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.
> The biggest unknown with my model is whether there was a major western Nile channel at the time, as modern authorities are split on this question.
Seems like what we have now is the discovery of a natural branch, which doesn't mean they didn't dig out useful extensions too.
The Nature article calls this branch a "tributary of the nile", which is the opposite thing to a branch. The paper says distributary (a branch). The tributaries are way to the south in Sudan and Ethiopia and Kenya.
>They said also that the first man who became king of Egypt was Min; and that in his time all Egypt except the district of Thebes was a swamp, and none of the regions were then above water which now lie below the lake of Moiris, to which lake it is a voyage of seven days up the river from the sea: and I thought that they said well about the land;
Later on
>Such is this labyrinth: but a cause for marvel even greater than this is afforded by the lake, which is called the lake of Moiris, along the side of which this labyrinth is built. The measure of its circuit is three thousand six hundred furlongs (being sixty schoines), and this is the same number of furlongs as the extent of Egypt itself along the sea. The lake lies extended lengthwise from North to South, and in depth where it is deepest it is fifty fathoms. That this lake is artificial and formed by digging is self-evident, for about in the middle of the lake stand two pyramids, each rising above the water to a height of fifty fathoms, the part which is built below the water being of just the same height; and upon each is placed a colossal statue of stone sitting upon a chair. Thus the pyramids are a hundred fathoms high; and these hundred fathoms are equal to a furlong of six hundred feet, the fathom being measured as six feet or four cubits, the feet being four palms each, and the cubits six. The water in the lake does not come from the place where it is, for the country there is very deficient in water, but it has been brought thither from the Nile by a canal; and for six months the water flows into the lake, and for six months out into the Nile again; and whenever it flows out, then for the six months it brings into the royal treasury a talent of silver a day from the fish which are caught, and twenty pounds when the water comes in. The natives of the place moreover said that this lake had an outlet under ground to the Syrtis which is in Libya, turning towards the interior of the continent upon the Western side and running along by the mountain which is above Memphis.
That's higher than the Great Pyramid. Lake Moeris still exists and is not near Giza. The two pyramids are thought to be exaggerations of the Pedestals of Biahmu:
Today, King Min is more commonly known as Menes, an upper Egyptian King who ushered in 3000 years of dynastic Pharaonic history by conquering the Nile Delta and thus uniting for the first time all of Egypt. He was as ancient to Herodotus as Herodotus is to us today (2500 years each). It is humbling just how deep Egyptian history goes.
Fascinating, thanks for sharing! Makes me wonder if the great pyramid was partially submerged, and if so, by how much.
This account lends some credence to theories of the pyramids functioning as some sort of ram pump in my opinion. (Check out John Cadman’s work if you’re interested).
I looked that up, and boy was it an interesting read! For anybody who is interested in reading what John Chapman theorized about the pyramids, see here [0].
Makes a lot of sense. I did a small dive into watersheds and fluvial systems a long time ago and something that surprises layman is how quickly rivers can change in just a few decades, let alone thousands of years. Even (or perhaps especially
) large rivers love meandering and and carving new paths over time.
Humans think of rivers as static things and like to use rivers as natural "borders" and forget that these are actually organic and evolving systems.
I can't speak to "the literature" but people have been colloquially talking about the mysterious lack of a canal since at least the 90s. One of the reasons people floated was a no-longer-active branch of the nile.
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 dissimilar to how the Rapa Nui moai were).
No,the best theory is they cut the stones in a slightly underwater quarry. The limestone if submerged hasn't gained co2. They used a complex system similar to a canal. They used ballast like logs or airbags to float the cut rocks while keeping them uderwater. Even the top working row was a water filled mini canal. They would drop the stones into place. Once the water was removed the limestone would absorb co2 and swell, tightening the blocks together. This would have been some serious engineering.
> For this, they said, the ten years were spent, and for the
underground chambers on the hill upon which the pyramids stand, which he caused to be made as sepulchral chambers for himself in an island,
having conducted thither a channel from the Nile.
Sounds like the same story for the Osireion, according to Strabo.
Ancient megalithic Geopolymer masonry made with electrodes and [Lingam,] electricity is apparently lost to modern day as well.
FWIU, in the Great Pyramid, there were/are copper rods in the shafts out from the King's Chamber, and the conductive gold at the top of the pyramid was added after construction over top of a perhaps more ancient well shaft (that is not as geomagnetically-aligned) that may have been a hydraulic/hydrologic water tunnel given the water erosion in the subterranean chamber.
Fairly,
Demonstrate moving and then placing an 80 ton granite stone with ancient materials and tools: copper, gold, limestone, granite, probably fulgurite (sand glass due to lightning) and/or volcanic glass, obsidian, grain dust, papyrus rope, papyrus boats, barges, [variable buoyancy] crane machines, masonry forms and jigs, chemistry in jars, large sceptre tuning forks, sand, porous cliffs by the sea
What are the dates on the outer structure, and on the oldest largest object within the structure?
Gears: Antikythera (200 BC), Watchmaking c. 1300 AD
But the boat, and things that float due to ballast or no; how old is that?
Aliens of similar height, from the tunnel and stair heights and sarcophagi.
Such as the [presumed] Sarcophagus of Senusret II - which has a pyramid built around it with perhaps newer and less precise masonry methods - which one might've hoped had contained instructions on how to produce spec granite at those tolerances back then; [1]
There is little evidence of advanced mechanical masonry tools at the time, except for the remaining megalithic stonework that later cultures built upon.
FWIU there are only a few examples of circular polishing, and the core drilling method leaves different signatures than known methods in modern day.
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.
That's all well and good until a really bad drought or a plague blows through and people start to wonder if maybe, just maybe, the inbred jackass on the golden throne doesn't control the weather after all.
Except, the Egyptian society was quite stable for 3,000 years. Can you imagine the USA existing for 3,000 years? Will there ever be another human civilization that lasts as long as the ancient Egyptian civilization?
My understanding of Egyptian chronology is that Egypt was far from stable for 3000 years. In fact, Ancient Egypt is broken up into the Old, Middle, and New Kingdom periods, separated by "intermediate periods" of a few centuries. Even then, it's generally reckoned around 2500 years from the beginning of the Old Kingdom to the incorporation by the Persian Empire.
But, even during the intermediate periods, the invaders became the pharaohs and kept the old time religion going.
Imagine back when Europe was under the thumb of the Roman Catholic church, but then it went on pretty much the same for 3,000 years. There would be some hiccups along the way, but for the normal peasant, it would pretty much be the same old same old from millennium to millennium.
Isn't the Catholic church becoming the roman Catholic church or vice versa sort of the same thing? Even with the split into Protestant it's still essentially the same core and looking back 5000 years from now it would probably be reasonable to glue it all together as the Ancient Roman-Christian period / civilization.
Imagine today there is not all these different European governments, but just the Catholic church controlling all of the different governments, which are all really branches of the Catholic Church. Their kings are determined by the Catholic church. All of them are under the Pope. Their laws have to be approved by the Catholic Church. Everyone is Catholic. Catholic bishops are more powerful than any king. Etc. And that is the way it is and continues for 3,000 years.
Building a big thing because you think it would be neat is not really a waste. It's a big thing, everyone knows it's not strictly necessary, but whether it's for the glorification of your nation or your people or your God doesn't matter so much. If people don't have gods they build big monuments to other stuff.
If we all have the delision that you can fly with the power of your mind that is still a delusion. Because one can perform an experiment and see that you in fact can’t fly with the power of your mind.
But if we all believe that you are the eastern bunny, or the coolest dude on the planet, or the twice crowned poet laurate, those are social constructs. We believe you are the eastern bunny and that makes you the eastern bunny, and that’s no longer a delusion.
I think your hang up is that you have a set of expectations you think a “god” should fulfill, and clearly the pharao did not fulfill them. And that is an objective fact. But there is no reason to expect that the ancient Egyptians shared your expectations about what a god is.
> ensuring the Pharoah's resurrection and immortality after death
That does not sound correct. I don’t think they believed that the Pharao will walk again after he died. That is what the world “resurection” would imply. Their belief was that there is some form of afterlife where you need to perform certain rituals. The pyramids and the treasures were there to aid the pharao in peforming those rituals so he can obtain a better position in the afterlife.
> I don’t think they believed that the Pharao will walk again after he died.
Don't count on it. At times, they believed everybody would.
It's complicated because concepts varied over time, and people had maybe five or eight souls (alright, soul-aspects) and there were two or three thousand years over which this changed (sometimes for ideological reasons).
> one form of the ba that comes into existence after death is corporeal—eating, drinking and copulating.
> The idea of a purely immaterial existence was so foreign to Egyptian thought ...
> the ba of the deceased is depicted in the Book of the Dead returning to the mummy and participating in life outside the tomb in non-corporeal form ...
I was under the impression that the Greeks leaned into a practice that was already well-established as part of rulership in the region. At the very least it seems we have evidence that Tutankhamun's parents were brother-sister and he appears to have had some severe abnormalities as a result:
> The results of the DNA analyses show that Tutankhamun was, beyond doubt, the child born from a first-degree brother-sister relationship between Akhenaten and Akhenaten’s sister (see Fig. 3). ... Pharaoh Tutankhamun suffered from congenital equinovarus deformity (also called ‘clubfoot’). The tomography scans of Tutankhamun’s mummy also revealed that the Pharaoh had a bone necrosis for quite a long time, which might have caused a walking disability. This was supported by the objects found next to his mummy. Did you know that 130 sticks and staves were found in its tomb?
And then we have Cleopatra the last Ptolemy and she seems normal. Even the famous inbred Charles Habsburg have relatively normal sister. Nature really plays dice sometimes.
https://acoup.blog/2023/05/26/collections-on-the-reign-of-cl... gives a good overview of Cleopatra parents as we understand them. Note too different family trees - the official one which is so inbred as to believe it isn't possible her parents could survive; and the unofficial one that recognizes nobles often sleep around and so we have no clue.
"I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party."
We like to think everyone was dumb but I'm pretty sure if those dudes could build pyramids, a lot of them also knew the Pharaoh wasn't a God even if lots of people believed, same as today with religions or cult of personality leaders.
Then there's the crown family of the UK or GB or whatever the proper calling, which claims to believe the same divine touch. You may call them ancients if you want, but they still get to make headlines.
You are missing the point here, while you might see a similar concept “divine right of kings” the lived experience was a lot different from modern times vs anything BCE.
That there similar social mechanics might be more appropriate.
"Lived experience" usually means first hand knowledge and experience, as opposed to the knowledge or information they would gain from external sources.
So, understanding this meaning, I hope it's quite obvious that lived experience is much different for people today than ancient people. Our technology is far more advanced, more information is available to us. And it is all influenced by the vast amount of information that is external to us which puts our first hand experience in different contexts.
All experience is necessarily firsthand. The word experience describes things that come in through the senses. Lived experience means something, but only if you buy into 20th century phenomenology.
re: changes. Yes things have changed. The point of the discussion is some people have asserted without argument that those differences lead to a fundamentally different concept of gods. There is no real reason to believe that that I've seen, and yet people keep pointing out that things are different as if differences in the world necessarily implies different experiences.
The Pharaoh wasn't a god, it was a ruler. I think they had the sun and other elements as "God". Kinda makes sense to praise the sun as it makes their agriculture go.
The pharaos were indeed worshipped as literal gods. Echnaton famously negated them all except for the sun and himself as the incarnation, but after his death all was restored to the normal system of polytheistic theoraty. The sungod Ra was still important, but not the most important. It was a complicated system and very different from our modern thinking.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ancient Egypt was notoriously wood-poor. Stonemasonry was developed to a high art there (in both senses of the word) out of necessity.
Many Egyptian watercraft were made not of wood but of papyrus. Where wood was utilised, it was imported from elsewhere (Lebanon, famous for its cedars, and acacia, possibly domestic in origin).
Amongst Egyptian relics, wood stands out as a high-value material reflecting its scarcity and imported status.
Other possible shipbuilding materials, not likely to have been available or widely used, would include animal skins (as with Inuit kyaks), water-proofed cloth (unlikely, though cotton was abundant), metals (unlikely), and concrete (again, highly unlikely).
Papyrus has even poorer survival characteristics as a shipbuilding material than wood, though some relics are extant.
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.
Egypt's deserts are about the perfect climate for preserving wood. However the area near water is not desert and so not perfect. Boats would be moved, but the piers (such as they were in those days, I doubt we are talking a modern shipyard structure) would remain in the water, and in general when a river moves the area remains a swamp long enough for any wood to rot.
The type of wood used maters, some wood rots much faster than others. Boats would have been made from rot resistant wood since they are in the water. I wouldn't be surprised if they used any old wood for the piers since the water course and floods mean the piers need to be rebuilt every year anyway - but this is pure speculation.
The Mississippi used to change course every year, and was about double the current length - all while following essentially the same route. (until the US army got involved). How do you want to count that?
I've recently been looking into the natron theory, which I also like. Instead of chiselling out big granite blocks and moving them long distances, you use a bucket of powder and a lot of wood ash to chemically form rocks.
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.
> got to nuclear power and destroyed the planet resetting civilization
don't even know why they need to get that far. we already know the younger dryas was a time period of extreme climate swings and natural disasters with purely natural causes. a civilization existing before that time could have been advanced without needing to have achieved nuclear. plus its pretty trivial to prove that no prexisting civilization made it to the fossil fuel era. never-mind NUCLEAR age.
If that was true then we would still be living like in the 18th century. They would have pumped out all the easily accessible oil. It's not possible to access current oil fields with 19th century tech.
So yeah - if this civilization falls - the next one won't be able to have their own industrial revolution.
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.
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.
Why is New York Penn Station so ugly and drab compared to Grand Central even though it’s newer? Even the style of decoration is entirely different and much richer on the older and larger building.
Could it simply be a question of society’s priorities and resourcing? Nah. After all the Americans were a fairly primitive culture primarily known for hamburgers and baseball. Most likely Grand Central was built by aliens or an older Native American culture.
Indeed. For some reason this obvious conclusion doesn't satisfy the pyramid theorists, even though ancient Egypt's many periods of cultural decline and later resurgence are well documented.
the economic case is more compelling in this example. grand central is still largely the same structure that was built in 1910 at the peak of rail's dominance. penn station was demolished and rebuilt to sell air rights during a sharp decline of intercity rail ridership.
I guess demolishing an iconic building could itself be evidence for cultural decline, but stuff like TWA flight center was being built at the same time. the dollars followed the passengers.
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?
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.
I don’t think it’s very narrow to note that the Pyramid of the Sun was built with stones that a single man can carry on his own. It’s impressive at half the size of the largest Egyptian pyramids, but it doesn’t really raise the question of how. They just got a lot of people to carry a lot of stones, maybe using carts or something.
The Egyptian pyramids easily make one wonder “How did people move such large stones?” I could never move those with strength alone. Some form of technology / leverage / something was needed for the Egyptian pyramids which wasn’t needed for the American ones.
Some of the Pyramids were the largest structures in human history until the industrial age. They're definitely worthy of being considered their own category.
> 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.
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.
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.
Technically, that was the first movie in the timeline. Well, was. Timeline wise, the enemies go Nazis (212BC), Thuggee cultists (1935), Nazis (1936), Nazis (1939), Russians (1957), and Nazis (1969).
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.
"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.
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?
The pyramid of Cholula (larger by volume), the Luxor hotel (smaller, but substantially more useful), and Ryugyong hotel (hobbled by the country building it) are all plausibly comparable projects.
> 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.
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.
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"
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.
> 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.
> 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.
There's plenty of people saying that, they're not serious scholars but they're people. From aliens did it to a race of white people travelled the world and shared their technology before a cataclysmic flood.
> 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.
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)
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
> The ancestors of the people who built Stonehenge
> the Neolithic migrants to Britain appear to have introduced the tradition of building monuments using large stones known as megaliths.
I mean, OK, yes, but Stonehenge was built in multiple phases by different groups of people over centuries. These farming migrants with Eastern Mediterranean grandparents built phases I and II, which had small stones (the bluestones from Wales, initially placed as grave markers before being moved around a lot) and lots of wooden posts.
The impressive phase with the sarsens, the big stones people picture if you say "picture Stonehenge", is Stonehenge III, and that was built by Beaker People, the steppe invaders. Inspired from the culture of their predecessors, I guess, but maybe for completely different purposes, in so far as any of it had a purpose.
The sarsens were connected at the top with woodworking joints, BTW, as if there was a risk they might fall off without pegs to hold them in place. I've never been sure what to make of that, but my best guess is "tradition". (A previous guess was "everybody in prehistory was drunk".)
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.
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.
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]
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.
People in general aren't that bright, but we're essentially the same build now as they were back then, there is no reason to assume they didn't have any geniuses.
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.
> 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/Беруний 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.
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.
> 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
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...?
What are you talking about? Germany and Britain never had “Greek cities” or even experienced cultural Hellenization. Germany wasn’t even part of the Roman Empire.
During the Middle Ages, “Greek people, who spoke and read Greek”, still had an empire—actually, it was the Eastern Roman Empire, but without the Western half it had become increasingly Hellenized, with the emperor’s title changing from the Latin “Augustus” to the Greek “Basileus”. And they spent much of that time at war with the Islamic conquerors, only falling to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. I can assure you they did not greet the Turks as liberators or saviors.
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.
That’s an oversimplification. Migration and intermarriage means that modern Egyptians will have ancestors from all over North Africa and the Middle East, and to a lesser extent from Europe. They’re not all descended from ancient Egyptians.
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.
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
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.
This seems like a bizarre statement, or at the very least your thesis does not seem supported by your example. There is no particular reason to think that Roman civilization should be the same after the passage of 500 years since the supposed founding of Rome. Ascribing that in any significant sense to Hellenic influence seems ill-founded; there was a massive difference in fighting style, and hence military virtues, in societies where military virtues were all-important. Also, as far as I know (which is admittedly not a great deal), early Roman combat and armament was more similar to the hoplite armies than later periods. Perhaps you can allay my ignorance here.
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.
> 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.
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.
Different ways of erosion leave different kinds of traces.
The ones in the Sphinx enclosure are indicative of water (more specifically - rainfall) erosion.
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.
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.
> 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 Göbekli Tepe), begin to appear much older than convention teachings might imply.
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).
> 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."
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?
> the idea that nonhuman entities from other realms kickstarted human culture
I'm not attacking him I'm just posting some quotes. In addition to his ideas about lost prehistoric societies influencing ancient Egyptians, he in turn believes that those prehistoric societies were influenced by aliens. I don't think this is an attack and I don't think he would disagree with this summary of his beliefs.
I spent less than one minute googling, and came up with this [0] on my first try:
> I am quite clear, however, having spent more than quarter of a century walking the walk across many of the most intriguing ancient archaeological sites on earth, and digging into ancient texts and traditions from all around the world, that NO ancient archaeological site and NO ancient text or tradition that I have yet come across provides persuasive evidence for the “ancient astronaut hypothesis”.
> ... My own view is that all of the anomalies of history and prehistory pointed to by advocates of the ancient astronaut hypothesis are far better and more elegantly explained as emanating from a lost, advanced HUMAN civilization of prehistoric antiquity than from high-tech alien visitors from another planet.
So, you just made that up, even though he expressly says the opposite on his own website. Why would you do that?
I don't know what to tell you, there are direct quotes from his books in my first comment. Here's another one:
> Shamanism is not confined to specific socio-economic settings or stages of development. It is fundamentally the ability that all of us share, some with and some without the help of hallucinogens, to enter altered states of consciousness and to travel out of body in non-physical realms - there to encounter supernatural entities and gain useful knowledge and healing powers from them.
- Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind
I do think it's different than the "ancient astronauts" theory, but anything living that isn't from Earth is an alien, so entities from other realms clearly qualify.
Edit: Sorry, rereading the thread I see the misunderstanding, you are right that he doesn't think aliens were involved in building the pyramids specifically and I didn't mean to imply that. I'm just saying that he thinks aliens were involved in the general development of the human species.
> he thinks aliens were involved in the general development of the human species.
That's still a gross mischaracterization of his stance, I think.
It sounds like you've never had a psychedelic experience yourself? If you had, I think you'd find it much easier to believe there's something to the 'stoned ape' theory. Especially when you realize that basically every culture ever - I know of no exceptions - has developed some way of leaving their normal state of reality.
No one has ever left the normal state of reality. Only perception. Certainly humans have been hallucinating and imagining things forever. Also, lying about your knowledge is a pretty universal human trait. Graham Hancock is proof of that.
No. But it didn't unfold itself to anyone else either. Shamans have never produced a single falsifiable hypothesis. Reality is exposed but by bit through observation and experimentation. Preferably while sober.
The combination of plants that creates ayahuasca appeared in a dream. Shamans have identified cancers and illnesses in people. If science can’t cope with these realities, that’s a science problem.
That's it. Shamans appear in disparate cultures over millenia upon millenia, helping people in astounding and near-inexplicable ways... And modern academia is just like, 'well, they believe in spirits and take drugs so they must be dumb - now off I go to work to pay my $400,000 mortgage, because that's sensible'.
We owe these traditions an astonishing unacknowledged debt, and the people telling us so are ferociously attacked.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
TL;DR: (1) brain shape has not changed for about 160k years. (2) The framing/facts of the discussion is bad. Mutations are happening all the time, it is 'natural selection' that seemingly made lactose tolerance more prevalent in the last 20k years.
-----------------------
Long answer:
## Natural Selection / Lactose Tolerance (as an example of a very recent adaptation) / Why the discussion is so far incorrect
In my first reply, I notice now a big flaw. Having an adaptation be present in a population for 6000 years does not mean it took that time to evolve it. (According to [3], the adaptation has become prevalent in 20k years rather 6k)
To frame what we are discussing, I hope we can all agree:
mutations are happening all the time and in aggregate we each individually carry a vast quantity of genetic differences/mutations apart from every other individual.
For lactose tolerance, really what we are talking about is more natural selection. At least I think we are. As an example, a population can change very quickly via natural selection if an event kills off everyone that is missing a mutation. That perhaps 1% mutation suddenly becomes the surviving population. (For completeness, I'll mention that this process can happen more slowly as well over time, but it can depend on single mutations, aggregates of mutations, and environment and random luck [eg: asteriod] are all factors). This is to say, there could have been plenty of lactose tolerant people well before. This NPR piece on the history of lactose tolerance states it well [3] "But now that doesn't happen for most people of Northern and Central European descent and in certain African and Middle Eastern populations. This development of lactose tolerance took only about 20,000 years — the evolutionary equivalent of a hot minute — but it would have required extremely strong selective pressure."
What's more though too, nothing is to say that natural selection always works to favorably select genes. EG: The village idiot might be the only one immune to the plague. It's way complex of course since there's so much variation between every individual, but I just wanted to underscore that natural selection is a function of individual, time & place. Sometimes some mutations are useful, other times they are not and are dumb luck of what is left over from some time before.
--------------------
## Brain Size & Human Cognition
With the issue of natural selection out of the way, what I do wonder is how long it took for the brain to get the way it is today. According to this resource, The Smithsonian [1], the answer is approx 7M years, with most of that happening in the last 2M years until 200k years ago. That is in terms of 'size' (does not account for wrinkles).
According to 'newscientist' [2], the shape (now talking wrinkles here) of the human brain today is very similar to what it was 160k years ago, and has not really changed since. The resource mentions that the biggest changes since then have been in how our faces look rather than how our brains are shaped. Those changes are specifically smaller jaws: "Faces in modern humans are far smaller, with subtler indentation, than those of their ancestors. Studies show that this change accelerated when hunter-gatherers became agriculturalists around 12,000 years ago and ate softer foods, probably due to less loading on the skull from chewing."
Summing up, given that brain shape has been about the same for the last 160k years; it's plausible that is how far it goes back for people that felt & thought about exactly the same way we do today. If anyone knows about more research around the rise of human cognition on this topic, I'd certainly like to learn more.
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.
> 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.
> 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].
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.
Strongly agree that this one is both very fun to think about and rings true. I sometimes imagine imagine it as parallel to the advancement of the world of computers, which has sort of been like watching the development an entire civilization in miniature. Early computer pioneers were, we know, incredible minds whose talent was the very thing that put us on the hard road to progress. Sure, nowadays, random people are able to casually accomplish much more in absolute terms, but it's because they're standing on the shoulders of giants.
All that said, I do tend to be sort of a Graham Hancock apologist. My take is that most people go too extreme with him. They either think he's a crackpot loony who must be taken at face value and debunked as a purveyor of pseudoscience OR they think he's a rebel truthteller: the only one who will look at the real facts, bravely pushing through the corrupt academic swamp.
It seems obvious to me that he's neither. He's just an author who stumbled on a compelling, mind-expanding idea. Roughly stated: what if we know less about the past than we think, and thus underestimate our ancestors? I think the interesting thing about Graham Hancock's spiel has nothing to do with any of his specific pieces of archaeological evidence that he digs up, which are very clearly marshaled to make a point he has already decided on making. (This is bad science, 100%.) Rather, the thing he brings to the table is more like a philosophical approach that is genuinely fresh and interesting. And I do think he will one day be vindicated in some way, because we act like we have way more precise knowledge about the past than we actually do. This is sort of an epistemology thing, so appealing directly to the evidence and the current anthropological understanding isn't really engaging with him in good faith. He's pointing out that the Troys of history prove that we consistently overestimate how completely we've understood history and what is and is not reasonable. Over time we tend to acclimate to that picture, and then the problem multiplies, because we tend to only accept things that seem to fit with the now-banal-seeming history we already know, leading to even more banal hypotheses gaining traction. Some of his best writings relate to the systematic bias against catastrophism that existed, and showing how these types of errors in epistemology lead to actual errors of science down the line.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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?
> 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).
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.
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.
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
>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.
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.
And archeologists limit their picture of the past to the evidences they have at a given point in time, although they know what they have is a very limited and degraded record of what actually happened.
See for instance the argument put forth by Hancock about network of ancient "highways" connecting cities in the amazon. Nonsense until lidar expose them:
"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!"
I would usually say, you first, since you made the outrageous claim he "provides no evidence at all".
But this might be fun... You do know the difference between evidence and proof though, right?
I'll go look at the most recent article on his website [0], and we'll see if there's evidence presented, or if he "provides no evidence at all"...
To avoid bias - and save time, because I'm doing your research for free - I asked ChatGPT to examine whether he provided evidence or not:
...
Evidence Provided by Graham Hancock
Cultural and Archaeological Evidence:
Hancock frequently references archaeological findings and scientific studies to support his theories. For example, he discusses the discovery of ancient human remains in California dating back 130,000 years, which challenges the conventional timeline of human migration into the Americas.
Comparative Analysis:
He often draws parallels between distant cultures to suggest the existence of a lost ancient civilization. For instance, he points out similarities between the spiritual beliefs of ancient Egyptians and Native American mound builders, arguing that these cannot be mere coincidences and suggesting a shared heritage from a forgotten civilization.
Scientific Studies:
Hancock cites recent studies and technologies, such as LIDAR, which have uncovered large, ancient geoglyphs and cities in the Amazon, suggesting advanced pre-Columbian civilizations that were previously unknown.
Historical Documentation:He references historical texts and accounts from early archaeologists and explorers, such as the work of Flinders Petrie and Margaret Murray in Egypt, to support his claims about the existence of older and technologically advanced civilizations.
Analysis of the Evidence
Pros:
Innovative Perspective:
Hancock provides a fresh look at ancient history by challenging established narratives, which encourages further investigation and discussion.
Detailed References: His works are often well-documented with footnotes and references to scientific studies, which lend a certain level of credibility to his arguments.
Cons:
Interpretation of Evidence: Critics argue that Hancock often selectively interprets evidence to fit his theories, sometimes ignoring data that contradicts his views .
Speculative Nature: Some of his conclusions are speculative and not universally accepted by the academic community, relying heavily on what some consider circumstantial evidence.
Conclusion
While Graham Hancock does provide evidence to support his claims, the validity and interpretation of this evidence are often contested. His approach is not always balanced, as he openly admits to focusing on evidence that supports his alternative historical narratives. Readers must critically evaluate his claims and consider the broader academic consensus when interpreting his work.
...
Summarizing: At least 4 different types of evidence are regularly laid out. Benefits to his approach include encouraging fresh investigation and discussion, and the cons are acknowledged by Hancock himself.
I'm no Hancock fanboy - I've seen one show of his. But I've seen the way he gets attacked and it's so often so dumb. It reminds me of how people attack Assange and Snowden, or RMS, or Jared Diamond: surprisingly emotional, personal, venomous, and more often than not completely made up (as in this case).
I'm not a native English speaker so some nuances are lost. But I can concede that he does have something you could call evidence, for his conjectures.
Will you concede that he has no proof, only conjectures and that big archelogy are not out to get him? I'll leave this for your viewing pleasure, let me know what you think. https://youtu.be/IeIj_rNYhCU
I don't need to, because I never claimed he had proof, and neither did he. He is always very upfront about that fact.
> and that big archelogy are not out to get him
But they are. Look at all the comments in this thread accusing him of things he isn't doing; putting words in his mouth; completely inventing beliefs that he doesn't actually hold - where did all that come from?
> I'll leave this for your viewing pleasure
... A 2 hour video nitpicking a Joe Rogan interview? I'll pass, sorry bud. Maybe if I get really bored later, but I hope to have better things to do.
I'll leave you with this: We have bone flutes that are 50,000 years old that use a pentatonic scale. Reconstructions of the Divje Baba flute can be seen played on YouTube (2 mins long, not 2 hours).
You can claim those perfectly circular, perfectly placed holes are animal bites, but there's other examples confirmed to be >30k years old, also using a perfect pentatonic scale. If you understand how music works, you know that's insane.
You could play modern pop songs on these flutes. Saying that there isn't any chance of an advanced civilization older than 10k years just doesn't seem credible to me, and the insistence from 'big archaeology' that it's impossible is not to their credit.
So no proof, only conjectures? Sounds like he shouldn't act like he is correct and everyone else is wrong.
I guess I am big archaeology then, somehow.
Having a very hard time understanding how a bone flute equates humans having forgotten advanced technology in the past. I don't think anyone here disagree that modern humans have existed for hundreds of thousands of years and have made artifacts like this in their spare time and created bespoke tools to create them that have been lost.
Conjecture, yes. Conjectures drive inquiry and investigation, especially when linked with evidence. They serve as starting points for scientific research and exploration.
Ignoring interesting conjectures despite the evidence is a foolish, and a mainstream historical pastime. If we let that be an end of it, we wouldn't understand evolution, germ theory, plate tectonics, or heliocentrism.
Someone always puts the idea out first, lays out their evidence, gets roundly mocked by people who feel threatened... And years later, building on their work, someone finds proof of the idea (or, tbf, sometimes disproves it in an interesting way).
> I guess I am big archaeology then, somehow
I really have no idea why you would say this. Are you feeling personally attacked here or something? Have you forgotten that you are the one that first brought up this term?
> Having a very hard time understanding how a bone flute equates humans having forgotten advanced technology in the past.
Then you don't understand music, technology, humans, or Hancock's argument. Creating such an instrument requires a massive degree of understanding. It suggests symbolic thought, cultural sophistication, planning, and multi-generational knowledge sharing. And it demonstrates that 'modern humans' were not the only game in town, because the Divje Babe flute likely wasn't made by homo sapiens, but by neanderthals.
> I don't think anyone here disagree that modern humans have existed for hundreds of thousands of years
Lol... Now most people would agree, but not long ago you'd have been treated just as Hancock is for suggesting so.
And again, the flute was probably made by Neanderthals.
For centuries, the archaeological establishment, influenced by outdated notions such as phrenology, underestimated Neanderthal cognitive abilities and cultural sophistication. Suggesting they were smart enough to make a flute would get you ridiculed by 'big anthropology'.
... I read 20 minutes of the transcript of that YouTube transcript you suggested, and it's really bad. Woeful stuff.
It's an obvious smear job: Someone could make a 1 hour video detailing the rhetorical bs Professor Miano uses in that 20 minutes. It's all there - hypocrisy, projection, ad hominems, insinuations, gish galloping, straw-man arguments, appeals to authority. Honestly how do people fall for this stuff?
He spends the first 3 minutes attacking Hancock's character, then says "I'm sure he's a nice guy, I'm only attacking his rhetoric". He then says a bunch of stuff that Hancock supposedly does, without any reference to evidence whatsoever. He does everything that he accuses Hancock of doing, without a hint of self awareness.
It feels like an elaborate prank on his audience, and I'd believe it was; if only for the fact that I know people do this all the time when they feel their worldview/career is threatened.
For a final time, I hope - Hancock is clear and upfront that he is making conjecture (with evidence). He doesn't claim to have proof. He delineates between evidence and conjecture, and no one in this thread has provided a counter example - only put words in his mouth. Watch for that in your video: look at the first 20 minutes and make a note every time Miano tells us what Hancock thinks or does without any reference to actual fact. You might be surprised.
Opinions are like buttholes Hikikomori - everyone has one.
> Flat earth theories also have evidence
So you're not just confused about the difference between evidence and proof, but also the difference between evidence and disproved claims. How fun! Everything that doesn't have direct proof and mainstream consensus is now on the same level as the flat earth theory, amazing!
> psuedoarcheology grifters
Hancock disagrees with the archaeologocial community on like, one point. Maybe two.
His 'grift' is to write interesting books about a very intriguing idea - wow, what a huckster piece of shit.
Your criticism says more about you than about Hancock, Hikikomori. It's very uncool to attack people like this without bringing any actual evidence for your claims, English as a second language or no.
It's funny that you think you are different from flat earthers when most people would put you in the same category.
Neither has any proof. Both have flimsy evidence and only conjectures (Opinion or judgment based on inconclusive or incomplete evidence; guesswork). Both are anti science and anti establishment and believe them to be hiding or stopping the truth from coming out to protect their sweet academic/science jobs. And both are pushed by people that make money from it, ie grifters.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Milo also visited Göbekli Tepe, as well as Karahan Tepe (a site which likely predates Göbekli 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...
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.
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 Däniken. 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.
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
How is that relevant? Misinterpretation of evidence is a thing, certainly, but that has nothing to do with a crackpot making up stories without any evidence to support them. I can do that too, in an afternoon. Doesn't make it real.
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
Can recommend this channel as well run by an American professor, just did a video on the techniques Graham uses to fool people but has a lot of other debunking and visiting the pyramids etc. https://youtu.be/IeIj_rNYhCU
Graham and a real historian recently did a debate on Joe Rogan where Graham did not come off well.
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.
Not that those who challenge the status quo can also turn into bullies later in life, once their paradigm is established.
This is well exposed in the first part of America Before (one of Hancock's book)
>At the outset of the twentieth century many scholars took the view that the Americas had been devoid of any human presence until less than 4,000 years ago.
>[...]
>the most influential figure in disseminating and enforcing the view that the New World had only recently been populated by humans was a frowning and fearsome anthropologist named Aleš Hrdlička
>[...]
>throughout the 1920s and 1930s compelling evidence began to emerge that people had reached the Americas thousands of years earlier than Hrdlička supposed. Of particular importance in this gradual undermining of the great man’s authority was a site called Blackwater Draw near the town of Clovis
>[...]
>The Smithsonian sent a representative, Charles Gilmore, to take a look at the site but—perhaps unsurprisingly under Hrdlička’s malign shadow—he concluded that no further investigation was justified.
>[...]
>Anthropologist Edgar B. Howard of the University of Pennsylvania disagreed.He began excavations at Blackwater Draw in 1933, quickly finding quantities of beautifully crafted stone projectiles with distinctive “fluted” points
>[...]
>Before and after 1943, the year in which both Howard and Hrdlička died, further discoveries of fluted points of the Blackwater Draw type—increasingly referred to as “Clovis points” after the nearby town of that name—continued to be made. This ever-accumulating mass of new evidence left no room for doubt and even the most stubborn conservatives (Hrdlička excepted) were eventually forced to agree that the Clovis culture had hunted animals that became extinct at the end of the last Ice Age and that humans must therefore have been in the Americas for at least 12,000 years.
>[...]
>a consensus soon began to emerge that no older cultures would ever be found—and what is now known as the “Clovis First” paradigm was conceived. We might say, however, that it was not officially “born” until September 1964. That was when archaeologist C. Vance Haynes, today Regents Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Arizona and a senior member of the National Academy of Sciences, published a landmark paper
>[...]
>because of lowered sea level during the Ice Age, much of the area occupied today by the Bering Sea was above water, and where the Bering Strait now is, a tundra-covered landscape connected eastern Siberia and western Alaska. Once over the land bridge, however, it was Haynes’s case that the migrant hunters could not have ventured very far before confronting the daunting barrier of the Cordilleran and Laurentide Ice Sheets
>[...]
>Tom Dillehay, professor of anthropology at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, began excavations at Monte Verde in southern Chile in 1977 and found evidence that humans had been present there as far back as 18,500 years ago.
>[...]
>Tom Dillehay’s most dogged and determined critic, perhaps predictably, has been C. Vance Haynes, whose 1964 paper launched the Clovis First theory and who by 1988 had used his influence, and his outreach in the scientific journals, to dismiss every case thus far made for supposedly pre-Clovis sites in the Americas.
>[...]
>Indeed by 2012 the bullying behavior of the Clovis First lobby had grown so unpleasant that it attracted the attention of the editor of Nature, who opined: “The debate over the first Americans has been one of the most acrimonious—and unfruitful—in all of science. … One researcher, new to the field after years of working on other contentious topics, told Nature that he had never before witnessed the level of aggression that swirled around the issue of who reached America first.
> 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
Because you're trying to 'learn' from an unreliable source spouting fiction. It's like someone learning homeopathy being frustrated that doctors dismiss it with passion.
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
Anyone who believes Hancock’s ideas should really watch the debate with Flint Dibble[0], in which Hancock eventually admits he has no evidence of his ancient civilisation, and Rogan, who is a long time friend and believer of Hancock, seems to end up siding more with Flint.
No. You misunderstood that quote, the emergence of writing is far more recent and at different locations. Thus “within 30km of” not at Göbekli 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 Göbekli Tepe, dates the emergence of the hieroglyphic script used to write in Luwian to the late 15th century B.C.E.,”
Göbekli Tepe was inhabited ~9500-8000 BCE, so ~6500 years before the writing examples given.
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.
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 Ötzi 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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Utterly spurious. The toolmarks don't match the experiment and therefore it was another civilization? Just stupid. They may have used a different type of grist for their drills. They may have had a technique for smoothing them after the hole was cut. They may have just been so practiced in their art that they were just better at it than anyone who tries to replicate it today by guessing. We have unequivocal evidence that cutting and drilling granite with available material was totally possible. We don't know and probably never will know for certain how exactly they worked. But it's 100% plausible they did it themselves with technology and resources available at the time that matches all the correlated evidence. There are carved granite and schist artifacts in Egypt spanning thousands of years during which they kept lots of written and artistic records and interacted with dozens of regional cultures all of whom are well-attested. Accusing the scientific mainstream of being to stuck in their orthodoxy to accept an alternate theory is rich coming from someone who believes a wildly implausible theory with nearly religious fervor and rejects all the physical evidence in front of his face in favor of blind faith. Bring some proof beyond pure conjecture and then maybe we'll be convinced. Go read about pre-Clovis people in the Americas. The orthodoxy that had stood for decades was upended pretty quickly when new evidence was uncovered.
> 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.
Very impressive, but the Egyptians supposedly didn't have the ability to form steel; also the holes were not chiseled, they were drilled leaving spiral striations that witness an incredible feed-rate.
Yes, it's interesting isn't it, how everyone is debunking eachother, and that hasn't changed much from the days of Petrie. Doesn't seem like the "science", after all these decades, is solid and settled yet whatever timeline you believe.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
From an alternative angle, it's not tragic but rather a triumph of the people who "actually" live there, to be able to repurpose old structures to modern use.
In Napoli, there's a set of pretty old (>300 years, I'd guess?) apartment buildings in the historic center, where if you view the buildings and curvature of the street from the sky or google maps, make a clear C shape.
The foundation of the buildings is a repurposing of a roman amphitheater. By the time that they began to convert the bottom 10 ft of the amphitheater into the basement of the homes, the amphitheater had been unused for centuries and the remaining high-quality building material had already been scavenged and repurposed for construction elsewhere in the city.
Naples, and many other "ancient" european cities that are still places inhabited majority by working people, are full of examples like this. It's kind of cool to see people living in a place where history is so overwhelming that it becomes banal.
I visited that amphitheater last year as part of the underground tour, really cool.
Might have read it at the Colosseum, but part of it were used by one of the noble houses to construct their Palazzo in Rome. Barberini if I remember correctly.
Because (the Giza pyramid at least) was built at the site of a massive limestone quarry and a substantial (~20%) proportion of the internal volume of the pyramid is composed of natural rock formation they didn't need to fill in with sandstone.
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.
Isn't getting the stones to the site the easier, much less interesting part of this? By far more interesting is how they actually constructed the things.
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)
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
Corvée 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.
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.
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.)
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?
> 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.
Apparently Pharaoh first worked on irrigation and later worked on big pyramids after the irrigation was built but with the same kind of labor force. Farmers who now know how to cut stone and move it around in water.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My alt theory is the pyramids were started from the core first with the blocks and then built out from there. And the stone was right there beneath the pyramid being carved out. But how did they get the blocks to the top? Using a crane system! At the apex there would be a lever balance and ropes would lever the stones into place.
> I can't speak to evidence that slaves weren't used but we have records of wages paid to laborers and engineers.
I don't think that's a counter-argument. Depending on context, wages can be paid to slaves, too. "Being forced to work under threat of death" doesn't imply that payment wasn't made.
As a counter-counter argument (yeah, I love arguing with myself), do these records mention any payment for the costs of food and shelter in bulk? Because generally, the food and shelter for slaves is paid for by the slave-drivers, so if slaves were used, I'd expect to see a record of bulk purchases of food and shelter.
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.)
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.
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.
> 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.
"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.
The concept of payment beyond present requirements may not have existed back then. People were payed in the resources their family needed to survive between the harvest seasons.
More than an ordinary laborer, much more than an agricultural slave, and you also had social esteem and a higher spiritual acclaim. This all means a LOT in a highly stratified society, like Ancient Egypt. You don't give such things to slaves.
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?
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?
Regardless, it makes sense they would want to have easy access to fresh water. Maybe instead they rerouted the river afterwards so that others would have less use of the spaceport.
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).
> 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.
> 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.
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...
> 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.
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?
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.
Further theories (also believed by the YTer under discussion) have the commonly quoted 2 million blocks is incorrect - most of the space inside is most likely taken up by rock rubble fill, like we do today to not overuse concrete. Evidence of this exists in the nearby mastabas which use the same construction technique - solid well fitted outer and inner structure walls, filled with rubble in the gaps.
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.
You can make any part of the Pyramids with primitive hand tools. In fact, material scientists have, to prove a point. Quartz is harder than the stone used for them, and diorite can be used to to smooth quartz.
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.
> The best evidence suggests that pyramid workers were locals who were paid for their services and ate extremely well. We know this because archaeologists have found their tombs and other signs of the lives they lived.
We don't know all the details of their process, but there are a ton of viable ways to do it using their level of technology, I'm sure they used one of them.
