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> , attributing their creation to Plato's lost civilization of Atlantis over 11,500 years ago what is with the obsession that ancient egyptians were incapable
by wnevets 2y ago
> , attributing their creation to Plato's lost civilization of Atlantis over 11,500 years ago
what is with the obsession that ancient egyptians were incapable of building these monuments?
- alephnerd 2y ago[flagged]
- chucke1992 2y agoExcept the heirs of that ancient civilization disappeared post Ptolemy dynasty. It has never been that old Egypt again.
- tiffanyh 2y agoThat's ridiculous. How do you explain Stonehenge then? (which was built in England yet no one can explain how Brits did it) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonehenge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonehenge
- alephnerd 2y agoI was disputing the notion that Egyptians CAN'T build monuments. I think my tone might have been too tongue in cheek. > which was built in England yet no one can explain how Brits did it To quote one of my favorite Adult Swim shows (China IL) - "F**ing people figured it out ... Nerd don't estimate all of humanity by the limits of your capabilites"
- lupusreal 2y agoI don't think anybody says the Egyptians couldn't build the Sphinx, they obviously built a lot of stuff at that scale or larger which isn't disputed. Plenty of people do claim that about the pyramids, but that's a separate and (IMHO) far kookier claim than the Sphinx stuff.
- alephnerd 2y ago> I don't think anybody says the Egyptians couldn't build the Sphinx That's what the hypothesis u/tiffanyh EXPLICITLY says, and connects with the larger theory of Atlantis and Thule. They already brought up the fairly discredited hypothesis that humans couldn't have built Stonehenge, ignoring the fact the prehistoric megaliths are actually fairly common, and "simple machines" are a fairly well known concept throughout much of history, and forced labor was VERY common throughout much of history.
- lupusreal 2y ago> That's what the hypothesis u/tiffanyh EXPLICITLY says No it isn't. The Sphinx water erosion idea says that the Sphinx is too old to have been built by the Egyptians, not that the Egyptians were incapable of building things like the Sphinx. The claimed evidence is apparent water erosion on the Sphinx and climate records, not the complexity of the Sphinx. > They already brought up the fairly discredited hypothesis that humans couldn't have built Stonehenge They didn't say humans couldn't build the Stonehenge, they claimed that nobody knows how it was done. They can clarify if they wish but I take this to be a rebuttal of your argument that "alternate" theories about ancient megaliths are obviously rooted in racism; Stonehenge is the subject of such interest despite being European. It's not motivated by some sort of racist desire to show that Britons are racially inferior people who can't stack some stones, it's just a legitimately interesting thing to wonder about.
- Hikikomori 2y agoThere's plenty of people saying that, they're not serious scholars but they're people. From aliens did it to a race of white people travelled the world and shared their technology before a cataclysmic flood.
- zaphirplane 2y agoWhat’s mysterious about its construction, is it the sourcing of the stones or some precision in the circle
- abc_lisper 2y agoEach stone weighed 25 tons.
- Suppafly 2y agoI'm not sure why people think it's impossible just because they were large and heavy, we see all sorts of other prehistoric things requiring similar effort and modern scientists have replicated the steps necessary. You can move a lot of weight if you have thousands of people involved doing the work.
- foobarian 2y agoThat reminds me of the various tug-of-war contests around the world where the contestants manage to snap impossibly thick ropes. E.g. > The 1,600 participants exerted over 180,000 pounds of force on a 2-inch thick nylon rope designed to withstand only 57,000 pounds. Amidst cheers, the rope violently snapped; the sheer rebounding force tore off the left arm of the first man on each side. [1] https://priceonomics.com/a-history-of-tug-of-war-fatalities/ https://priceonomics.com/a-history-of-tug-of-war-fatalities/
- abc_lisper 2y agoIdk, because people are unbelievably not bright. Like humans have hardly evolved in last 200k years, yet, we have made most of the time we had only in the last 500 years. Wheel was "only" invented 6000 years ago. We are only slightly above natural selection in selecting what works. Newton was the first guy to use averages in experimental results - and look at all the brilliant people before him! Socrates, and I am fan, thought writing things down makes people lazy, democracy is a stupid etc - he is arguably one of our finest, and had awesome arguments to back his assertions, yet, he didn't know what works. People only learn through practice, mistakes and improvement. The rest is bogus 99.9% of time. This is why I think we are only slightly above natural selection.
- abc_lisper 2y agoTo be clear, it wasn't Anglo saxons nor the Celts nor the steppe invaders before them who built the Stonehenge, though some of their DNA survives in the current population. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47938188 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47938188
- card_zero 2y ago> The ancestors of the people who built Stonehenge > the Neolithic migrants to Britain appear to have introduced the tradition of building monuments using large stones known as megaliths. I mean, OK, yes, but Stonehenge was built in multiple phases by different groups of people over centuries. These farming migrants with Eastern Mediterranean grandparents built phases I and II, which had small stones (the bluestones from Wales, initially placed as grave markers before being moved around a lot) and lots of wooden posts. The impressive phase with the sarsens, the big stones people picture if you say "picture Stonehenge", is Stonehenge III, and that was built by Beaker People, the steppe invaders. Inspired from the culture of their predecessors, I guess, but maybe for completely different purposes, in so far as any of it had a purpose. The sarsens were connected at the top with woodworking joints, BTW, as if there was a risk they might fall off without pegs to hold them in place. I've never been sure what to make of that, but my best guess is "tradition". (A previous guess was "everybody in prehistory was drunk".)
- loufe 2y agoI'd argue parent's comment was clearly sarcastic.
- sonicanatidae 2y ago[dead]
- jedberg 2y ago> which was built in England yet no one can explain how Brits did it There was a guy who rebuilt a section of Stonehenge using only techniques that could have been used thousands of years ago, and explained how it was possible to build it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K7q20VzwVs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K7q20VzwVs
- guerby 2y agoThanks! Made my day :)
- alephnerd 2y agoI recommmend watching similar videos about the monoliths in Easter Island. Human Innovation is amazing. If only we can channel that into renewables constructively (don't give me Big Oil bullshit. I told enough of them my mind and my peers did to which is why we have a renewables boom now)
- shufflerofrocks 2y ago>don't give me Big Oil bullshit. I told enough of them my mind and my peers did to which is why we have a renewables boom now Could you clarify here? Are you saying that Big Oil has reduced their interference in renewables research? or that it was never the case?
- hennyting 2y agoYou can tell Wally was done with fools claiming that modern tools couldn't do x and y. "Just a big teetertotter with a big kid on one side"
- dudheidbdbdi 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- autokad 2y agoNo. part of it is that its hard for many to believe that civilization can regress for very long periods of time. They were the tallest man-made structures for 3800 years. The engineering and quality of construction was mostly unmatched throughout that duration. Another issue is that 'scientists' refused to acknowledge that Egypt and most of Northern Africa was lush and green for some time. The people claimed the gods pulled the sun accross the sky and changed the climate. 'scientits' were like "wow you are so stupid, it doesnt work like that, it was never green and you killed what ever green there was by over farming". Turns out, it was a change in Earths tilt. going along with that theme, we tend to ignore what we are told. The egyptians left depictions of how they did it, by rolling the blocks on large logs and throwing water in front of them, and they left notebooks describing how they sourced the blocks and shiped them down the nile on the river. turns out, after 4000 years, we still don't read the f'ing documentation.
- alephnerd 2y agoRead about the person who created the hypothesis GP mentioned (Schwaller de Lubicz). I'm not disputing the climate change part, I'm disputing the Atlantis part
- mcphage 2y ago> The engineering and quality of construction was mostly unmatched throughout that duration. That's definitely not true. They didn't build pyramids of that size after the Old Kingdom, but they definitely had impressive engineering and crafts. The largest computer ever built was finished in 1963—why don't we build computers that large anymore? Because "largest computer" isn't a useful metric.
- autokad 2y agoThe grandeur of the Great Pyramids is widely acknowledged as the pinnacle of pyramid construction (pun intended). Despite their impressiveness, other pyramids fell short in comparison (also pun intended). Your argument suffers from flawed logic by attempting to directly equate the construction of a physical structure with that of a computer. Moreover, the greatness of the Great Pyramids of Giza cannot be solely attributed to their size; they possess other notable aspects as well.
- genman 2y ago[flagged]
- alephnerd 2y agoAncient Egyptians BECAME Romans then BECAME Byzantines then BECAME Arabs. Just like Byzantines BECAME Arabs and Turks. Arab is a linguistic designation, not a racial designation.
- pirate787 2y agoThey became Greeks before that. The Ptolemaic pharaohs were Macedonians. Alexandria, Egypt, the second greatest city, was founded by Alexander the Great and was 35% Jewish.
- sethrin 2y agoI mean yes, the ruling class was Macedonian for a while, but saying "Egyptians became Greeks" is broadly not true.
- kbolino 2y agoNone of these conversions were absolute. Moreover, you missed a rather important one: the Hellenic/Greek era of the Ptolemaic dynasty, from which we get the still-spoken Coptic language, which was formed from a mix of Ancient Greek and the indigenous Demotic Egyptian language. Language is not race, but it is strongly intertwined with ethnicity and culture in most parts of the world.
- alephnerd 2y agoI pointed out Roman for that reason, as middle-late Roman culture itself was largely derived and built on top of Hellenic influence. Just look at how different Etruscan and early Roman civilization was compared to Rome after the Macedonian and Achaean wars
- 2y ago
- spiderice 2y agoCongrats you made the only racist comment in this entire thread
- adastra22 2y agoIn the specific case of the Great Sphinx, there is evidence that it was an existing structure repurposed by Khafre and may have predated the rest of the Giza complex by thousands of years. Atlantis and 11.5ky is crazy talk though.
- kuprel 2y agoWhat if they’re even older than 11.5ky? Neanderthals had larger brains and have been around for half a million years
- jvanderbot 2y agoWell that'd be quite unexpected and surprising, I'd say!
- spookie 2y agoLarger brains don't mean a whole lot. Look at crows. If you do question they do have relatively big brains for their size... That's completely fair. Still, current research still hasn't proven if it's indeed causal, and not just correlated.
- moomoo11 2y agoSomeone told me that an ancient civilization got to nuclear power and destroyed the planet resetting civilization. I guess with enough mind altering (diminishing) drugs anything is possible. Idk why it’s always these wacko types who are into this kind of ancient history. It’s annoying.
- cultofmetatron 2y ago> got to nuclear power and destroyed the planet resetting civilization don't even know why they need to get that far. we already know the younger dryas was a time period of extreme climate swings and natural disasters with purely natural causes. a civilization existing before that time could have been advanced without needing to have achieved nuclear. plus its pretty trivial to prove that no prexisting civilization made it to the fossil fuel era. never-mind NUCLEAR age.
- schmidt_fifty 2y ago> what is with the obsession that ancient egyptians were incapable of building these monuments? It's part of the broader new age movement. It coincided with the rise of commodification of the identity, individualism of the 80s and 90s, and the self-care movement. People express beliefs in a higher power as a way of dealing with many things, and many new age people look either to the stars or into "other dimensions" (whatever that means) for these higher powers. I'd also like to point out that although you could view this as being cynical about the capacity of humanity, you could also view this as hope that someone will save us from ourselves. You can also see this in political belief with eg posadism (where dolphins/aliens elevate us after we destroy ourselves with nuclear warfare and recuperate by turning to communism, which to be fair is also basically the plot of star trek) or the belief that a free market expresses superhuman collective rationalism that will save us from individual failings.
- DiggyJohnson 2y agoAppreciate the comment. Are you a real person?
- schmidt_fifty 2y agoYes, of course. What kind of comment is this? EDIT: to be clear, I think the idea of alien involvement in pyramids is ridiculous. I'm just answering the question.
- ithkuil 2y ago> what kind of comment is this? It's part of a broader new new age movement. The race to the bottom in the quality of online comments made any informative content immediately suspect of being produced by LLMs which got trained on the few trillion high quality tokens that are encoding all human knowledge.
- robocat 2y ago> few trillion high quality tokens Where are these high quality tokens you speak of? In the dark net? Maybe my input filters are set incorrectly but I don't see too many myself. And I'm fairly sure most of the tokens I write are not up to training qwuality.
- akira2501 2y agoThe lack of tools and historical documents that explain the feat. It is hard to believe that thousands of people made these monuments simply by using "pounding stones" to extract them from quarries. Many construction theories otherwise paint a picture of a labor environment that's almost impossible to imagine.
- Hikikomori 2y agoNot really, plenty of tools have been found and techniques have been successfully tried https://youtu.be/L3A_kItgymQ https://youtu.be/L3A_kItgymQ
- sjtgraham 2y agoThey're in Egypt, the builders would have been "Ancient Egyptians" regardless of whether that means dynastic Ancient Egyptians or a pre-dynastic "lost civilization". That being said there are a lot of interesting unanswered questions, e.g. why are pyramids newer than the Giza complex less-sophisticated? The fact that we don't know how they are built tells you all of these are still questions completely unanswered by archeology.
- dylan604 2y agoWere there less laborers available after the Giza pyramids? Of course s/laborers/slaves/ would be implied. If the labor force was smaller later, would that contribute to less-sophisticated?
- mkl 2y ago> Of course s/laborers/slaves/ would be implied. Not if you want to be accurate: https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/were-the-egyptian-pyramids-built-by-slaves https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/were-the-egyptian-pyram..., https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/who-built-the-egyptian-pyramids-not-slaves https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/who-built-the-..., https://www.worldatlas.com/ancient-world/were-slaves-used-to-build-the-pyramids-debunking-a-long-standing-myth.html https://www.worldatlas.com/ancient-world/were-slaves-used-to...
- pavlov 2y agoWhy is New York Penn Station so ugly and drab compared to Grand Central even though it’s newer? Even the style of decoration is entirely different and much richer on the older and larger building. Could it simply be a question of society’s priorities and resourcing? Nah. After all the Americans were a fairly primitive culture primarily known for hamburgers and baseball. Most likely Grand Central was built by aliens or an older Native American culture.
- philwelch 2y agoThe obvious conclusion would be that Penn Station was built during a period of cultural decline, which turns out to be both true and interesting.
- 6SixTy 2y ago[flagged]
- gnatman 2y agoIndiana Jones & Short Round fought the Thuggee cult in the 2nd movie.
- selimthegrim 2y agoAryans all
- saalweachter 2y agoTechnically, that was the first movie in the timeline. Well, was. Timeline wise, the enemies go Nazis (212BC), Thuggee cultists (1935), Nazis (1936), Nazis (1939), Russians (1957), and Nazis (1969).
- spiderice 2y agoBelieving something was too advanced for an ancient civilization isn’t racism. Stop trying to square peg a round hole.
- gembeMx 2y ago[dead]
- goodluckchuck 2y agoThe particular reference to Egyptians is a red herring, since nobody else built pyramids of this sort (that survive and are known). I expect that if they were located in China or Europe (and no where else), people would equally wonder how the Chinese or Europeans could have been so unique as to build something of the sort.
- bluGill 2y agoThere are a number of Pyramids in Mexico. Unless your definition of "this type" is very narrow that disproves your point.
- goodluckchuck 2y agoI don’t think it’s very narrow to note that the Pyramid of the Sun was built with stones that a single man can carry on his own. It’s impressive at half the size of the largest Egyptian pyramids, but it doesn’t really raise the question of how. They just got a lot of people to carry a lot of stones, maybe using carts or something. The Egyptian pyramids easily make one wonder “How did people move such large stones?” I could never move those with strength alone. Some form of technology / leverage / something was needed for the Egyptian pyramids which wasn’t needed for the American ones. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/Comparison_of_pyramids_SMIL.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/Comparis...
- DoItToMe81 2y agoSome of the Pyramids were the largest structures in human history until the industrial age. They're definitely worthy of being considered their own category.
- zepolen 2y agoBecause all the evidence points to ancient civilizations building these monuments that the ancient egyptians repurposed.
- wnevets 2y agoCan you have links to all of this the evidence that isn't a youtube video or podcast?
- Hikikomori 2y agoLike?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- EnjoyOneBliki 2y agoMaybe because that's what they themselves believed?