To start a conspiracy theory thread about the pyramids?

[Gardener82]

Do you believe the pyramids or The sphinx were built by the ancient Egyptians?
I’m just watching Egypt’s Secret code and Bradley Walsh isn’t accepting this theory, my husband believes it was Aliens.
I don’t know what I think really, please discuss, Share your thoughts.

We don’t know how much the Egyptians knew because the library in Alexandria burned down

Is this a scheme?

There’s plenty of papyri that have survived-medical, mathematical, astronomical so I think we do have a pretty good idea about what they knew.

As others have said, no (or at least very few) slaves involved. Archaeologists have spent years studying the villages that housed the very skilled and well trained workers who built the pyramids including records of things like their pay, what they ate etc. In fact it's thought that these workers staged the earliest known and recorded strike in history.

The BBC has recently shown a series on the fall of 4 of the great civilisations of history including the Egyptians. The conclusion that was come to was that the fall there was due to a combination of factors including lack of rain in the mountains that fed the Nile river leading to food shortages, invasion and infighting (and murders) in the ruling family of the day.

It also covered a few subjects like the evolution of pyramid building starting with the Step Pyramid where they went from the traditional mastaba, a comparatively low building over a tomb then built gradually smaller ones on top to get a greater height and eventually ended up with the classic pyramidal shape, similar to those built in places like South America. There's also the Bent Pyramid where they realised part way through they had the maths wrong and had to flatten the angle of the slope. Would they have made these evolutions & mistakes if they'd been guided by some fabulously advanced alien civilisation capable of crossing between the stars? Surely the aliens would have got it right first time.

I saw the Bradley Walsh series about Egypt - he had plenty of well educated Egyptologists telling him how things were built etc, he just chose not to believe them lol.

BlueJuniper94

Watch how great empires collapse, current bbc2.

All the same cause. The leading elites keep all money , the general population rebel, harvest fails and starvation, pandemic, hostile takeover by outside forces. Egypt, Japan, Rome, Aztecs (who also built pyramids ) etc. happened to France, Portugal, England and
eventually the US.

Or volcanic eruptions and earthquakes!
(Just a small thing, but Minoan….. 🤣)

A lot of culturally ignorant kids at some art school don’t constitute proof of this, that, or the other.

Exactly this! The evolution of pyramid building is in the archaeological record. They didn’t just appear, dropped from some passing starship. They also continued after the start of the decline of dynastic Egypt in the south (Meroe) but much smaller.

Excellent

Maybe not. But until you ask, you'll never know.

There are some budget collapsed pyramids where they got it wrong too.

The Persimmon link is deep.

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. Have you seen the Megalithic temples of Malta? Older than the pyramids, or Stonehenge, they contain stones of up to 500 tonnes. The population of Malta was relatively small, the soil less productive than Egypt's, yet the people had the skills and motivation to build these amazing structures.

I'm and archaeology graduate of half a century ago, and an avid reader of everything I can get my hands on about the latest developments in the field. I also teach an Archaeology class at U3A. The ancients were both far more clever and more capable than modern people believe, arrogant as we are. Aliens just don't figure.

Never bet your savings on something propounded as fact in the OT.
Most of those prophets and elders must have lived on hallucinogenic crocuses, and suffered from dysfunctional ‘glands’.
Look at Moses. Forty bloody years trying and failing to get from the equivalent of (wild guess here) Piccadilly to Windsor, with no big buildings obscuring the view.

Didn't these people even have celestial navigation?
Didn’t Samaritans and other -ans traverse the countryside too, able to offer guidance to these ever-wandering brainiacs?

Whatever about that, I just think they make pretty unreliable narrators!

I have it on good authority they were built by The Clangers

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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