To start a conspiracy theory thread about the pyramids?

Maybe look further than “the” pyramids at Giza - they’re not the only pyramids in that part of the world, plus there are all the south American step pyramids/temples - must have been very busy aliens with single track minds just to leave all those pyramids and nothing else!

I found the series ancient aliens fascinating rather than totally believable. Glad you’ve read up on this stuff now op.

True. For anyone still roaming around Ancient Egypt, their own paintings show people ranging from white with straight noses, to black with curvy noses. The majority are cappuccino-coloured with straight noses, typical of Southern Mediterranean and North African people today.

There's no indication of colourism. The slaves depicted are mostly the same light brown as the bosses. The Egyptians held the people of Kush in very high regard, judging them wealthy and well organised with religious practices rivalling their own. Kush is now Northern Sudan; its people were definitely 'Black African'.

If I remember rightly, they devalued the Kush as part of their drive to colonise the country and nick its resources - this was still not linked to colour, though. There's no historical evidence of dark skin being aligned to inferiority until the Brits did it. I apologise for my ancestors' vile propaganda.

Cleopatra had about as much to do with the pyramids as the king Charles has to do with the roman invasion of Britain.

AI is primarily being funded by savvy investment houses who see that it's clearly a bubble that will inevitably and very messily burst but realise that if they're careful about when they get their customers to buy in and cash out, they could personally make a lot of profit in the process and so be able to buy their next yacht.

The gullible people are the ones who are a) trusting these investment houses to get the timing right about when to buy and sell, or b) paying Google/OpenAI/etc for an AI to provide a shitty service to their own customers - these people are just there to provide the AI companies with enough of a pretend cashflow to persuade the type A people to put in the next $100billion.

It’s possible that few of its adherents ever thought of Egypt as African anyway. Though that line of argument must stop there, or this thread’ll zoom off into the dreaded Cleopatra weeds

But Cleopatra wasn't of Egyptian heritage anyway, she was of Greek heritage. OK a few generations after the original Ptolemy founded Alexandria, but they were very hot on the purity of bloodlines back then & only really married members of their own family or occasionally other very senior Greek families in Egypt. What she definitely wasn't, was what people typically think of as black African; the majority of north African peoples looked closer to how we would think of as Middle Eastern i.e. thinner more aquiline noses, straight hair etc.

Well, that turned into a very interesting conversation about the pyramids didn't it. The best of mumsnet!

ps. my DH believes that they were built by aliens to "create" our atmosphere.

pps. yes, I have lost all respect for him!

Nah, all three gospels describe this ridiculous event as it appears in modern translations - mountain, personnel, shining, ghost appearances and mystery voice.

Matt 17, Koine Greek original and word-by-word translation into English.
https://biblehub.com/text/matthew/17-2.htm

DIGRESSION ALERT:

I've been looking into how 'knowledge' - or, rather, human thinking about what knowledge is - has evolved from about 1,000 BC to the Enlightenment and beyond. Basically, religion wasn't a cultural activity or even a shared belief system as we'd understand it today. It was just taken for granted that everything is an emanation of the supernatural, you weren't even independently responsible for your own thoughts. This predisposed people to accept all kinds of weird shit as "Just how things are".

Numerous people throughout the ancient world got a long way towards discovering the Scientific Method. It was what Greek philosophers were all about - they were major celebrities in their time - but always hit a mental block when it came to separating their reasoning from this internal supposition of divine purpose. Happened over and over again, for millennia.

I feel relieved when I get to the 18th century, and can see people figuring out that we are the originators of our own thoughts, which gives us the ability to examine how & why things happen without getting stuck at "because god says so". It was a massive revolution that took a long time coming. I'm not an epistemologist but there are reasonably credible theories that this is in fact an ongoing feature of evolution: our brains are developing an ability to think about themselves, which includes an understanding of the difference between conscious and unconscious thought/instinct.

So, yes, conspiracists and god botherers, I am suggesting your brains might be lagging slightly on the evolution front 😂

That isn’t true. It’s not anti-African racism which is behind a belief that an alien civilisation must have built the Pyramids.
(It’s possible that few of its adherents ever thought of Egypt as African anyway. Though that line of argument must stop there, or this thread’ll zoom off into the dreaded Cleopatra weeds)

But you are conflating a good many historical eras, going back millennia, into one wholecloth thesis more suitable to very much later colonial exploitation, recognisable racism, and the concomitant erasure of cultural achievement.

Yes, I think they were built by ancient Egyptians.

I don’t understand the mental process you need to go through to rationalise that they couldn’t possibly have been built by ancient Egyptians, so the obvious explanation is they were constructed by aliens.

Apparently all the pyramids align with constellation points too! Its true even with today's tech it would be impossible to build the pyramids especially in the time frame it was supposed to have taken.

It was Egyptians.

The arrogance of today's humans is amusing.

We would struggle so there's no way those primative people could have done it.

There's been documentaries showing exactly how they could have done it

Using water, using logs, using pulley systems etc.

We are a lot less resourceful and, tbh, intelligent than we used to be.

Africa as a continent was far more advanced in science, maths and medicine at the time than the rest of the world, but sadly a lot of history was written so that Africans as a whole would be viewed as primitive etc in order to justify the atrocities that followed… pyramids are only unfathomabld for that reason

Inadmissible. No punctuation!
(Unless you think a semi-colon was the original ‘mark of the Beast’!)

I’m fairly sure if that were the case they’d have been knitted or made from blue string.

A pp quoted from the bible but failed to mention whether they were quoting from the original Hebrew or from later translations possibly Kings James version.

The translators used their own knowledge and experience and beliefs and by stating Jesus was taken to the top of the mountain is a literal interpretation of a metaphorical explanation intended for populations in England Scotland and Wales who were simple mostly farming people with limited access to knowledge and mostly with the only education was from the pulpit

The maths is standard geometry, which was well understood in the ancient world.

Spot on.
Also mental disarrangements, eyesight issues, organic illnesses which caused distinctive symptoms or movements: all kinds of everything might draw down the numinous either deliberately, or in the eyes of observers.
I was reading something in the paper earlier about Blake.
His visions of angels, had he lived around 1785 BCE instead of AD 1785, would surely have made him a revered seer and prophet even had he never painted, nor written a word.

True, although the celestial event at Nuremberg linked above is obvs pre ‘space ship’ memes etc & has always fascinated me. It doesn’t seem like it was a ‘sun dog’ event or natural similar other which might be logical. The fact indep contemporary reports also interesting.

Not only Egyptian. We’ve accounts tablets from the exchequer at Knossos (or some other great Minoan palace. You know the one, lots of blue, and bulls’ heads)

Gawd even Noah could count, even if he used weird measurements such as three ewes = one cubit; seven zebras and a Lebanon cedar = one eleventieth of an ark, and so on.

If we're going to talk hallucinations, they had ergotism back then and didn't know what it was. I reckon it accounts for an awful lot of magic, demons and miracles people think they saw.

I don’t believe in any conspiracy theories, but I do find them fascinating (even if the people who believe in them tend to be annoying imbeciles). My current favourite is the one about Finland not really existing.

The most constant driver of change in human (and pre human) history has been climate change

With sufficient well-trained manpower, and food supplies to support them, community belief in what they are doing, it is truly amazing what humans are capable of doing.

We walked on the moon, FFS.