[HN Gopher] Egypt's pyramids may have been built on a long-lost ...
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Egypt's pyramids may have been built on a long-lost branch of the
Nile
Author : gumby
Score : 195 points
Date : 2024-05-16 15:20 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| tiffanyh wrote:
| It might be related, there's a hypotheses that the Sphinx had
| massive water erosion.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphinx_water_erosion_hypothesi...
| tootie wrote:
| That theory is espoused by the same people who think it was
| built by aliens. It's not plausible. Per this study, by the
| time the Sphinx is built rainfall has already decreased
| substantially. The rain erosion theory requires the Sphinx be
| thousands of years older than records indicate and predate the
| first pharaoh by several millennia.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| > That theory is espoused by the same people who think it was
| built by aliens.
|
| I think this is a common misunderstanding.
|
| Yes, there are some who think aliens built the pyramids.
|
| But there is an equally large group of people who think that
| humans pre-ice age were advanced like we are today. And when
| the ice age happened 12,000 years ago - that knowledge was
| lost.
|
| When you then look at build sites around the world from this
| perceptive, structures like the Sphinx and others (like
| Gobekli Tepe), begin to appear much older than convention
| teachings might imply.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobekli_Tepe
|
| EDIT: for those interested more in this topic, there is a
| Netflix series on it (called "Ancient Apocalypse"). I can't
| attest to the validity of the statements made in the series,
| but the arguments are compelling (and not alien related).
|
| https://grahamhancock.com/ancient-apocalypse/
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| is there even a single documented case of finding writing
| at Gobekli Tepe? My understanding is there is no evidence
| of a writing system
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Yes
|
| https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=90
| 367...
| Retric wrote:
| No. You misunderstood that quote, the emergence of
| writing is far more recent and at different locations.
| Thus "within 30km of" not at Gobekli Tepe.
|
| "Current archeological evidence in the form of seals,
| reliefs, steles, lead strips, and wood panels, across
| almost one-hundred Anatolian sites, _including some
| within 30 km of Gobekli Tepe,_ dates the emergence of the
| hieroglyphic script used to write in Luwian to the late
| 15th century B.C.E.,"
|
| Gobekli Tepe was inhabited ~9500-8000 BCE, so ~6500 years
| before the writing examples given.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| So the writing is found in the same area, but may be from
| a much later civilization?
| danparsonson wrote:
| That's the idea - settlements are usually built in
| favourable areas (e.g. next to rivers) so the same site
| may be continuously inhabited or repeatedly reinhabited
| over very long periods of history.
| Kye wrote:
| >> _" As of 2021, less than 5% of the site had been
| excavated."_
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| My conclusion was the sites aren't excavated because they
| aren't really that interesting. They are all similar in
| nature and don't contain extensive written knowledge that
| can be preserved and studied. To put it comparatively
| Otzi the iceman is highly studied because preserved
| bodies aren't found from his era and location that often.
| If we stumbled across a graveyard with 10000 people from
| the same era that was easily accessible, I doubt we'd
| spend much time studying all of them.
|
| As another poster has pointed out, there may in fact be a
| writing system that we are just beginning to understand.
| So I'll have to see if there is anything I can try and
| learn there.
| masklinn wrote:
| The sites are absolutely interesting, however unless
| pressed for time (usually because they're in the way of
| or uncovered by construction work) archaeological digs
| are slow going: the slower you are the more artifacts you
| can find, the better you can place them, and the better
| you can preserve them and the rest of the site.
|
| Used to be people dynamited sites to get at stuff faster
| (also dynamite colleague's sites to undermine them). We
| stopped doing that, because it was stupid and wasteful.
|
| Furthermore protecting and stabilising the site been a
| major focus of recent site coordinators, especially as
| the site has been opened up more for public visits.
|
| If you want faster digs, fund archeological grants so
| there's more money to hire more people.
| Retric wrote:
| There's quite a bit of evidence for the existing timeline.
| People quibble about radiocarbon dating, but there's
| multiple methods. For example by comparing rings on enough
| wooden objects you can get a firm this can't be older than
| X date.
|
| https://www.nps.gov/tont/learn/nature/dendrochronology.htm
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Exactly, and radiocarbon dating puts Gobekli Tepe at
| being ~12,000 years old.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobekli_Tepe#:~:text=Radioc
| arb....
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| That's simultaneously true, and misleading to the point
| of being wrong. The _earliest_ parts of the layers date
| that far back, yes. The features of Gobekli Tepe that
| people who aren 't archaeologists actually care about
| like the obelisks date much later around the second phase
| of the neolithic (PPNB).
|
| Also note that Gobekli Tepe is neither the oldest site we
| know of nor unique in having monumental architecture.
| Even within the Tepler culture, Karahan Tepe dates
| earlier and I'm sure you heard of the older site of
| Jericho.
| danparsonson wrote:
| From your link: "Radiocarbon dating shows that the
| earliest exposed structures at Gobekli Tepe were built
| between 9500 and 9000 BCE"
| Retric wrote:
| ~9500 BCE + 2024 - 1 = ~11,523 years ago.
|
| So yea not quite 12,000 years ago.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >But there is an equally large group of people who think
| that humans pre-ice age were advanced like we are today.
| And when the ice age happened 12,000 years ago - that
| knowledge was lost.
|
| Advanced as in late neolithic or even early bronze? Sure, I
| could find that tenuously plausible. Advanced as in space
| age, heavily dependent on petroleum products, etc... not
| even slightly plausible.
| noslenwerdna wrote:
| If they were as advanced as we are now, we would have seen
| that the atmospheric CO2 levels had been higher back then,
| no? This paper draws the conclusions that such a
| civilization would be visible in the geological record.
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03748
| narrator wrote:
| It could be that the technological civilization arose
| extremely quickly, and only in certain limited
| geographical areas before the population could grow to
| overwhelm the earth with industrial production. They
| might have had a completely different morality that led
| to this pattern. It was before the founding of all
| religions we have today.
| bluGill wrote:
| Maybe, but I doubt that as technology seems needs a lot
| of specialists. You don't have time to focus on one small
| area in depth if you also need to farm/hunt/gather. We
| need generations for someone to come up with the idea of
| writing, make it better, educate kids in it... And of
| course before the printing press books took a lot of time
| and so even if you created something passing it to
| someone else is hard.
|
| Primitive people were not stupid, they just needed a lot
| of time to figure out things that we now think are
| obvious.
| seadan83 wrote:
| I think you under emphasized the first part of your
| point. Living in a modern community is easy mode. Without
| that, mass time and effort are needed to subsist
| datavirtue wrote:
| The morality of all religions can be traced back to
| Zoroastrian roots, which is effectively pre-historic.
| ahakki wrote:
| Only if you assume that the supposed advanced ancient
| civilization oxidized large amounts of fossil
| hydrocarbon.
| noslenwerdna wrote:
| But there are other chemicals that a civilization might
| produce that are also visible in the geological record.
| Fertilizers would also leave a mark.
| stuxnet wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
|
| > Terra preta soils are found mainly in the Brazilian
| Amazon, where Sombroek et al. estimate that they cover at
| least 0.1-0.3%, or 6,300 to 18,900 square kilometres
| (2,400 to 7,300 sq mi) of low forested Amazonia; but
| others estimate this surface at 10.0% or more (twice the
| area of Great Britain).
| masklinn wrote:
| So what you're saying is there was a massive
| technologically advanced civilisation which didn't build
| buildings, didn't carve stone, didn't mine or refine
| metals, didn't deforest, didn't farm, and didn't use oil?
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Keep in mind that the start of the industrial revolution
| predates the mass adoption of the steam engine, and
| charcoal (a renewable resource) based steel mills existed
| into the 20th century.
|
| I can imagine a world where electricity and batteries
| were developed before the mass exploitation of fossil
| fuels as, afaik, there's no specific technological
| requirement on one for the other to exist.
| lupusreal wrote:
| > _Keep in mind that the start of the industrial
| revolution predates the mass adoption of the steam
| engine_
|
| Well of course the _start_ of it predated the _mass_
| adoption of steam engines, but as I understand it the
| start is generally considered to be when steam engines
| were first put to use pumping water out of coal mines,
| that water then being used to flood canals to transport
| the coal. That synergy was incredibly powerful, making
| cheap coal available in cities which allowed urban
| populations to rapidly grow, providing a workforce for
| the factories which would eventually (not initially) also
| be coal powered. That 's the industrial revolution as I
| learned it.
| seadan83 wrote:
| In 1800, there were 1B humans, 1950 is 2.5, 1990 is 5.0B,
| and we are now at 8.0B.
|
| I think we forget how many more people there are now
| compared to just 100 years ago. At -5000, there is an
| estimated 5M people. There's more than 1000x more people
| now. Per capita carbon footprint would be quite wild to
| leave any kind of mark on the planet with a total human
| population that is smaller than a single modern day mid
| sized city.
|
| (Data is from worldometers.info/world-population)
| noslenwerdna wrote:
| Of course, there would also be other markers. Fertilizers
| is one.
|
| Another is the plants and animals they used for food. Why
| are some plants and animals still indigenous to certain
| areas, assuming there was a small globe spanning
| civilization at some point in the last million or so
| years? Shouldn't this civilization have at least brought
| the crops and livestock to other areas of the globe they
| visited?
| jahewson wrote:
| This is the 2nd dumbest conspiracy theory ever.
| wincy wrote:
| Nobody is conspiring to "keep this under wraps" so it
| can't be a conspiracy theory. A conspiracy requires
| people who have some hidden knowledge and are keeping it
| secret?
| konfusinomicon wrote:
| the shape shifting lizard people are the conspirators.
| only one of them would say it's not as to throw us all of
| the trail. we're on to you wincy, we are on to you...
| roywiggins wrote:
| Graham Hancock insists that his ideas aren't being taken
| seriously by the archeological community because they
| find them too threatening, rather than for the real
| reason: that they think he's plain wrong.
|
| In this view, archaeologists "know" that he's really on
| to something, but refuse to look closer. He's claimed to
| have been "banned" from Egypt (which might even be true,
| I don't know). The whole vibe is _this is the truth that
| THEY don 't want you to know_.
| christkv wrote:
| There is the whole theory about the Sumerians coming from a
| civilisation at the bottom of the Persian Gulf. As the ice
| age came to an end the rising sea wiped it out making them
| move to higher ground.
| njarboe wrote:
| Also theorized as the source of the great flood myths. As
| the Gulf flooded the shore line would be moving around a
| meter per day for centuries/millennia.
| mburns wrote:
| More interesting still is an archaeologist debunking Graham
| Hancock's nonsense.
|
| https://youtu.be/-iCIZQX9i1A?si=521Y4VpqaQqPeBpq
| unclad5968 wrote:
| Graham himself debated an actual archeologist on the
| Rogan podcast not too long ago. I think he makes it
| pretty clear that he's mostly advocating that there is a
| nonzero amount of evidence for a pre ice age civilization
| that was significantly more advanced than immediate post
| ice age civilizations.
|
| Im not convinced he's correct, but that doesn't make his
| stuff invalid. He's basically just presenting an
| alternative interpretation of the data and academic
| archeology is vilifying him for it, which they've done to
| several people before who ended up being right.
|
| Of course in his shows he presents everything as fact,
| just like every other science does.
| danparsonson wrote:
| > Of course in his shows he presents everything as fact,
| just like every other science does
|
| That is problematic though, because genuine science is
| never/should never be presented as fact unless it's
| irrefutable. I'm fairly sure that's one big reason why he
| comes in for so much criticism, aside from any questions
| about the veracity of his ideas.
| mandmandam wrote:
| > in his shows he presents everything as fact
|
| I've only seen one of his shows, but he didn't present
| anything in it as facts except actual facts.
| roywiggins wrote:
| If you like video essays, I enjoyed this movie-length
| debunking of Ancient Apocalypse.
|
| tl;dr: The evidence is simply not there, and real
| archeology is much, much more interesting.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iCIZQX9i1A
| masklinn wrote:
| Milo also visited Gobekli Tepe, as well as Karahan Tepe
| (a site which likely predates Gobekli and is believed to
| be related as there are lots of shared features), and a
| few other more recent sites of southern turkey:
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXtMIzD-Y-
| bNsVeMHjFjF...
| cavillis wrote:
| thank you for posting this! I loved Ancient Apocalypse,
| very entertaining. It has been frustrating trying to find
| refutations of some of the theories/questions posed by
| it.
|
| When the subject is brought up anywhere with experts it
| is usually dismissed with a bunch of ad-hominem attacks
| which is just not helpful for anyone trying to learn
| roywiggins wrote:
| It doesn't help that Graham Hancock levels his own ad
| hominem attacks, claiming that archeologists don't take
| his ideas seriously to protect their own egos and jobs.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| I just started watched the YouTube.
|
| It's hard to take this debunking serious when the very
| 1st point he makes about Graham is incorrect.
|
| He states that Graham claims to be a researcher.
|
| https://youtu.be/-iCIZQX9i1A?t=139
|
| In the Netflix series, Graham doesn't not. He makes it
| clear he's not a researcher nor archeologist. He clearly
| states he's an investigative journalist.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=19&v=DgvaXros3MY&feature=yo
| utu...
|
| ---
|
| And then the YouTube host roots his show on the
| scientific method with the question "How do you prove
| there was an ancient civilians".
|
| This is the _wrong_ root question.
|
| The root question should be "How did ancient civilians
| create these structures using the technology we believe
| they had at the time". Or said differently, "how did
| civilians not use more advance technology than we believe
| they had"
|
| (Which is only bronze tools and no existence of the
| wheel)
| roywiggins wrote:
| > He states that Graham claims to be a researcher.
|
| No, he doesn't state that at all. This is what Milo says,
| verbatim: "He is a person that some may call a
| researcher. I am one of those people. More predominantly
| than that, Graham Hancock is a writer."
|
| > The root question should be "How did ancient civilians
| create these structures using the technology we believe
| they had at the time".
|
| That's an interesting question, but it's essentially an
| endless one: we will never, ever know how ancient
| civilizations created everything they created, because
| their secrets have been lost to time. Human history is so
| deep and the evidence so porous that we simply will never
| run out of questions to ask about how they did what they
| did. Furthermore, even when we come up with ways they
| _might_ have created things, we may never, ever know
| whether that 's really what they did, because the
| evidence is not there anymore. There are medieval and
| later items which we don't really know how were created,
| but we _do_ know, _for sure_ , that they didn't have
| power tools.
|
| For instance, what was Greek fire, _exactly_? There are
| lots of good ideas, Wikipedia suggests "it may have been
| made by combining pine resin, naphtha, quicklime, calcium
| phosphide, sulfur, or niter." Will we ever know which?
| Maybe, but probably not.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| His whole premise is that civilizations didn't exist that
| long ago (which is his scientific method question).
|
| Yet no one disputes that archeologist have found remains
| of people from 200,000 years ago.
|
| That right there debunks his "debunk" show.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2022/01/13/1072867405/scientists-
| determi....
| roywiggins wrote:
| Of course there were people (or at least very-nearly-
| human people) 200,000 years ago, and of course there is a
| very, very long history of humans and not-quite-humans
| having material culture.
|
| Graham Hancock asserts that there was a _globe-spanning
| single culture with advanced technology ~12,000 years
| ago_. That 's a big, specific claim! Of course there were
| _people_ around during the Younger Dryas, Hancock is
| making a bunch of claims about _what people were doing at
| that time_.
|
| Milo is saying there wasn't a _globe-spanning
| civilization with a shared culture and advanced
| technology_ existing during that period, not that there
| weren 't _people_ (are you perhaps confusing the words
| "civilian" and "civilization"?)
|
| Seriously, keep watching for more than a couple minutes:
| does he at any point say "of course Ancient Apocalypse
| isn't real, humans didn't exist back then"? That would be
| a very short video.
| johncessna wrote:
| As someone who doesn't know much about archeology, I
| watched the netflix show and thought it was interesting
| and had a lot of questions. Knowing that it's one
| perspective and that there has been information has
| likely been left out and/or there were either answers, or
| at least commonly accepted explanations, I started
| looking around for what those were and what the academics
| had to say.
|
| I found this channel and couldn't get more than 30
| minutes. He starts off well saying that he didn't want to
| dismiss it all as nonsense but that doesn't last long. So
| yeah, If you want to watch someone ridicule an
| alternative theory that has been presented, or present
| commonly accepted theories as matter of fact, then sure,
| great channel.
| dbspin wrote:
| Your criticism of this channel may be on point - I
| haven't watched it. But please don't make the mistake of
| equivocating scientific hypotheses, theories well
| supported by evidence and crank pseudoscience created for
| a mass audience. Hancock hasn't been excluded from the
| 'mainstream' archeological debate. He never participated
| in it in the first place. He's a writer of
| retrofuturological science fantasy in the same vein (and
| citing much the same evidence) as his predecessor Erich
| von Daniken. This stuff can be hugely entertaining (I'm a
| science fiction fan and grew up on 'face on mars',
| 'chariots of the Gods etc'). But its epistemic are based
| on just so stories and shifting goal posts, not
| triangulating the dating of sites, engaging in
| archeological digs or weighing in on scientific arguments
| about methodology.
| unclad5968 wrote:
| That may be true but the scientific hypotheses and
| theories well supported by evidence in archeology have
| been wrong enough times that it isn't inappropriate to
| question them
| danparsonson wrote:
| That's how science works but new hypotheses must
| necessarily be able to explain all the existing evidence
| rather than just cherry-picking.
| njarboe wrote:
| The last ice age ended around 12,000 years ago and started
| about 115,000 years ago[1].
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Period
| tiffanyh wrote:
| > We know that the Earth has had at least five major ice
| ages. The first one happened about 2 billion years ago
| and lasted about 300 million years. The most recent one
| started about 2.6 million years ago, and in fact, we are
| _still technically in it_.
|
| https://www.space.com/ice-ages-on-earth-could-humans-
| survive
| masklinn wrote:
| Ice age are properly defined as periods of "extensive ice
| sheets" at the poles, contrasted with "greenhouse
| periods" of no polar ice sheets (or glaciers).
|
| Ice ages are comprised of glacial and interglacial
| periods. The Last Glacial Period is... a glacial period.
| We're currently in an interglacial. But still an ice age,
| since there's ice at the poles (for now anyway).
| njarboe wrote:
| Thanks for the info. I was just using ice age in the same
| way the parent was. Glacial Period is more technically
| correct.
| nurple wrote:
| Thanks for bringing these topics up, I find the raft of
| evidence quite compelling. I also find it quite interesting
| how much pushback on alternative hypotheses there is from
| the mainstream scientists. I even attempted to have a
| conversation with GPT4 about the possibility that ancient
| humans created the pyramids, and it told me I was being
| RACIST! Like, what?
|
| The thing that sells me, besides the erosion, is the
| absolutely astonishing artifacts that were left behind.
| There is no way I could be convinced that hand-driven
| bronze tooling was cutting diorite to a precision we would
| struggle to meet today, carving schists so thin you can see
| light pass through, absolutely perfect symmetry, and
| creation of granite stoneware with multivariate surface
| geometry that we'd be unable to do without a precision-
| destroying tool change.
|
| I find the tool marks on the partially excavated obelisk in
| Aswan particularly compelling. It's like they had
| technology that could scoop granite like warm ice cream.
|
| One person doing somewhat interesting research here and
| other ancient sites is Ben from Uncharted-X. He brings a
| lot of first-hand content and analysis of areas many can
| not access, though it is pretty light on conclusions
| (probably for the best).
|
| As an example, this geometric analysis of a pre-dynastic
| vase carved from granite belies the capabilities of a
| forgotten generation of this planet's inhabitants: https://
| unsigned.io/log/2023_02_24_Initial_Geometric_Analysi...
| roywiggins wrote:
| > The thing that sells me, besides the erosion, is the
| absolutely astonishing artifacts that were left behind.
| There is no way I could be convinced that hand-driven
| bronze tooling was cutting diorite to a precision we
| would struggle to meet today, carving schists so thin you
| can see light pass through, absolutely perfect symmetry,
| and creation of granite stoneware with multivariate
| surface geometry that we'd be unable to do without a
| precision-destroying tool change.
|
| The explanation is pretty simple: with sufficient effort
| and skill, it's possible to produce extraordinary works
| of precision. You cannot underestimate what people can do
| with sufficient patience and expertise.
|
| However, each artifact is going to be _different_ ,
| because they're hand-made. If you found half a dozen
| objects that matched _each other_ to extreme precision,
| you 'd have a more serious case- that's the sort of thing
| you expect to need machine tools for.
|
| One very good way to debunk this stuff is to look at the
| best stuff that came out of the Renaissance: we know, for
| certain, that they weren't carving that stuff with power
| tools.
| nurple wrote:
| So your view is that these pieces are modern forgeries?
| It's _maybe_ possible we could create something like this
| with today's machinery, but if you're saying some ancient
| person with enough time could create these, it's just not
| the case. It's not just that I don't believe a determined
| human can do amazing things, but it's just impossible to
| create the precision these cuts show without measurement
| tools almost more precise than we have the capability to
| make today.
|
| There were thousands of vases like this found beneath the
| bent pyramid.
| mc32 wrote:
| I think we have to take into consideration the
| "entertainment" aspect of lots of these theories. Like
| UFO theories, such and such monster, bigfoot, etc., they
| are for entertainment. People make money off of these
| things. The more plausibility and uncertainty they add,
| the more money they make. Some suffer from delusion as
| well.
|
| Archeology and Paleontology have evidence for things
| millions of years ago, yet do not have evidence for
| Ancient advanced civilizations.
| sampo wrote:
| > Like UFO theories, such and such monster, bigfoot,
| etc., they are for entertainment.
|
| Many astronomers and physicists have engaged in
| speculations about extraterrestrial life. They also use
| some radio telescope time for SETI (search for
| extraterrestrial intelligence) projects.
| mc32 wrote:
| Extra-terrestrial life does not mean Alien Vehicles at
| super-light speed darting in and out of the atmosphere or
| nerosphere. It means looking for signs of life forms on
| other planets or planetary systems. We could have alien
| life on Mars, Io, extra-solar planets, etc. They search
| for that.
| tootie wrote:
| I can't find the video, but I recall watching this on TV
| when I was younger. They found an ancient abandoned
| quarry site in Egypt (same one?) and brought in someone
| to test cutting and drilling granite with copper tools
| and it worked. The trick is using sand in between the
| copper and the granite.
|
| Here's some still photos and captions: https://www.pbs.or
| g/wgbh/nova/lostempires/obelisk/cutting.ht...
|
| The thing that made Ancient Egypt so special and so
| historically significant isn't that they had amazing
| technology. It's that they built a coherent culture,
| religion, language and government. The vast construction
| projects they undertook were achievable because they
| could field massive armies of laborers and keep them
| provisioned for years. They built these massive
| structures by dint of having lots of food and secure
| borders.
| nurple wrote:
| It actually didn't work. They were barely able to scar
| the surface with a jagged janky cut after many hard hours
| of hard work, and they weren't even attacking the hardest
| types of stone we see things created from. It's just not
| possible these tools were used to create the amazingly
| accurate pieces you find in Egypt, fashioned in some of
| the hardest materials we know.
| tootie wrote:
| https://youtu.be/zoOCcrgWkIA?si=qfsrmduoc7qgzSp7&t=188
|
| He cuts it pretty sharp here. And then shows a technique
| for smoothing imperfections. Also a lot of the stones
| weren't actually cut perfectly. Only the ones that were
| on visible surfaces. The technique was probably slow and
| laborious, but the Egyptians had huge numbers of workers
| and they spent years or decades on projects.
|
| I'm not sure what the counterargument even is. If the
| Sphinx was built using super ancient metal tools, where
| are they? And how did Egyptians make granite carvings all
| over their empire over the span of millenia? They
| obviously knew how. We know it's possible. We just don't
| know for sure how they specifically did it and maybe
| never will.
|
| It was only a few years ago that we solved the mystery of
| Roman concrete.
| masklinn wrote:
| > It's just not possible these tools were used to create
| the amazingly accurate pieces you find in Egypt,
| fashioned in some of the hardest materials we know.
|
| The pyramids are almost entirely made of limestone.
| Limestone is around a 3.5 on the mohs hardness scale.
|
| The scale goes up to 10 (diamond).
|
| Granite (king's chamber, sarcophaguses, plugs) is around
| 6, 6.5.
|
| Guess what's above that? Quartz. AKA your common desert
| sand.
| thaumaturgy wrote:
| Agh, this is _so_ close to being a really interesting
| perspective.
|
| "Advanced" can mean a couple of different things. I think
| your comment and Graham Hancock's stuff is using it in the
| sense of "technologically advanced", i.e., access to earth-
| moving equipment or something.
|
| But there's also "advanced" in the sense of "ability to
| reason", and that's _much_ more interesting to think about!
|
| I think there's a tendency in the modern perspective to
| equate technological advancement with intelligence, and so
| we (laypeople and dilletantes especially) tend to think of
| these long-ago cultures as being sort of comprised of
| primitive _people_ because they built primitive _things_ ,
| by modern standards. Writing systems, technology, politics
| & governance, math, chemistry, mechanical systems,
| metallurgy and materials science, medicine -- minor
| periodic and localized variations aside, all of these were
| pretty darn primitive, near as we can tell, and so the
| people must have been, too.
|
| But maybe advanced people do primitive things because the
| process of developing technology takes a long time. Think
| about everything that's required to reliably produce steel;
| maybe a prerequisite for steel is 10,000 years of
| agriculture.
|
| The "Primitive Technology" channel on YouTube is a great
| case study. We have an individual who has access to modern
| knowledge and technology, but re-producing it is
| extraordinarily laborious and he's still in the mud hut
| phase of development -- and he can escape that time period
| at any time to get access to modern medicine and a rich,
| nutrient-dense diet.
|
| I think this might be a strong argument against ancient
| technologically advanced civilizations (and alien
| claptrap). It's unlikely that things really developed that
| much out-of-order because it just takes too dang long to
| develop all the steps between basic agriculture and powered
| machinery. It's kind of like that counter-argument against
| the "moon landing was a hoax" nutters: in 1969, we didn't
| yet have the film technology required to fake a moon
| landing. It was easier to get on a rocket to the dang
| thing! We knew it could be possible to fake it, but we
| didn't have the tools to do it, yet.
|
| So, it's fun to think of past cultures and neolithic humans
| as being basically us, in terms of intelligence and
| reasoning and capability, but without any of the modern
| affordances we have now.
| tootie wrote:
| Humans have been humans for at least 200K years. And those
| primitive humans had the same capabilities we do today. But
| the kind concerted effort and organization required for
| monumental construction still took hundreds of generations
| to develop. Megaliths older than the Sphinx certainly
| exist, but the Sphinx is orders of magnitude more complex.
| Not just in terms of engineering and tools (the Sphinx was
| carved with metal tools) but the size of the well-governed
| population required to do the labor. It is inconceivable
| that a society could spring out of the marshlands to build
| the Sphinx and leave no other trace for thousands of years.
| And then for a new civilization to show up with all the
| technology and culture they had, falsify a load of records
| to say they built it along with the Pyramids.
|
| Hancock isn't just wrong, he's a fraud. https://www.reddit.
| com/r/AskHistorians/comments/z8p83b/is_th...
| wins32767 wrote:
| > And those primitive humans had the same capabilities we
| do today.
|
| Evolution has been ongoing on humans the whole time we've
| been a species. Drinking milk in adults has only been a
| capability we've had for ~6000 years. I'd be hard pressed
| to claim that there haven't been other capabilities that
| have evolved over that time that led to our ability to
| have more social organization.
| seadan83 wrote:
| Lactose tolerance AFAIK is a single enzyme. That taking
| 6000 years to develop I think is evidence against what
| you are saying. Specifically, that is a tiny adaptation
| compared to the organization of the human brain. Is 30x
| more time than lactose tolerance enough for significant
| brain changes? I find it implausible, I would guess the
| major adaptations of the brain are on the order of
| millions of years, not a couple hundred thousand.
|
| The adaptations for social organization seemingly have
| been with us for a long time. AFAIK humans have been in
| large groups for a very long time, as long as they have
| been homo sapiens (Large being over 50 members, and take
| that with a grain of salt, that is only my possibly
| incorrect understanding).
|
| I do find it very plausible that people 1k, 10k, 50k and
| maybe even 200k years ago were all smart (Plato probably
| is far smarter than most alive today). Though, smart and
| education are different, while smart- the body of
| knowledge was limited.
| masklinn wrote:
| > Lactose tolerance AFAIK is a single enzyme. That taking
| 6000 years to develop I think is evidence against what
| you are saying.
|
| Also relevant: lactose tolerance is something _we start
| out with_ , babies need it. So lactose tolerance, or more
| properly lactase persistence, was not the development of
| a brand new trait out of nowhere, it was maintaining a
| capability past the age where it would previously degrade
| out of functionality.
| allturtles wrote:
| > Yes, there are some who think aliens built the pyramids.
| > But there is an equally large group of people who think
| that humans pre-ice age were advanced like we are today.
|
| Not GP, but to me, these two theories are both wildly
| implausible, so "think it was built by aliens" is a handy
| shorthand for "believes an implausible theory about the
| origins of the pyramids." There's zero reason not to
| believe the "orthodox" theory about the pyramids. There is
| even an actual _contemporaneous written papyrus record_
| referring to the Giza construction project [0].
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diary_of_Merer
| burkaman wrote:
| It's still aliens with this guy.
|
| > In his book Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient
| Teachers of Mankind, Hancock (2006) explored the cultural
| importance of shamanism and psychedelics and the idea that
| nonhuman entities from other realms kickstarted human
| culture. Hancock draws parallels between shamanic spirit
| journeys, narratives of fairies, and modern alien abduction
| accounts. Shamanism is "nonsensical to 'rational' Western
| minds" as it is based on "the notion that the human
| condition requires interaction with powerful nonphysical
| beings" (Hancock 2019:220). He has also discussed this idea
| in public presentations. In America Before, Hancock (2019)
| again emphasizes access to the Otherworld of souls and
| nonhuman entities through psychedelic "plant allies."
|
| - http://onlinedigeditions.com/publication/?i=634462&articl
| e_i...
|
| He was able to do a Netflix series because his son is the
| "Director of Nonfiction" there
| (https://thetvcollective.org/breakthroughleaders/industry-
| exp...).
| mandmandam wrote:
| That _is_ a very common thing with ancient and even
| modern shamans.
|
| So, how does saying so in a book _about ancient shamans_
| equate to an endorsement that aliens built the pyramids?
|
| People love attacking this guy but the attacks always
| seem to be remarkably poor strawmen. What's so hard about
| believing we were smarter than acknowledged 10,000 years
| ago?
| robbiep wrote:
| I spent my younger and teenage years obsessed with graham
| Hancock and his ideas.
|
| I can confidently say after more than 16 years of listening
| to his talks, reading and re-reading his books and
| listening to the shifts of his emphasis, that he is full of
| shit in regard to his many hypothesis regarding some
| ancient culture pre-ice age that was the Ur-culture and is
| responsible for building lots of things in lots of places
| that we now falsely attribute to other civilisations.
|
| When you get really into to him, the problem is he isn't
| even internally consistent. In fingerprints of the gods
| he's all into these things, then in heaven's mirror he's
| all going Gaga first on Ur-maps and then on fixed ratios/SI
| units and in the sign and the seal he's pandering
| ultimately to the Masonic Lodge.
|
| It is so convenient that these civilisations would have
| had, in his estimation, to have the sophistication and
| technology level of the 20th century, but left behind only
| artifacts that in many instances ended up getting 'claimed'
| by other civilisations. Give me a break.
| donkey_oaty wrote:
| Graham Hancock is literally just making up stories and
| saying "wouldn't it be cool if this happened" with
| absolutely zero evidence. The guy can't understand why
| archeologist don't like his theories, but he doesn't have
| theories, he has fiction stories.
| mandmandam wrote:
| "Hey archaeologists - here's a cool thing that doesn't
| fit with your timeline. Here are some ideas that could
| explain what's going on, but they're just ideas don't
| lynch me!"
|
| The archaeological establishment: "Lynch this fucker!"
| wudangmonk wrote:
| That it was embraced by the ancient aliens crowd does not
| dismiss the findings. It has what appears to be water
| erosion, now the claim should be challenged if you do not
| believe it was made by water erosion and truely believe it
| was made by something else.
|
| The problem is when things are ignored because they are
| inconvenient and you settle on attacking the individuals to
| the point where if you do not 100% believe in what the
| Egyptologist say then you must be an ancient aliens believer.
|
| I'm sure some people are motivated by such a belief but
| ancient aliens is the same as giving up and saying that god
| did it, it does nothing to get you closer to understanding
| anything, if anything it gets you infinitely farther since in
| your eyes there is nothing to figure out.
| wnevets wrote:
| > , attributing their creation to Plato's lost civilization of
| Atlantis over 11,500 years ago
|
| what is with the obsession that ancient egyptians were
| incapable of building these monuments?
| alephnerd wrote:
| Racism, Orientalism, and 19th century nationalism. How could
| an impoverished Arab country filled with zealots, belly
| dancers, and opium addicts be the heirs of a civilization
| that was a major cornerstone of "European" civilization
| (Edit: This is tongue in cheek).
|
| Tbf, Schwaller de Lubicz was also a Nazi sympathizer and
| there was a lot of bad science and history driven by
| ethnonationalism.
|
| You see similar stuff today with Multiregional Genesis of
| Humans (China), Out of India Hypothesis (Hindutva), etc.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| That's ridiculous.
|
| How do you explain Stonehenge then?
|
| (which was built in England yet no one can explain how
| Brits did it)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonehenge
| alephnerd wrote:
| I was disputing the notion that Egyptians CAN'T build
| monuments. I think my tone might have been too tongue in
| cheek.
|
| > which was built in England yet no one can explain how
| Brits did it
|
| To quote one of my favorite Adult Swim shows (China IL) -
| "F**ing people figured it out ... Nerd don't estimate all
| of humanity by the limits of your capabilites"
| lupusreal wrote:
| I don't think anybody says the Egyptians _couldn 't_
| build the Sphinx, they obviously built a lot of stuff at
| that scale or larger which isn't disputed. Plenty of
| people _do_ claim that about the pyramids, but that 's a
| separate and (IMHO) far kookier claim than the Sphinx
| stuff.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > I don't think anybody says the Egyptians couldn't build
| the Sphinx
|
| That's what the hypothesis u/tiffanyh EXPLICITLY says,
| and connects with the larger theory of Atlantis and
| Thule.
|
| They already brought up the fairly discredited hypothesis
| that humans couldn't have built Stonehenge, ignoring the
| fact the prehistoric megaliths are actually fairly
| common, and "simple machines" are a fairly well known
| concept throughout much of history, and forced labor was
| VERY common throughout much of history.
| lupusreal wrote:
| > _That 's what the hypothesis u/tiffanyh EXPLICITLY
| says_
|
| No it isn't. The Sphinx water erosion idea says that the
| Sphinx is too old to have been built by the Egyptians,
| not that the Egyptians were incapable of building things
| like the Sphinx. The claimed evidence is apparent water
| erosion on the Sphinx and climate records, not the
| complexity of the Sphinx.
|
| > _They already brought up the fairly discredited
| hypothesis that humans couldn 't have built Stonehenge_
|
| They didn't say humans couldn't build the Stonehenge,
| they claimed that nobody knows how it was done. They can
| clarify if they wish but I take this to be a rebuttal of
| _your_ argument that "alternate" theories about ancient
| megaliths are obviously rooted in racism; Stonehenge is
| the subject of such interest despite being European. It's
| not motivated by some sort of racist desire to show that
| Britons are racially inferior people who can't stack some
| stones, it's just a _legitimately interesting_ thing to
| wonder about.
| zaphirplane wrote:
| What's mysterious about its construction, is it the
| sourcing of the stones or some precision in the circle
| abc_lisper wrote:
| Each stone weighed 25 tons.
| Suppafly wrote:
| I'm not sure why people think it's impossible just
| because they were large and heavy, we see all sorts of
| other prehistoric things requiring similar effort and
| modern scientists have replicated the steps necessary.
| You can move a lot of weight if you have thousands of
| people involved doing the work.
| foobarian wrote:
| That reminds me of the various tug-of-war contests around
| the world where the contestants manage to snap impossibly
| thick ropes. E.g.
|
| > The 1,600 participants exerted over 180,000 pounds of
| force on a 2-inch thick nylon rope designed to withstand
| only 57,000 pounds. Amidst cheers, the rope violently
| snapped; the sheer rebounding force tore off the left arm
| of the first man on each side. [1]
|
| https://priceonomics.com/a-history-of-tug-of-war-
| fatalities/
| abc_lisper wrote:
| Idk, because people are unbelievably not bright. Like
| humans have hardly evolved in last 200k years, yet, we
| have made most of the time we had only in the last 500
| years. Wheel was "only" invented 6000 years ago. We are
| only slightly above natural selection in selecting what
| works. Newton was the first guy to use averages in
| experimental results - and look at all the brilliant
| people before him! Socrates, and I am fan, thought
| writing things down makes people lazy, democracy is a
| stupid etc - he is arguably one of our finest, and had
| awesome arguments to back his assertions, yet, he didn't
| know what works. People only learn through practice,
| mistakes and improvement. The rest is bogus 99.9% of
| time. This is why I think we are only slightly above
| natural selection.
| bell-cot wrote:
| So? With (for instance) this simple & ancient technology
| -
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slipway#Slipways_in_ship_co
| nst...
|
| - people can routinely construct ships weighing ~1000X
| the weight that any one worker (or crane) could lift.
| jedberg wrote:
| > Each stone weighed 25 tons.
|
| There was a guy who rebuilt a section of Stonehenge using
| only techniques that could have been used thousands of
| years ago, and explained how it was possible to build it.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K7q20VzwVs
| abc_lisper wrote:
| To be clear, it wasn't Anglo saxons nor the Celts nor the
| steppe invaders before them who built the Stonehenge,
| though some of their DNA survives in the current
| population. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-
| environment-47938188
| loufe wrote:
| I'd argue parent's comment was clearly sarcastic.
| jedberg wrote:
| > which was built in England yet no one can explain how
| Brits did it
|
| There was a guy who rebuilt a section of Stonehenge using
| only techniques that could have been used thousands of
| years ago, and explained how it was possible to build it.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K7q20VzwVs
| guerby wrote:
| Thanks! Made my day :)
| alephnerd wrote:
| I recommmend watching similar videos about the monoliths
| in Easter Island.
|
| Human Innovation is amazing. If only we can channel that
| into renewables constructively (don't give me Big Oil
| bullshit. I told enough of them my mind and my peers did
| to which is why we have a renewables boom now)
| autokad wrote:
| No.
|
| part of it is that its hard for many to believe that
| civilization can regress for very long periods of time.
| They were the tallest man-made structures for 3800 years.
| The engineering and quality of construction was mostly
| unmatched throughout that duration.
|
| Another issue is that 'scientists' refused to acknowledge
| that Egypt and most of Northern Africa was lush and green
| for some time. The people claimed the gods pulled the sun
| accross the sky and changed the climate. 'scientits' were
| like "wow you are so stupid, it doesnt work like that, it
| was never green and you killed what ever green there was by
| over farming". Turns out, it was a change in Earths tilt.
|
| going along with that theme, we tend to ignore what we are
| told. The egyptians left depictions of how they did it, by
| rolling the blocks on large logs and throwing water in
| front of them, and they left notebooks describing how they
| sourced the blocks and shiped them down the nile on the
| river. turns out, after 4000 years, we still don't read the
| f'ing documentation.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Read about the person who created the hypothesis GP
| mentioned (Schwaller de Lubicz).
|
| I'm not disputing the climate change part, I'm disputing
| the Atlantis part
| mcphage wrote:
| > The engineering and quality of construction was mostly
| unmatched throughout that duration.
|
| That's definitely not true. They didn't build pyramids of
| that size after the Old Kingdom, but they definitely had
| impressive engineering and crafts. The largest computer
| ever built was finished in 1963--why don't we build
| computers that large anymore? Because "largest computer"
| isn't a useful metric.
| autokad wrote:
| The grandeur of the Great Pyramids is widely acknowledged
| as the pinnacle of pyramid construction (pun intended).
| Despite their impressiveness, other pyramids fell short
| in comparison (also pun intended).
|
| Your argument suffers from flawed logic by attempting to
| directly equate the construction of a physical structure
| with that of a computer. Moreover, the greatness of the
| Great Pyramids of Giza cannot be solely attributed to
| their size; they possess other notable aspects as well.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| "People" didn't lost the ability to build giant
| megalithic structures and indeed pyramid construction
| flourished in the Americas until about 600 years ago. The
| Egyptians stopped building pyramids because it took
| decades, was insanely expensive, and gave grave robbers
| an obvious target. From an engineering perspective,
| ancient people built more complicated things than the
| pyramids, just not as tall. Why should height be the sole
| measure of engineering prowess? Consider the coffered
| dome of the Roman Pantheon.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| For what it's worth, it's the height _and volume_ of the
| pyramids that impresses me. A skinny skyscraper twice as
| tall but 1 /64th the surface area
|
| Obviously we could build bigger if we wanted. I literally
| work in one of the biggest buildings in the US by volume
| and it is impressive on a daily basis. But just because I
| know we are capable of more doesn't mean the
| accomplishment of actually doing the world and
| constructing the pyramids isn't amazing. Besides the
| pantheon, what other ancient or modern projects measure
| up?
| genman wrote:
| Egyptians were not Arabs.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Ancient Egyptians BECAME Romans then BECAME Byzantines
| then BECAME Arabs.
|
| Just like Byzantines BECAME Arabs and Turks.
|
| Arab is a linguistic designation, not a racial
| designation.
| pirate787 wrote:
| They became Greeks before that. The Ptolemaic pharaohs
| were Macedonians. Alexandria, Egypt, the second greatest
| city, was founded by Alexander the Great and was 35%
| Jewish.
| sethrin wrote:
| I mean yes, the ruling class was Macedonian for a while,
| but saying "Egyptians became Greeks" is broadly not true.
| kbolino wrote:
| None of these conversions were absolute. Moreover, you
| missed a rather important one: the Hellenic/Greek era of
| the Ptolemaic dynasty, from which we get the still-spoken
| Coptic language, which was formed from a mix of Ancient
| Greek and the indigenous Demotic Egyptian language.
|
| Language is not race, but it is strongly intertwined with
| ethnicity and culture in most parts of the world.
| alephnerd wrote:
| I pointed out Roman for that reason, as middle-late Roman
| culture itself was largely derived and built on top of
| Hellenic influence. Just look at how different Etruscan
| and early Roman civilization was compared to Rome after
| the Macedonian and Achaean wars
| kbolino wrote:
| The Greeks had a lot of influence over the Romans, and
| the Romans even conquered Greece, but Hellenic Egypt was
| not the same thing as Roman Egypt. The rather tumultuous
| transition alone is one of the most famous historical
| events, though most people know the names (Cleopatra,
| Antony, Caesar) more than the context.
| genman wrote:
| "became" - a nice euphemism for concurring and genocide,
| especially about Byzantine - like they had any choice.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| This is what gets me about the 'Islamic Golden Age' that
| 'saved' Greek history, while Europe was backwards and
| didn't. Like, how many Greek cities, with historic Greek
| libraries, were in backwards Germany and Great Britain
| were destroyed? Now how many Greek people, who spoke and
| read Greek, and had access to historic Greek libraries,
| were 'saved' by the Islamic invaders versus how many
| Islamic libraries, created solely by Islamic invaders,
| were created from texts possessed by Islamic invaders and
| not texts from lands that they conquered? Seems more like
| a 'Middle Eastern Golden Age' of the indigenous people
| would be a better name than to label it after the regions
| conquerors.
| Amezarak wrote:
| Yes, this is true to a large extent; the "golden age"
| thinkers are very often Persians, Greeks, Berbers, etc.
| returning to the status quo before the disaster of the
| conquests. There aren't all that many Arab figures
| represented in the Golden Age, for whatever reason -
| maybe something to do with the culture around
| conquest...?
| alephnerd wrote:
| > Seems more like a 'Middle Eastern Golden Age' of the
| indigenous people would be a better name than to label it
| after the regions conquerors
|
| That's all of history in a nutshell. Ever heard about the
| Siege of Syracuse and the Achaean Wars?
|
| "Islamic" Golden Age didn't mean "Arab" the ethnicity -
| which only became a formal identity in the 19th century.
| While Arabic was used as the lingua franca, the ethnic
| origins of the various thinkers were well known in their
| names (eg. Al-Khwarizmi the creator of Algebra from
| Khwarazm/Khorasan, Al-Biruni the sociologist from
| Beruniy/Berunii in what's now Uzbekistan, etc). The main
| thing was all these thinkers were Muslim.
|
| History is brutal and dark, and while we should look at
| it to remember our pasts, we should not idealize it.
| Amezarak wrote:
| If by "formal identity" you mean that Arab nationalism
| didn't exist until the late 1800s/early 1900s, no
| quibbling from me, but the Arabs certainly understood
| themselves, and the outside world understood them, as an
| ethnic group for thousands of years prior. This is the
| same as saying Germans didn't exist as a formal identity
| prior to the 19th century; it's true in a certain sense
| but it's important to be clear.
|
| I think GP is complaining the credit seems a little
| weird; the religious conversion happened due to violent
| conquest, not peaceful proselytizing. The name implies to
| him the religion deserves credit when the conquests a few
| centuries prior really brought the region into a dark age
| out of which the "golden age" was merely a moderate
| recovery. It's certainly true that large areas of the
| MENA never again regained their wealth and fame again,
| and some ancient centers of learning were permanently
| deserted at this time.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > If by "formal identity" you mean that Arab nationalism
| didn't exist until the late 1800s/early 1900s, no
| quibbling
|
| That's what I'm saying.
|
| If UAE special services (some of whom are Baloch) are on
| here, yk. I got into a fist fight with an ethnic Baloch
| al-Nahyan bouncer a couple years ago in Novella (Iykyk)
|
| But Islam was the first form of psudeo-globalism in the
| 8th century (along with the Tang Empire).
|
| I agree with you that it was is Ajams that powered the
| "Islamic Golden Age" but that detracts from the fact that
| before the 19th century, Identity was inherently
| ephemeral.
|
| But that does NOT mean Islam is inherently Arab. Say that
| shit and you will get a bullet in your jet in most areas
|
| > I think GP is complaining the credit seems a little
| weird; the religious conversion happened due to violent
| conquest, not peaceful proselytizing
|
| No argument there, but based on GP's history, it's just
| racism morphed as Islamophobia.
|
| History was bad, and for some ethnic groups, "Muslims"
| were bad. No argument there from a Pahari/Koshur Hindu (I
| have Hindu/Sikh that died in the 1990s and 1947, but also
| protected Muslims in both decades - shit's tough)
|
| But that's a statement for all fundamentalists. Doesn't
| matter what diety your rever - it's the -ism aspect that
| makes you a fundamentalist
| Amezarak wrote:
| Arabic and Coptic Egyptians are genetically
| distinguishable.
| adastra22 wrote:
| In the specific case of the Great Sphinx, there is evidence
| that it was an existing structure repurposed by Khafre and
| may have predated the rest of the Giza complex by thousands
| of years.
|
| Atlantis and 11.5ky is crazy talk though.
| kuprel wrote:
| What if they're even older than 11.5ky? Neanderthals had
| larger brains and have been around for half a million years
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Well that'd be quite unexpected and surprising, I'd say!
| spookie wrote:
| Larger brains don't mean a whole lot. Look at crows. If
| you do question they do have relatively big brains for
| their size... That's completely fair. Still, current
| research still hasn't proven if it's indeed causal, and
| not just correlated.
| schmidt_fifty wrote:
| > what is with the obsession that ancient egyptians were
| incapable of building these monuments?
|
| It's part of the broader new age movement. It coincided with
| the rise of commodification of the identity, individualism of
| the 80s and 90s, and the self-care movement. People express
| beliefs in a higher power as a way of dealing with many
| things, and many new age people look either to the stars or
| into "other dimensions" (whatever that means) for these
| higher powers.
|
| I'd also like to point out that although you _could_ view
| this as being cynical about the capacity of humanity, you
| _could_ also view this as hope that someone will save us from
| ourselves. You can also see this in political belief with eg
| posadism (where dolphins /aliens elevate us after we destroy
| ourselves with nuclear warfare and recuperate by turning to
| communism, which to be fair is also basically the plot of
| star trek) or the belief that a free market expresses
| superhuman collective rationalism that will save us from
| individual failings.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Appreciate the comment. Are you a real person?
| schmidt_fifty wrote:
| Yes, of course. What kind of comment is this?
|
| EDIT: to be clear, I think the idea of alien involvement
| in pyramids is ridiculous. I'm just answering the
| question.
| ithkuil wrote:
| > what kind of comment is this?
|
| It's part of a broader new new age movement. The race to
| the bottom in the quality of online comments made any
| informative content immediately suspect of being produced
| by LLMs which got trained on the few trillion high
| quality tokens that are encoding all human knowledge.
| robocat wrote:
| > few trillion high quality tokens
|
| Where are these high quality tokens you speak of? In the
| dark net?
|
| Maybe my input filters are set incorrectly but I don't
| see too many myself. And I'm fairly sure most of the
| tokens I write are not up to training qwuality.
| CTDOCodebases wrote:
| People have been doing this for millennia. It's called
| religion.
|
| When people don't understand something they attribute it to
| a higher power.[0]
|
| [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps
| akira2501 wrote:
| The lack of tools and historical documents that explain the
| feat. It is hard to believe that thousands of people made
| these monuments simply by using "pounding stones" to extract
| them from quarries.
|
| Many construction theories otherwise paint a picture of a
| labor environment that's almost impossible to imagine.
| sjtgraham wrote:
| They're in Egypt, the builders would have been "Ancient
| Egyptians" regardless of whether that means dynastic Ancient
| Egyptians or a pre-dynastic "lost civilization". That being
| said there are a lot of interesting unanswered questions,
| e.g. why are pyramids newer than the Giza complex less-
| sophisticated? The fact that we don't know how they are built
| tells you all of these are still questions completely
| unanswered by archeology.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Were there less laborers available after the Giza pyramids?
| Of course s/laborers/slaves/ would be implied. If the labor
| force was smaller later, would that contribute to less-
| sophisticated?
| mkl wrote:
| > Of course s/laborers/slaves/ would be implied.
|
| Not if you want to be accurate:
| https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/were-the-egyptian-
| pyram..., https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-
| earth/who-built-the-...,
| https://www.worldatlas.com/ancient-world/were-slaves-
| used-to...
| 6SixTy wrote:
| Classical racism. Ever wonder why Indiana Jones fought N@zis
| in the first 3 movies?
| gnatman wrote:
| Indiana Jones & Short Round fought the Thuggee cult in the
| 2nd movie.
| goodluckchuck wrote:
| The particular reference to Egyptians is a red herring, since
| nobody else built pyramids of this sort (that survive and are
| known). I expect that if they were located in China or Europe
| (and no where else), people would equally wonder how the
| Chinese or Europeans could have been so unique as to build
| something of the sort.
| zepolen wrote:
| Because all the evidence points to ancient civilizations
| building these monuments that the ancient egyptians
| repurposed.
| primer42 wrote:
| > Egyptologists, geologists and others have rejected the water
| erosion hypothesis and the idea of an older Sphinx, pointing to
| archaeological, climatological and geological evidence to the
| contrary.
| lodovic wrote:
| That was debunked, the same erosion was found in the rock at
| the quarry site where the stones for the Sphinx were originally
| taken from.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Also, Schwaller de Lubicz was very loco and racist (very
| antisemitic and was close with a number of the earlier
| ideologues of the Thule movement)
| taejavu wrote:
| How did the erosion happen? At what time period was that much
| water there?
| robbiep wrote:
| You know sand and wind erode as well, right?
| beeandapenguin wrote:
| The Sphinx wasn't built with stone from a quarry, it was
| carved from the bedrock. It has since been restored a number
| of times, one of which added layers of limestone block which
| is easily distinguishable from the original shape.
| baq wrote:
| and the pyramids too, for that matter - nobody stole the white
| limestone covering, it just melted away.
|
| it has some implications on when exactly these things were
| really built if it would be true. the height of the water which
| did that would be quite preposterous, too.
| UberFly wrote:
| The pyramids were treated as a quarry over the millennia.
| Much of the outer casing and more was used to build medieval
| Cairo.
| masklinn wrote:
| A sadly common fate for big stone buildings nearby any
| settlements. Lots of towers and castles in europe also
| ended up like that after their maintenance stopped.
| smm11 wrote:
| I thought they were built by the golf course.
| duxup wrote:
| I wonder would the proposed harbor locations have left any
| structure to indicate that they were in fact harbor temples
| rather than just temples?
|
| I also wonder how much the river moves within that flood plain. I
| lived in a flood plain at one point and the river even season to
| season seemed to "move" a noticeable amount.
| bluGill wrote:
| I would expect that harbors were mostly made of wood. Stone is
| too heavy and would sink into the bottom, and they didn't have
| access to enough metals to think about bronze (much less iron).
| Wood of course rots - while the climate in Egypt is the most
| conductive to wood not rotting, if it was a harbor structure
| I'd expect (read I'm not sure here!) that the area remained as
| a swamp for a while thus rotting away anything left behind
| before to fully dried up.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| The oldest surviving dugout canoe found could be as old as
| 10k years old. Certainly a number of ancient Egyptian boats
| have been found and dated to around the time of the pyramids.
| So dock piles could possibly have survived.
|
| Of course there were no doubt a large number of boats and
| only a small number of temple docks.
| JoBrad wrote:
| I think it's likely that they would have been dug up and
| reused, given the relative scarcity of wood.
| beeandapenguin wrote:
| At Wadi al-Jarf[1], one of the oldest harbors in the world
| (~2600 BCE), they discovered numerous stone anchors, a stone
| jetty, and storage galleries carved into limestone that
| contained several boats, sail fragments, oars, and rope. They
| also found jars that have been discovered at another site
| across the Red Sea, indicating they may have been used for
| trade.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wadi_al-Jarf
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| It makes a lot of sense because obviously having a river there
| makes the transport of materials a lot easier, but i do wonder
| how nobody noticed this before.
| duxup wrote:
| Well the pyramids in question are right next to a flood plain
| so I don't think this idea is out of the blue entirely.
| nwhnwh wrote:
| I am an Egyptian, I read about this years ago. But maybe they
| didn't have a solid proof back then.
| underlipton wrote:
| IIRC it's been well-known for a while how they moved the vast
| majority of materials by land (similar to how the Stonehenge
| megaliths were moved, highly _dis_ similar to how the Rapa Nui
| moai were).
| solardev wrote:
| How? Last I heard, it seemed either "rolling logs" or
| "powerful aliens" were equally plausible...
| danking00 wrote:
| There's also a lighter weight Nature News article about it
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01449-y
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! I've changed the URL above to that from
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01379-7 (the paper).
| Those who are interested can read both, of course.
| imjonse wrote:
| Is there new evidence for this? It has been the main hypothesis
| for why the pyramids are far from the river, I thought it was
| generally accepted.
| Simon_ORourke wrote:
| There's been plenty of discussion about cutting a canal to
| deliver blocks to the build site, but this makes more sense.
| jorts wrote:
| I thought it was well-known. If memory serves correctly on my
| visit to the Sphinx the guide talked about where the water came
| to just adjacent to it.
| shellfishgene wrote:
| As the paper was just published I'd assume it contains lots of
| new evidence?
| kuprel wrote:
| So maybe the pyramids are older than we thought?
| ck2 wrote:
| The "fact" about the pyramids I simply cannot believe is the
| insistence of many historians that slaves weren't used
|
| If true now THAT is amazing, personally I think the people in
| power in ancient Egypt simply rewrote their records.
|
| Virtually no other ancient culture and its world-level marvels
| can make that claim
|
| Great-Wall-of-China they basically used to throw slaves into the
| filler after they became too old or injured, people today are
| basically walking and taking photos on top of a mass-grave of
| horrors
| duxup wrote:
| Why would it seem that slaves would have had to be used?
| bombcar wrote:
| People who are paid to do work they don't want to do don't
| believe in the existence of people who would do work they
| don't want to do for money.
|
| (In reality the distinction between slave and employee is
| blurred over thousands of years and it's hard to use our
| words to talk about their setups. It's likely that both slave
| and non-slave labor (taking slave to be unpaid coerced labor)
| was used; just as our society uses both, either openly or
| discretely.)
| duxup wrote:
| I also would assume that the state and/or religion aspect
| may have resulted in citizens (skilled and otherwise)
| willing to volunteer as well.
|
| The local church down the road from me can bring out a TON
| of people to work for free for various activities, and
| they're upset if they miss out.
|
| It doesn't seem unimaginable that non slave locals in Egypt
| would be similarly motivated and even enthusiastic about
| working / being a part of it all.
| masklinn wrote:
| I would also assume that good pay is a strong incentive,
| and public works have been used time and again as a form
| of welfare.
| duxup wrote:
| I can imagine a "3 squares a day" meal offering could
| possibly be a big draw.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Maybe for a slave.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > just as our society uses both, either openly or
| discretely.
|
| "Prisoners with jobs" are becoming something more people
| know exist, as opposed to a niche dirty secret, which I
| think is probably a positive sign of reform rather than an
| indication of deeper normalization.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZHENHICSoE
| Xirgil wrote:
| I thought the consensus was that corvee labor was used,
| rather than outright slavery.
| adastra22 wrote:
| They were paid in grain and beer.
| Xirgil wrote:
| Enough just to feed them, or enough to actually be
| considered payment?
| earthboundkid wrote:
| The medieval cathedrals of Europe are known to have been
| built without slave labor because slavery wasn't practiced
| in Europe at that time, but they were built by serfs, which
| is not totally dissimilar. It's hard to describe past labor
| relationships with modern language since they had very
| different societies.
| duxup wrote:
| Agreed, and we really don't know / have any good
| information on how the locals felt about things then.
|
| I imagine being common citizen back then is terrible, if
| only relative to my experience, but on the other hand
| they may have been enthusiastic to contention to an
| important religious activity. Really hard to know their
| circumstances / point of view.
| ck2 wrote:
| In the modern world we have Qatar and other middle-eastern
| countries that trick migrants into coming in to work on
| their massive projects in the insane heat, seize their
| passports and basically have them "work or die".
|
| They are paid but aren't they technically slaves at that
| point if they cannot quit?
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/25/revealed-
| qatar...
|
| What if pyramid workers were like that? Came and started to
| work, realized the insanity of it all and wanted to quit
| but if they did they would be killed, starved or
| blacklisted?
| sethrin wrote:
| "Slave" cannot mean unpaid coerced laborer, especially
| since the society in question predated currency. In point
| of fact, there isn't a single set of conditions that
| uniquely define slavery, and historical labor relations
| were different to the point where using the term "slave"
| broadly is useless, especially across large differences in
| culture and time. I don't think the question of whether the
| Egyptians used slave labor is meaningful.
| wudangmonk wrote:
| They must have had great foresight to know that 4,500 years
| later using slave labor would become historically inconvenient.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| My understanding is that the claim is slaves weren't used for
| the pyramids, not that Egypt didn't have slaves.
|
| I can think of many reasons slaves wouldn't be used for the
| pyramids even if they existed. Politics, availability, even
| worse jobs to be done, etc.
| isk517 wrote:
| I can believe it. Wasn't ancient Egypt ridiculously fertile for
| growing grain due to the yearly Nile flooding. An abundance of
| food would mean excess labour to work on other projects.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| An abundance of food means an abundance of offspring until
| there is no abundance of food. You have to make people serfs
| for them to spend their time with anything but increasing
| their family size and thereby increasing their power and
| influence. So maybe they weren't slaves, but for sure they
| were serfs.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Any citation for this? In the modern world, food security
| means a lower birthrate.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Look at all of world history for a start.
|
| In the modern world, the population is put through 9 or
| more years of indoctrination during formative years to
| conform to a different system. Before then it was have as
| many children as you can, because when they become adults
| they can have no stronger allies than their brothers.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| "A farewell to Alms"
|
| This book explains it extremely well and backs it up with
| data in excruciating detail (which you can read or skip
| if you're convinced early on).
|
| People think that Malthus predicted exponential
| population growth, but his actual observation was exactly
| what the above comment described. Growth in productivity
| would lead to growth in population until wealth per
| capita reached the same point it was at before. No
| improvement in productivity would ever actually improve
| the human condition, just increase its size. Malthus was
| absolutely right at the time he made this observation of
| his so called "Malthusian trap".
|
| The observation you make about the modern world and lower
| birth rates started very abruptly not long after Malthus
| published his findings. The industrial revolution
| literally invalidated what had been true for all of human
| civilization up to that point.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| That's also with modern medicine. Back in the day you had
| to have lots of kids because nearly all of them died and
| you needed someone to work the farm and care for you in
| old age. In modern society, they're viewed more as an
| expense.
| masklinn wrote:
| Egypt was "ridiculously fertile" _but_ it also had a very
| short but intense growing season, and it was also completely
| dependent on the _quality_ of the floods, not enough flooding
| and the fields would not hydrate, and you 'd get a famine,
| too much flooding and it'd overrun the levees and destroy
| villages.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Chattel slavery was sort of the extreme historical endpoint of
| a spectrum of forced labor and is maybe not a good model for
| discussion.
|
| Is it slavery if the pharaoh demands each family provide 1 male
| for labor each year? Or each person has to spend a month on the
| pyramid. Or there's a famine and the only way for your family
| to get grain is to work on the pyramid?
|
| Doesn't really feel like an interesting point to fixate on tbh.
| There was undoubtedly a huge amount of coercion since Egypt
| funneled a ton of resources into a useless project, and the
| pharaoh had to pay for it somehow. Whether it was heavy
| taxation that forced people into labor or starve, or explicit
| forced labor, eh.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Corvee labor systems are unbelievable to you? Especially in an
| environment where (because of the annual Nile floods) the
| homelands of people are uninhabitable for a few months each
| year?
|
| > Virtually no other ancient culture and its world-level
| marvels can make that claim
|
| That is a bold claim. My recollection of lots of historical
| instances of slavery is that slaves tended to be used in jobs
| that no one wanted to do, such as mining. Monumental buildings
| tend to involve a lot of skilled artisanal crafts--stonemasons
| are not something you'd be likely to trust to slave labor.
| There are also monuments that are constructed by cultures not
| known to have practiced slavery, such as Stonehenge or Norte
| Chico.
| bluGill wrote:
| The stonemasons would not have been slaves (or if they were
| they were highly trusted servants who were too valuable to
| mistreat and thus may have been technically slaved by some
| definition but could do anything a free person could do).
| However there is a lot of brute labor that a slave could do.
|
| Slaves were used for all sorts of things in history, with
| different areas having different uses. However the most
| common use would have been farming as 95% of the economy was
| farming.
|
| I do not know if the people who built the pyramids were
| slaves or not. I can see how different people would define
| slave differently and as a result get a different answer.
| However it seems highly likely slaves would be been known and
| used for many things in that area/time.
| jcranmer wrote:
| That's fair enough--in any slave society, there's a decent
| chance that any sufficiently large body of unskilled labor
| contains slavery simply because some non-negligible
| fraction of the labor force is slave.
|
| That said, I interpret a statement like "the pyramids were
| built with slaves" to refer to an idea that the vast
| majority of the workforce were slaves, as for example was
| the case for agricultural workers in the antebellum US
| south (although apparently it was roughly 6 free workers :
| 7 slave workers specifically in agriculture in the region,
| a somewhat lower ratio than I would have expected--I guess
| I'm undercounting the existence of non-slave agricultural
| lands.)
| akira2501 wrote:
| How many skilled artisan stonemasons were available at the
| time? If the market for their craft was that large why do
| there seem to be so few of their projects left behind?
| jcranmer wrote:
| > If the market for their craft was that large why do there
| seem to be so few of their projects left behind?
|
| Stone for building is comparatively rare, so buildings that
| are dilapidated tend to see their stonework reused for new
| buildings. If we're talking about 4000 year-old
| architecture that has gone through several eras of state
| collapse and rebuilding, then you'd expect to see lots of
| reuse.
|
| Note for example that the pyramids--even the great pyramids
| at Giza--are pretty thoroughly denuded of their outer
| casing blocks, and there are a few lesser pyramids whose
| outer structure have been entirely carted away.
| cco wrote:
| You might find documents like this interesting:
| https://mymodernmet.com/ancient-egyptians-attendance-record/
|
| But I think others here have pointed out the larger issue at
| hand, "slavery" isn't a monolith. The spectrum of forced labor
| is pretty wide and to our modern colloquial use of the word,
| the builders of the pyramids weren't "slaves" in the same way
| that those who built the Great Wall or worked in Rome's silver
| mines were.
| atombender wrote:
| We have evidence in the form of writing, e.g. accounting books
| and the journals of Merer [1], who describes the supervision of
| the construction and of the workers. The logbooks describe
| worker strikes (they complain about not being given enough
| beer) and how they're divided into teams of skilled laborers
| that compete against each other. These logbooks coincidentally
| describe canals used to bring supplies close to the pyramids.
|
| [1] https://www.history.com/news/egypts-oldest-papyri-detail-
| gre...
| bluish29 wrote:
| While it makes sense that it would make it easier to transport
| materials via the river. It does not make sense in context of
| pyramids purpose were tombs where they should be away from places
| where people usually live. Specially that even at this point of
| history, looting tombs was a common occurring problem.
|
| So with these mega projects, you would think that moving them
| away would make sense although making it much harder. Easier to
| think that they made a canal to deliver fresh water for the
| project from the nearest location of the nile which is a couple
| of Kilometers aways (~ 8 km).
| willvarfar wrote:
| They are hard for tomb robbers to miss?
|
| They were made to be seen; would they not be within sight of
| the subjects who worshipped the Pharaohs as gods?
| duxup wrote:
| I believe many of the pyramid sites had temples and areas that
| were designed for human activities / ceremonies.
| jwueller wrote:
| If anyone is curious, here is an _amazing_ and scientific YouTube
| channel mostly focused on the pyramids:
| https://youtube.com/@historyforgranite
| pests wrote:
| Seconded, I've tried posting videos here before. His
| explanation of the great pyramid being a public/private
| devotion place, not a secret grave, makes the most sense to me.
| It would be like Lenin's Mausoleum. Everyone knows where its
| at, who is there, and you can go see him and leave offerings.
|
| Previous tombs were robbed and looted because the king was
| buried and forgotten and no one cared anymore. Probably helped
| their followers maintain power after their death too.
|
| (purposefully not using any names, I am skeptical on the
| official story of who built what for who)
| nwhnwh wrote:
| If you want something that is more mysterious than the
| pyramids, google "Serapeum of Saqqara"
| skilled wrote:
| Is it at all possible they were built with advanced physics we
| know nothing about? What about spiritual technology?
|
| Buddhists and Hindus talk about "miracles" often, so why couldn't
| the Pyramids be one of those miracles?
|
| It really renders the discussion meaningless when you are trying
| to justify the impossible with wild theories and whatnot.
|
| No machine today can do what they did all that time ago and yet
| we still talk about it like there is a practical and logical
| answer to it.
| Suppafly wrote:
| you forgot the /s unless you really are a wackjob.
| skilled wrote:
| So there is a logical explanation as to how the pyramids were
| built?
| buildbot wrote:
| Slave labor and ramps.
|
| Just kidding, you and I both know that they are landing
| pads for Goa'uld starships so they probably used their
| tech. (Plus slaves).
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Just because we don't know whatever low tech methods were
| used doesn't make it magic. There's a video of a guy moving
| multiple ton bricks in his backyard easily using some rods
| to act as a conveyor built. It's not something we tend to
| think about anymore as we have much better options now.
| Given a little time though and people will figure out low
| tech solutions.
|
| Look up "wallywallington" on YouTube and see how trivial
| moving incredibly heavy things can be with simple leverage.
| pests wrote:
| > No machine today can do what they did all that time ago
|
| They definitely can, just no one wants to pay for it. We can
| build massive buildings, huge bridges, bore through mountains,
| dam hundreds of millions of liters of water. We can stack some
| heavy rocks on top of each other.
| skilled wrote:
| I can't recall the exact article right now, but I was under
| the impression that we can't. Maybe it was an old one.
|
| On top of that, it's my understanding that Giza pyramids were
| built with special cosmic alignment also.
|
| Again, I am only throwing "outlandish" ideas in the bucket.
| It's a worthwhile discussion to have in my opinion. There are
| plenty of stories out there about certain places in the world
| being "consecrated", so why not the pyramids?
| lesuorac wrote:
| Pyramids aren't even unique; plenty of civilizations [2]
| figured it out.
|
| The Giza Pyramids are aligned to the cardinal directions
| [1] which is something that is done(ish) fairly often
| nowendays. Muslims often have their houses point towards
| Mecca [3] which requires you to build a house at a specific
| cardinal direction after determining it.
|
| You're going to have to provide the special cosmic
| alignment, Wikipedia mentions Orion [4] as a theory and
| certainly we can build buildings today 3 in a diagonal
| line. We can definitely measure the location of the stars
| in Orion's constellation now better than before. But also
| keep in mind there are a gazillion stars in the galaxy, any
| 3 buildings are going to match up with some subset of them.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giza_pyramid_complex#Ast
| ronomy
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_pyramids
|
| [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_architecture#Qib
| la_ori...
|
| [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_correlation_theory
| masklinn wrote:
| > I was under the impression that we can't.
|
| Pyramids are a pile of big rocks. They're pretty well
| fitted big rocks, but engineering and construction wise
| they've got nothing on a Burj Khalifa, or a Millau Viaduct
| (below which the Great Pyramid would fit handily), or a
| Three Gorges Dam.
|
| The Palace of the Parliament of Romania has a larger outer
| volume than the Great Pyramid, and is ~40% lighter, and is
| an actual building (so large it's mostly unused), and was
| built in just 13 years, by Romania, in the 80s.
|
| Hell, while the Memphis Pyramid and the Luxor Las Vegas are
| smaller than the Great Pyramid, they're mostly usable
| volume, not mostly rock.
|
| It's not that we _can 't_ build a pyramid, it's that if you
| have a few hundred mils lying around there are more useful
| and / or cooler things to build.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > We can build massive buildings, huge bridges, bore through
| mountains, dam hundreds of millions of liters of water. We
| can stack some heavy rocks on top of each other.
|
| We usually use machines powered by petroleum to do that. I've
| not seen human labor used for this work in my lifetime.
| Nashooo wrote:
| Because, why would you we when we _have_ those machines..
| What a weird argument. Just look at how we used to be build
| cathedrals until recently and how many labourers died.
| Heck, take a look at the construction of the World Cup
| Stadiums in Qatar...
| masklinn wrote:
| > We usually use machines powered by petroleum to do that.
|
| First, GP claimed it couldn't be done even with machines.
|
| Second... how's that relevant?
|
| > I've not seen human labor used for this work in my
| lifetime.
|
| First, what work, building pyramids? Because people have
| definitely built shit by hand in your lifetime, I can
| assure you.
|
| Second, why would we do things the slower, more expensive,
| and more dangerous way, if we don't have to? You don't get
| your nonsense delivered to your readers by runners, riders,
| or messenger pigeons, that doesn't mean they didn't exist.
|
| But if you want an example of human hard work in the modern
| era, look no further than Dashrath Manjhi. Dude hammered
| and chiseled his way through an entire ridge over more than
| 20 years.
| hackthemack wrote:
| I found another article that I found more lightweight and
| accessible. Has some pictures of the people involved.
|
| https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/egypt-pyr...
| cydonian_monk wrote:
| That article is paywalled and locked to National Geographic
| subscribers only. I'm not sure we have the same definition of
| accessible.
| woleium wrote:
| https://archive.is/sILbH
| marshallward wrote:
| > "The pyramids seem like pretty monumental work"
|
| You don't say...
| pavlov wrote:
| "Cutting-edge psychological research suggests that pharaohs may
| have suffered from megalomania"
| loceng wrote:
| "Breaking news - older civilizations than currently have been
| found may have had most evidence of their existence wiped out
| by major events"
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Megalomania is characterized by _delusion_.
| bqmjjx0kac wrote:
| I'm willing to entertain the idea that the god kings had
| some delusions
| nkrisc wrote:
| If they're indulged by society as a whole, are they
| delusions?
| krapp wrote:
| It's the "god" part of "god king" that was the delusion,
| and all of the wasted effort that went into ensuring the
| Pharoah's resurrection and immortality after death. And
| yes, it's a delusion regardless of how many people
| believe in it.
| abduhl wrote:
| >>all of the wasted effort that went into ensuring the
| Pharoah's resurrection and immortality after death.
|
| How do you know that it didn't work? What if it wasn't a
| waste?
| ethbr1 wrote:
| To some degree, the practice of state religion exists to
| ensure the stability of the state, especially in pre-mass
| communication times.
|
| To that, so what if the "god" part was a lie?
|
| A stable society built on an unfalsifiable lie is still a
| stable society.
| cchi_co wrote:
| Since childhood, I have been fascinated by Egyptian history. It's
| mesmerizing
| Ductapemaster wrote:
| Myself as well. I recently listened to an episode on Egyptian
| history from this podcast and really enjoyed it -- consider
| checking it out!
|
| https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| I thought they sorta kinda knew this already?
|
| One of the most batshit theories I've heard is it was actually a
| sort of water well on demand, the weight of the pyramid pushing
| down on an underground aquifer fed by a then-unknown branch of
| the Nile, forcing water up through a man-made well.
|
| I wonder if they started looking for the missing tributary
| because of this theory.
| tamimio wrote:
| Or maybe that branch was man-made, for one to help builders to
| transport the materials, and also to build the pyramid itself
| after controlling the water level there with some man-made dams.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Martians are well known for their proficiency building canals.
| [0]
|
| [0] History Channel
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