SUPER SAID: I'll do my part and contribute to the greatness: The Pyramid of Khufu. The largest of the three Pyramids of Giza. It took 23 years to build (2589-2566 BCE)...twenty three years. The pyramid is 481' tall. How the hell did these people manage to control over 2 million stones to create this giant? It remained the largest man made structure until the Eiffel Tower was assembled (1889). Each side is 751' long and stretches across 13 acres. Christ, just imagine the amount of trial and error to perfect the angle. This post in the blow me away thread gave me the idea for this one. I don't know how many of you are interested in this particular argument or not, but I have always thought, upon learning of just how precisely and perfectly almost all of our ancient structures are built, that we had help. There has been a series on Discovery or TLC I believe called Ancient Aliens and I have to say some of the evidence that we were not alone way back when is quite compelling. For myself, I have a really hard time believing that people with such limited technology had the ability to construct something that we could not do as well now with current technology. FOCUS: Discuss your thoughts on the ancients technological abilities and the possibility that we had help.
I was not originally going to run this, but E. Tuffmen begged me to run it in a rep because it is Ancient Egypt Week at TiB. How Ancient Egyptians built the pyramids is really a fascinating question, unless you just give up and say "aliens did it," which is sort of the ultimate cop-out. What amazes me is how persistent these fuckers were with few technologies to help them. Obelisk quarrying is, to me, the most insane thing that we've discovered. The stones from which obelisks are carved were quarried out of the ground horizontally (imagine carving something shaped like a stick of butter out of the ground, but longer). The carving was not done with jackhammers, they instead used these rock balls about the size of a baseball made of Diorite and just beat them into the rock to chip it away. Once they cut a trench around the stone that was to become the obelisk, they got into the trench and just started beating the rock horizontally to carve out perforations in the bottom side. These were then filled with wood that was wet down to expand, cracking the stone away from the base. The process is described here. If we had help from aliens, apparently nobody asked them "hey, Mr. Alien, can you bring your lightsaber over here and cut this big-ass granite obelisk off the ground for me? Because I've been beating this rock against the stone all year and my arm is getting tired." ALT FOCUS: Make fun of people who believe in aliens building the pyramids.
E. Tuffmen eats paint chips, wears foil hats and cry’s when he masturbates. Hard, complex and massively difficult does not equal little green men. It's insulting to our forbears and it pisses me off when people bring this kind of nonsensical bullshit up. Rather than exploring what techniques they may have utilised and making fascinating discoveries they throw their hands in the air and proclaim "Fuck I can't imagine anyone being able to do that, it must be aliens" - Pathetic.
To be fair, there is some evidence that slaves may not have built the pyramids. As I understand it from Zahi Fucking Hawass, there are graffiti with names of work-gangs in the pyramids, and they have dug up matching work-gang camps/cemeteries nearby. Zahi Fucking Hawass claims that no slaves would ever be built in the shadow of the pyramids, so they must not have been slaves. This is a pretty big leap for me, maybe after a long, hard day of hauling rocks up to the pyramid site they just didn't feel like hauling dead Jews away from the site all night, and so they just left them there. Who knows? You know what I learned recently that blew my mind also? That there was an actual Scorpion King (and maybe two). Scorpion II wasn't a former WWE wrestler, but he was probably a warrior who may have unified Egypt's two kingdoms. I guess a lot of the protodynastic kings are known by a single symbol: King Scorpion, King Fortress, etc. We know very little about them.
Care to elaborate on this compelling evidence of yours? I'm not just trying to be a dick, I legitimately know almost nothing about Ancient Egypt. Having said that, ALT FOCUS: "Ok fellow aliens, let's go to earth so we can move massive fucking rocks for a few decades! After we build those pyramids, we're just gonna peace. We might come back and abduct some rednecks in a few thousand years, we'll see."
If the History Channel hasn't lost all credibility, the Old Testament (in Hebrew) never refers to the Jews as slaves, but with some other not-translate-so-well term. Given how quickly they became a well equipped world-class fighting force in Exodus, it's likely they had some other relationship with Egypt. Probably not high up on the pyramid (ahhaha! see what I did there?), but not quite slaves the way we think of it. Also, just think of the job security! 23 years of stable employment, and when that pyramid is finished, they'll probably build another. Alt-Focus: Jaffa, kree!
Couldn't have put it better myself. As DryFrylock noted, the Egyptian pyramids, from many indications, were not built by mostly slave labor. In fact, it was probably done by laborers who had free time in-between the yearly floodings of the Nile. Regardless, there is no question that with 500,000 to a million workers, some pretty fantastic structures could be built, like the Pyramids of Giza, the Sphinx, or the gorgeous 7-10 foot diorite statues of the pharaohs. (I can't even begin to describe how hard just getting the material and sculpting it is) By the way, a common problem with judging ancient civilizations and their "technology" is that there is the sophisticated, scientific solution to a given problem, and then there is the "good enough" practical solution. For instance, the irrigation routes that the Egyptians used was considered to be a great sign of technological advancement and ability. Indeed, it's a difficult mathematical problem. But you know how they actually decided upon them? They would take a camel which hadn't drank anything in several days, take it to the fields they wanted irrigated, and then set it loose. Then, the route that it would take to the water was what they used as an irrigation ditch. Effective? Yes. Ingenious? Absolutely. Technologically sophisticated? Not really.
Other question: I was also under the impression that there was pretty much zero evidence to the claim that the Jews had ever been enslaved by the Egyptians in the first place. I mean, I guess you can pull the "You can't produce any positive evidence that they weren't" card, but between the lack of such records in ancient Egyptian texts, plus recent archaeological efforts in the last 50 years by Israeli architects and subsequent failure to find any evidence to corroborate the story of Exodus, well, you know. As to the topic, considering that we were able to a) go to the moon within a half-century of flight being invented, and b) do so with less than the computing power of a scientific calculator, it's not that hard to imagine that humans built the pyramids with their own two hands. And I guess when you consider that people didn't so much as have books to read to pass the time back then, they obviously were motivated to do something to stave off boredom. Well, either that, or Asterix and Obelix was more of a documentary than a comedy.
<a class="postlink" href="http://www.lloydpye.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.lloydpye.com/</a> This guy not only believes aliens built the pyramids, but believes humans were actually genetically engineered by aliens.
I don't know where you got this impression, but it's wrong. While it's true that the Biblical story of Exodus has many holes in it, and many scholars don't believe that such an event took place, that's very different from saying that the Egyptians didn't own Jewish slaves. Because they did, especially since Caanan was a part of their empire at the time.
On the Pyramids and Obelisks the Pharaohs liked to brag about how they used no slave labor to build them. Source De Camp actually then goes on to say that the Pyramids weren't that difficult to build, technically speaking. Given enough men, the pyramids were easy to build. One skill that amazed me is that most of the pyramids point true north, to within a fraction of a degree. Knowing how to find true north is easy, discovering how to do this blows my mind. Here's what you do: Get a perfect hollow cylinder, or as perfect as you can make it. Stand in the dead center, and look up at the night sky. Mark where a star rises over the cylinder's edge. Then wait and mark where it sets on the cylinder's edge. Draw straight down from both marks, then into a center point of the cylinder. From there, bisect the angle and you have True North.
Please. Everyone knows the leprechauns built the pyramids before moving to Alabama because they like the humidity.
I went on holiday to Egypt last November and visited the pyramids. What no one has mentioned, and unless my tour guide was lying, they didn't build the pyramids all year round. Only when the rivers flooded as that is how the stones were brought to the area. If you visit the pyramids today you can see part of the river still. It's literally less than 400 metres from the first pyramid and less than 100 metres from the third. It was an interesting experience, but I personally prefered the trip to the Egyptian museum. Seeing the pure amount of gold that he was buried in was insane.
I did not say I believed that aliens came down from the sky and did everything for us. I've seen the stuff on obelisk building and I'm perfectly willing to believe that current wisdom has that one figured out. I've also seen people attempt to build pyramid replicas (very small scale) using the techniques they believed were used, and some of that again, looks perfectly reasonable. What I said was: "FOCUS: Discuss your thoughts on the ancients technological abilities and the possibility that we had help." The term "help" does not necessarily mean alien influence, though I would not exclude that as a possibility . Even most cosmologists now state that we are more than likely not alone in the universe. I'm obviously not a scientist, nor have I ever visited these ruins, but the things that I have read and seen on shows like Ancient Aliens seem like valid points. Current wisdom is only a theory, and to simply laugh off any theory strikes me as narrow minded. If not aliens, what about the possibility that our civilization is much older than first thought, or that there was one before recorded history that was somehow destroyed and elements of that technology somehow survived? Anything is possible, isn't it? I'm posting this because this is the part of the show that impressed me the most and what I had in mind when I said "evidence that seems pretty compelling". Fast forward to 1:40 and watch. And for the record, I do NOT eat paint chips. However, sometimes the kids and I sit around trying to tune in on the aliens, and it looks something like this:
I saw this multi-part documentary once, about a civilization from a long time ago, in some faraway galaxy or something. They had all sorts of technology we couldn't possibly reproduce today. Maybe they colonized our planet once they got sick of losing to furry forest midgets. As far as Jewish involvement, I am somewhat Jewish myself, and think I can help. Jews don't often perform manual labor. They may have recommended a good contractor, and they almost certainly arranged the financing, but hauling multi-ton stones up the side of a fake mountain? Nah. I'd bet on the Ewoks over that.
This would be a more worthwhile conversation if you actually presented any concrete facts or arguments, instead of lazily linking to a show CALLED "Ancient Aliens". Anyways, I watched a bit of the video, and apparently, their main argument is "if you look at the site of Puma Punku, there is a bunch of rubble. Feasibly, if this rubble was once a perfectly aligned structure (quite the assumption already), it must have been really big and impressive. The only possibility? ALIENS!!!!" I don't know much about Puma Punku, but I also didn't see a shred of evidence for this belief beyond more idiotic, wild assumptions. They mention that the stone is cut very fine and expertly, ignoring that most ancient civilizations had a specific job called a freaking stone-cutter whose work could rival modern-day efforts. Personally, I always found it more englightening and entertaining to read books written by historians about how ancient civilizations lived and worked then watching sensationalist, bullshit television shows about "ancient aliens". But I have never been a fan of tinfoil hats, either.
I think we have a hard time in modern times wrapping our heads around the manpower that was employed in ancient times, as has already been stated here. There is nothing that a million laborers can't build over decades.
I agree that's it's stupid to just assume it was aliens, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to think that maybe they had some sort of technology or help or something that we aren't aware of. It says in the video that there's an 800 ton slab of rock there, that would have had to been brought from at least 10 miles away. I don't know enough about this stuff to really make any conclusions, but do we know of any techniques they could have used to do that?