When it comes to engineering, domain knowledge is often far more important than any kind of inherent "smartness," and ancient Egyptians had thousands of years of block-stacking domain knowledge that we don't. While modern society has billions of tricks up our sleeve that would completely befuddle ancient Egyptians, I'm sure they had a handful of tricks that would catch us by surprise. Knowledge isn't strictly ordered.
Also, just because we aren't sure precisely which strategy they used doesn't mean that we didn't think of it, it just means that we can't find evidence to overwhelmingly support a single one of our hypotheses.
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Hmm, Poe's law? I'll bite.
When it comes to engineering, domain knowledge is often far more important than any kind of inherent "smartness," and ancient Egyptians had thousands of years of block-stacking domain knowledge that we don't. While modern society has billions of tricks up our sleeve that would completely befuddle ancient Egyptians, I'm sure they had a handful of tricks that would catch us by surprise. Knowledge isn't strictly ordered.
Also, just because we aren't sure precisely which strategy they used doesn't mean that we didn't think of it, it just means that we can't find evidence to overwhelmingly support a single one of our hypotheses.