A few days ago I watched this video by wired about the pyramids in Egypt
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enMPLaB1oEo), and something interesting that the expert talks about is that they know exactly where the stones come from- not only is there clear evidence of quarrying in the immediate vicinity, but the dimensions match and they even have contemporary records describing the movement of stone blocks from quarries across the river to the construction site. (2 day round trip.)
Granted it’s a Wired video so she didn’t go into an overly extraordinary level of detail, but in any case it reminded me of a lecture I attended about 15 years ago when I went a prospective students/parents night at a prestigious university that I was looking to attend.
As part of the presentation, they had this guy give a lecture on his groundbreaking new theory that the pyramids were actually cast in place, rather than quarried. I thought it was interesting at the time, so when I heard about this quarry stuff in the Wired video, I assumed it must be a relatively recent discovery.
Nope! People have literally known about these quarries since ancient times, and they were confirmed by modern methods in the 1980s. This ‘prestigious university’ literally just had some crackpot give us his pet theory as an example of the kind of fine, high caliber academics that we could look forward to as part of our education at this institution. 😂
(Btw I did end up attending that university for Computer Science, and the lead professor there taught us that we should try to avoid using if statements.) Anyway there’s no point or anything just thought I’d share.
Yup!
Another fun one is that the standard (biblical) images of it being all slaves and poor is wrong.
They were well paid and compensated for their time working on government projects. We’ve found villages including discarded letters and even “newspapers” (clay tablets) of the worker villages.
The method was fairly simple: the Nile floods every year, they knew this. So, while the farms were all flooded/useless, those people all worked on various government projects.
While there were slaves used, the Egyptians were, for slavery, pretty good on it not being a perpetual death sentence for you. That would be the greeks, where once enslaved, your linage would almost always be perpetual slaves.
Oh that’s neat; I have heard they were paid but I didn’t know it was seasonal work.
Regular flooding is what made the Nile Delta such an awesome place for a civilization. Every year, Nile mud would flow over the farmland and enrich it. Check out the green!
EDIT: Forgot to note, the Nile flows north, which can look upside down compared to most others, so that’s freshwater flooding, not saltwater from the Med.
They were paid (at least partly) in beer. Truly an enlightened civilisation. 😉
The Bible says the Israelites were forced to make bricks from clay and straw, which would build buildings not pyramids.
The Bible has a major problem when it comes to claims that fall into the late bronze age.
It’s that the elites of the time wrote everything in a script called Linear B(by us) on clay tablets and archived them. We can understand linear B and have found several archives of the tablets. Though those hundreds of thousands of tablets we have a pretty good idea of the goings on, life and relations between the various empires and city states of the region.
Through those tablets we know that the Canaanites(not Israeli) were occasional adversaries but typically peacefully traded with the Egyptians. There is no record, even by groups generally opposed to the Egyptians like the Hittites, of them being liberated slaves of the Egyptians, nor a massive group of wandering people for 40 years.
What’s that got to do with your comment about the bible saying slaves built the pyramids?
I enjoy pointless stories! 8.5/10 !
Same
The reason they were built was to help everyone remember which way is up — not so easy on ancient times!
It was before Issac Newton had invented gravity, so you couldn’t just feel it.
Avoiding branching unless necessary is actually good programming advice 🤷♂️
Not with modern branch prediction. (Or extremely energy efficient barrel processors)
I remember when I was a kid they taught us Egyptians didn’t actually build the pyramids, it was really Jewish people enslaved by the Egyptians who built them.
There is zero historical evidence that Jews were ever slaves in Egypt
https://reformjudaism.org/jewish-holidays/passover/were-jews-slaves-egypt
I mean, it’s sparse but there’s evidence that could be interpreted in that direction, including a historian from much later that says as much. The evidence can also be interpreted in other directions, but that’s a different story.
Yep, in case it wasn’t clear I am not saying that Jewish people built the pyramids. It’s just what I was taught to believe as a child, I quickly figured out it was bullshit as soon as I started thinking for myself. It turns out Christian fanatics don’t run the best schools.
Replying solely as a show of solidarity.
I was raised in a Christian home, home-schooled (which my mom and dad were exceptional at, actually, religious brainwashing aside), then attended Christian college prep schools for my highschool diploma.
I deconverted in my twenties after watching a YouTube video which made avoiding the fact of evolution too unreasonable. The rest pretty quickly unraveled from there. I’ve spent many nights disassembling newly discovered pockets of disinformation in my brain. It’s incredible how clever the little twists of half-truth are… How easily they’re manipulated to a premise which seems plausible but is then used to support abject absurdity.
It’s no wonder institutional religion and fascism are such good bedfellows.
I can sympathize so much with the unique and often difficult challenges that come with deprogramming - I was raised Mormon. When I broke free, for a long time I struggled with anger at myself for believing charlatans. But the process of untangling your own thoughts from the brainwashing can have unexpected high Libby’s, too, as you learn who you want to be on your own terms.
Dude, you escaped a religion a lot of people consider a cult. That takes a lot of courage.
Wow.
Also, the parallels/links to Zionism are striking.
Well that one is super weird because according to the Biblical narrative the time of Joseph (and therefore Jews) come more than a thousand years after the Pyramids.
I was taught all kinds of weird shit growing up, the schools I attended were not the best. My favorite was that fossils aren’t real, they are the product of a global conspiracy of Satanists to trick Christians into believing in evolution.
You’re going to love Last Thursdayism
😳
Fun fact the modern theory is that they quarried the stones down river then stacked them into a trapazoid then quarried that into the pyramids working from the cap down and reusing the cut off for the lesser pyramids and facilities.
Here’s how you make a triangle, first you build a square… Then you cut it into a triangle!
A guest lecturer came in to my microbiology department to talk about his paper on how hiv is not sufficiently proven to cause aids and he believes it is just a passenger virus present in the population and aids is essentially a collection of different diseases. I mean his reasoning was sound but latter much more evidence came out out indicating it was the case including treatments that knock out hiv.
Wow, that must have been ages ago; I feel like they’ve known HIV caused AIDS for like, literally since before I was born?!
mid nineties so a bit over 30 years ago.
Afaik the issue isn’t the material but the incredibly compressed timeline of 20y to build the great pyramid.
But yeah there’s a ton of neat stuff without clean answers that keep Egyptologists barking at each other and the moon.
Not exactly a crackpot, just a dude trying to drum up hype for his business/research project.
Ah we know how they were built, but nobody talks about their actual purpose… Storing grain.
Deep cuts!
