It was entirely possible to build tall towers with straight walls. Below I provide numerous examples. It is important to address a small issue right away before proceeding. Many towers do have tapering sides. That does not negate my thesis for two reasons.
1. The taller a structure rises the more it must deal with wind resistance, as winds are stronger the higher up you go. The best solution, as seen in modern buildings such as the Burj Khalifa, is to taper the building as you go up. No one would claim that a tower like the Burj Khalifa or the Empire State Building are pyramids, but they do taper to reduce the surface area that is being bombarded by heavy winds.
2. Reducing the thickness of the walls as you go up allows you to build much taller. The base of any structure can only support a finite weight before collapsing. If you taper the structure you can make it taller than if you kept the walls a uniform thickness.
Since I intend to demonstrate that it was possible to build tall towers using pre-modern construction techniques and materials, I will only list pre-modern structures, those built before 1500.
When people think of pyramids they probably think of the Great Pyramid, and who knows how that thing was built? Maybe it was aliens. Probably not, but if ancient aliens didn't exist then how did they build everything? What people don't know is that most pyramids are nowhere near that impressive. Pyramids, for the most part, are just heaps of rubble and earth faced with stone. This is how the pyramids of the Americas were built. It's not all that difficult to create a big heap of dirt and put stones on top. While the Great Pyramid is 455 feet tall, the Pyramid of the Sun in Mexico only stands at 216 feet. Pyramids throughout southern Egypt and Sudan are usually no taller than 60 feet.
The Minaret of Jam
In 1190 in central Afghanistan the Ghurid kings built a brick minaret 203 feet tall. Before anyone says "Bricks? Bricks are modern, build it out of stone!" I will point out that the ziggurats of Babylon, some of the earliest pyramids in the world, were built not of stone, but of fired bricks. The minaret is composed of five sections, each smaller than the other, but each section itself has very straight sides.
The Qutub Minar
1220. The Sultan of Delhi, taking inspiration from the Minaret of Jam, dismantled several Hindu temples to make a 240 foot tall victory minaret. This tower does taper quite a bit, but it is far from a pyramid. It is a tower much like a lighthouse, also with five sections, built without steam power or steel cranes.
The Towers of the Himalaya
Throughout eastern Tibet and south-western China, there are hundreds of stone towers built, it is thought, within a 400 year period around 1400. It is believed they were built by numerous different civilisations for different purposes, family pride, signal towers, protection from Mongol invasions, etc. Most are between 100 and 200 feet tall, with straight sides, and either rectilinear or star-shaped bases.
The Towers of Bologna
The rich families of Bologna, in terror of vendettas, built tall towers to spy on one another. Of the hundred or more towers in the city, the most famous are known as the Two Towers. Built of stone, brick, and wood, the towers are believed to have been built on average over ten years. The shorter Garisenda Tower stands at 159 feet and leans heavily to one side. It was much taller, but the top had to be removed to prevent collapse. The taller Asinelli Tower is 323 feet and overlooks its shorter neighbor. Both were built between 1109 to 1185.
Lincoln Cathedral
The medieval cathedrals were built over many centuries, using man-powered cranes and often had to be rebuilt numerous times due to collapse. There are a few very tall cathedrals, some even taller than the Great Pyramid, but, while most were started centuries ago, most were not finished until the late 19th century. This disqualifies them from this list. One very prominent exception is Lincoln Cathedral. Built in 1311, the central spire rose to 525 feet high, towering over the Great Pyramid even at its greatest, before erosion and thieves stole some of its height. A heavy storm tore down the spire in 1549, but the parts of the tower still remaining stood at 271 feet high. With dead straight walls, it is impossible to claim that the only means of reaching fantastic heights was to build pyramids.
So far all these examples have been from the ADs, a good three thousand years after the Great Pyramid was built. This might turn some people off. "We want ANCIENT towers, not merely pre-modern towers! It was IMPOSSIBLE! Pyramids were inevitable!!!!1"
I've saved the best for last.
The Lighthouse of Alexandria
The original Seventh Wonder of the World. Built in 280 BC, the lighthouse stood at Alexandria Harbor, the gateway to the greatest city in the world, built by Alexander the Great himself and governed by his general Ptolemy. Built in three sections, with very gently sloping walls, the lighthouse rose to at least 400 feet high, almost as tall as the Great Pyramid itself! The tower stood until 1480, only 12 years before Columbus' history altering voyage, when it was dismantled to built the fort at Qaitbay by the Sultan of Egypt.
People were capable of building tall towers before modern construction, they were not required to build pyramids. There was nothing to stop ancient people from building perfect vertical walls, yet many decided to still build pyramids. Why? We don't know. The ubiquity of pyramids all over the world is a truly unexplained mystery.
It is interesting that the same people who say that to suggest a lost civilisation such as Atlantis or alien intervention is to insult the intelligence of the brown people who made these monuments, themselves insult the intelligence of ancient peoples by suggesting that the ONLY way to build tall structures was to build pyramids. It is another sign of the hypocrisy of these people.
You can't explain away why ancient people all over the world built
pyramids. Why did people all over the world build pyramids? Say it with
me, it's my favourite phrase: "WE DO NOT KNOW." We do not know. I am not here to propose an alternate hypothesis, merely to disprove the predominant hypothesis that pyramids exist all over the world because people were too stupid to build straight sided towers. I have provided you with six examples of ancient towers, now you can let the pyramid deception die.
