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.

No way. They have stood for millennia.

Having read about new builds, I wouldn't put money on them lasting the decade.

Don't subscribe to any Alien theory, but believe in a civilisation pre pharaonic. The geology of sub saharan Africa does support the lush lands to the west and this would support a climate crisis and displacement of people. Much of the early dynasties borrowed and recycled buildings and learning. We've maybe only skimmed the surface. Look up the Osireion and fall down the rabbit hole of how much we just don't understand or can explain today.

I don't think they are even real, just stacks of cardboard boxes.

True but the architects still needed to do the maths.

Those Old Testament ‘Bible folk’ lived according to countless beliefs which must have appeared wacko to outsiders by, say, Caesar’s day.
That they apparently hadn't got the hang of this here water cycle* doesn’t mean that nobody else around in the first millennium BCE had much of a clue about anything as well.

*Maybe the prophet just hadn’t been paying attention in his school days, of course, nor on the outward bound course where everyone ran riot while ostensibly looking at evidence of glaciation in the landscape (bit of autobiography there, folks!)

He needs to spend less time online and more time in the real world, ideally developing some critical thinking skills.

There is currently an entire exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum dedicated to the skills of ancient Egyptian craftspeople. It includes explanations and artefacts demonstrating their expertise and how they achieved precision.

Maybe your husband could attend to try and break the conspiracy spell. If he can't get there in person, the exhibition catalogue is excellent. Both are produced by genuine experts who have dedicated their careers to studying this.

https://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/plan-your-visit/exhibitions/made-in-ancient-egypt

https://curatingcambridge.co.uk/products/made-in-ancient-egypt-exhibition-catalogue

I saw something a few months back stating that the Egyptians just found the pyramids ready built and used them for what they wanted

Not sure what your point is?

We have ancient Egyptian mathematical texts and architectural plans. They had a standardised measurement system. They had schools and apprentices.

The Egyptians were very advanced mathematicians (see the Rhind Mathematical papyrus); same with medicine. Mummification taught them about human anatomy and there is even evidence of prosthetic toes as well as trepanation as a pp pointed out. This was a civilisation that lasted 3000 years-longer than ours has done. But all civilisations rise and fall and that knowledge is then absorbed and appropriated by the incoming forces (Greeks then Romans).

Even the Egyptians’ achievements were preceded by peoples with advanced methods with which to calculate and predict the position of planets to an exquisite degree of accuracy.
The Neolithic farming people in ancient Ireland, circa 4500 BCE, built vast tombs and other monuments (with beautiful abstract stone carving whose distinctive designs are still employed all over the globe) wherein sacred chambers would be pierced by the rising solstice sun.
That depended on incredibly close calculations, and without even a toy telescope!
(This expertise wasn’t known only to Ireland of course. Other kindred tribes in northern Europe were working on a similar path. It’s merely that Ireland’s great Neolithic sites have survived particularly splendidly. No flag waving here!)

This feat of engineering, before the erection of the Great Pyramids, must be the ancient equivalent of Von Braun’s precise and visionary calculations landing men on the Moon.

Aha! (quoth the husband): Egyptian ancients worshipped cats, and THEY generally lack opposable thumbs too!
Therefore those weird-hand aliens could easily have been living among the higher castes, imparting advanced engineering knowledge in exchange for accommodation (after landing their multi-dimensional spacecraft near Thebes, they found they were stuck there, because they couldn't operate their phasers to get back in and leave, since their lack of useful thumbs the buttons refused to co-operate).

🤣😹

I know …. that was the point.

Built by the G’ouald to land their spaceships on

🤣

😂😂😂

My theory is that there was a civilisation of humans around this time that had contact with an older, more advanced being. Maybe humans who had left earth and developed, maybe another species entirely. They shared knowledge and tools and then something happened and they left again. It would explain quite a few ancient things that seem unexplainable. They had knowledge but lost it.

I am not saying nobody had a clue. I was responding to a PP who suggested masses of lost knowledge. I used the water cycle as an example.

I just say there is no mythical lost knowledge more advanced than today.

Eratosthens, a Greek, showed the earth to be a sphere in about 200BC. He calculated it's diameter. And if you are wondering why volcanos erupt, knowing the shape of the earth is a fundamental building block to work out plate tectonics. But it took what, about 1800 years to get from sphere to plates.

To say ancient Egyptians knew advanced stuff lost forever is just daft in my view.

Re the Bible, I reckon it is a pretty good guide of what was common knowledge at the time. In the NT for example, Jusus was supposed to have been taken to the top of a mountain where he was shown the 4 corners of the earth. So the authors of that book, even though they were writing in Greek, appeared to be unaware that the earth was a sphere. Something that had been discovered and proven 2or 3 hundred years before.

So it's unlikely schools were doing widespread teaching of Eratosthenes. Probably because we had to wait a while for the printing press.

What being? What unexplainable ancient things? Isn’t this the plot of Stargate?

I devoured all that stuff at school fifty years ago. Wasn't it he who claimed that the pyramids in Egypt constitute proof that alien intelligence ‘seeded’ humanity, since pyramids appeared also in Mexico?
That ratiocination was enjoyably used in Eco’s great novel about credulousness and conspiracies, Foucault’s Pendulum.
A principal character is musing one night about that same architectural coincidence, only to be recalled to common sense by his very grounded lover, who reminds him that back in far off millennia, a pyramid was the only design which made great height possible.
Arches and vaults, that consciousness-expanding technological leap forward, were far in the future. (I just got a flash of some ‘nouveau’ pharaoh screaming at his chief architect to bung flying buttresses on his new pyramid or face death in the crocodile enclosure)

Oh, I wouldn’t disagree.
Just to be pointlessly picky though, especially given my lack of ancient Greek, we still say ‘the four corners of the Earth’, do we not?
If some being from twenty centuries in the future were to latch onto that expression, she could infer from it that we regarded the planet as more or less a table top.

Even those ancient Egyptians knew the Earth is round.
Had it been flat, they reasoned, all the holy cats would have shoved everything off its edge at the first opportunity; golden burial trappings, chief eunuch, the palm fan of Ra: the lot!

But let's be honest, the level of evidence for the efficacy of Wiccan practice is pretty much exactly the same as the level of evidence for the efficacy of prayer to any other God.

Chesterton clearly didn't bother to understand atheism, and this piece of 'wisdom' that everyone raves about was just another cheap sneer of superiority from someone religious about those who are not.

Oh, there absolutely was pre-pharaonic civilisation. I have been on an excavation of a settlement from that period and the things we found speak of a technologically and politically advanced society even then. Everything has roots.

Yes, I was taught-by Irish parents and teachers-that the English were running around with arses painted blue until the Irish taught them how to read.

What's more, it was probably the Irish who built the pyramids, just as they built bridges, roads and tunnels for the English.

Also, it's a nonsense to imply that there were 2000 or so years of stable Christian religious practice, then it all went to shit in the 20th century. There have always been new sects, denominations and cults, within the big religions and without. Christianity and Islam are themselves sects that sprung from Judaism and took off for a variety of specific cultural circumstances.

Humans never let anything settle, they're always thinking and coming up with new ways of doing things. God, being a human invention, is subject to the same innovative zeal.

See: The Rhythm of Life scene from Sweet Charity - come for the satire on 60s hippy cults ("I'm in a Religion of the Month club"), stay for the insane choreography.

That was my first thought😀