to lift water. Builders moved giant stones with levers, ramps and sledges.

Shaduf

A pole with a bucket and a counterweight, for water

In Egypt from

About 1500 BC

Moving stone

Sledges, ramps, levers and boats

Big cranes

Came later, in Greek and Roman times

History Lifting water

A shaduf is a long pole balanced on a post, with a bucket on one end and a heavy weight of clay or stone on the other. Pulling the bucket down into the river and letting the weight swing it back up, one person could lift water all day to water gardens and fields. Shadufs appear in Egyptian tomb paintings from about 1500 BC, and some are still used today.

Farmers lifting Nile water with shadufs, in an old engraving. Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

History Moving giant stones

Egyptian builders had no big cranes. They moved heavy blocks on wooden sledges, pulled them up ramps of mud brick and rubble, and used levers to raise them a little at a time. The Greek writer Herodotus said the pyramids were built with lifting machines made of short timbers, but he was writing about 2,000 years later, and builders still argue about exactly how the heaviest stones were raised.

Art In this artwork

The illustration shows a tall wooden lever on a mud-brick base lifting a sandstone block on a rope, with a clay counterweight at the other end. It mixes the design of a shaduf with a building site.