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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 😂

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!

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.

Right so I spent around an hour this afternoon reading about all things Egyptian. I agree with your responses and am married to a lunatic.
He isn’t a total bastard though and has a lot of lovely traits so I’ll just ignore this alien nonsense.

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.

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

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.

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

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!

Quite so, but you never know who out there is just itching to pounce on any mention of ancient Egypt which mentions an anti-African bias, seeing an opportunity to spout the black Cleopatra line.
That’s a discussion which always gets desperate and overheated very quickly.

Well I know this of course, exactly as you have set it out.

I’ve been pressed into too many bothersome arguments on that damn notion of her being black though, and as I mentioned, they're a tenacious lot who can spot a chance to air the thesis in the most unlikely of circs.

That was me, and yes, you are correct. I should have said what bible version, and I would have if this was a bible chat. But it's not, so I didn't :-)

And I got the 4 corners of the earth wrong. I was going from memory. I should have said Mat 4:8 "Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; " (KJV)

The 4 corners are from elsewhere in the Bible.

Re translations, that why I made clear that it was a Greek who calculated the diameter of the earth, because he wrote in the same language as the NT is written in. So the language as it was, is capable of conveying the point.

I also quoted Isaiah in a post about the water cycle. I lifted that from Biblehub, but I usually use a PC program called E-Sword. That's an excellent resource, free to download ( I highly recommend it), and many bibles are available. Interlinear bibles and dictionaries too, so if there is a dispute in a Bible chat about translations, it's all on hand. Just click the reference number beside each word to get the translation info.

So yup, you caught me out :)

I was posting in good faith tho, in the context of this thread.

Again though. E-Sword. A really excellent resource. I have tried a few, and I rate that the best.

In the Jovial spirt of this thread OP, I reckon you should casually test him.

Next time you are both watching the news, and the Royals are mentioned, just say " Bah, they are lizards you know. I was reading about it online, and I agree. Lizards, the lot of them".

See what he says :-)

Exactly the point I was referring to - I can remember back in the 70's the screams that Cleopatra should be played by a black African, I was too young to remember the same furore about Elizabeth Taylor playing the role but I remember my parents commenting on it the next time the subject came up.

@GarlicRound I'll also throw in the fact that for quite a while Egypt was ruled by Kushite pharaohs, who restored some of the glories of earlier dynasties.

I like to watch these kind of programmes occasionally too, but, we seem to look at ancient civilisations and think they had no technology or skilled crafts people, especially from our technological age. It's a bit like you hear people say that in the past they thought the earth was flat, many in the past knew much about science and knew the earth was round, going back to the ancient Greeks. A lot of these old cultures were incredible places. And there is money to be made in conspiracy.

The ancient Egyptians were geniuses and the knowledge that they had to build the pyramids has been lost. There has been a place found that had waste systems that surprised archaeologists as it was really early.

Civilisations that no longer exist the knowledge gone just because modern builders lack the know how, just shows the ancient skills were amazing.

@Gardener82 Ask your husband about Stonehenge! How did they know how to get the stones to Wiltshire from wales. I get lost using a sat nav!

However, the Egyptian civilisation was “allegedly” started by someone coming in from the sea and I think a lotus flower had something to do with it. So hence theory of Atlantis.

Does anyone think he's a bastard, I think he's just an idiot.

They'd have fallen down by now if it was Persimmon.😆

Allergictoironing Thank you for your very informative comments .I think Conspiracy theories have taken hold so much now, that people think they are missing something if they dont "get it" ! Obviously BW has a vast depth of Ancient History at his fingertips ,and would never knowingly try to bend History for the sake of a lucrative TV show!