A guy who used to sell tyres the next town over from where my parents live also sold a lot of concrete garden decorations, including statues in some Greco-Roman style. One day he started painting them like the Romans were meant to have done, looking at those dumbed down the Romans a lot in my mind.
Sadly, the Ancient Alien idea predates him by quite a bit.
There’s also the learning experience evident in the progression of pyramids. The first pyramid was the Step Pyramid of Djozer, which is made of small-ish rock bricks. It was an inspirational improvement on the standard rectangular tombs of the day. You can see the seams where the architect (Imhotep) realized - “We can make this square instead of rectangular… add another layer…we can make this even bigger…” and kept adding. By the time of Giza they’d figured out that it was quicker and simpler and less stonework to use much bigger blocks. The Bent Pyramid was an ambitious attempt to build a sharper-angled pyramid, and the angle was changed half-way when they saw the shifting foundation causing problems - which determined the optimal angle for future pyramids. Then as the Old Kingdom declined, there were smaller pyramids built on the cheap by filling the interior with rubble instead of making it all blocks. Many of those have crumbled over time and today are a pile of gravel.
There’s very little mystery to the pyramids. Mostly awe. The Great Pyramid implies a massive assembly line going full tilt for 20 years or more.
True!
The Pyramid of Djozer is itself a hell of a thing for people to build. It’s enormous - more than twice as high as the pyramid at Chichen Itza. It’s part of a huge complex and would have taken a level of organization, planning, engineering and management that very few, if any, other peoples in the 27th century BC could have mustered.
Do we know that? As in, were there no beasts of burden in Britain when Stonehenge was erected? (I realize I have no idea when horses and cattle came to Britain.)
That wasn’t MrDibble’s point 
The notion that ancient people were stupid savages has finally turned around. This past weekend more than one media talking head uttered amazement at our ability to reconstruct the Notre Dame cathedral after it was damaged by fire 5 years ago. Yes folks, it’s true, here in the 21st century we at last have advanced engineering to the point where we can repair a structure built over 800 years ago by people using minimal technology.
The thing is that ancient peoples were appallingly stupid as compared to us in some things. In many things that matter to us. Electricity was of course utterly beyond their conception. Most people couldn’t read.
But we are very stupid as compared to them in many things that were important to THEM. Of course we could build another Pyramid now, so that’s not a great example, but the fact they could do it doesn’t strike me as being hard to believe.
Hell, that’s true today. Jared Diamond, IIRC, was the one who notes that a person in the interior of New Guinea in the 1930s might not have known much about electricity or airplanes, but many of those people had a command of local flora and their uses and dangers that would have put a botanist to shame.
I’d say the Arab (or maybe Vandal) conquest. The Egyptians of the Hellenistic period definitely still had historical traditions that said which king built the pyramids and considered themselves the descendants of the pyramid builders (even if they were temporarily ruled by Greeks and then Romans)
Don’t kid yourself into thinking people today understand electricity. The other day, I found myself patiently explaining to some kid concepts like “voltage” and “current” and “frequency”, and how power comes into the mains via “transformers”.
As for reading, maybe many people formally are taught how to read, but in practice sometimes it does not seem like it… 
It’s more than “seems.” There was a depressing statistic in the local news recently that something like 45% of the people in my city can’t read at higher than third grade level.
That’s ignorance, not stupidity. Very different.
Right So not a huge mystery then- still how they built it was a bit of a mystery.
And then never found any Mummies in any of the pyramids -well, some smaller ones out in the middle of nowhere were recently found to have some. This led some to think they were a cenotaph, not a burial place or maybe a decoy for the real.So, that is a real mystery. But definitely the Great Pyramid was built for Cheops.
They were never grain storage, however. Or batteries.
But they did keep Cheops razor blades really sharp… 
Which predates the Great Pyramid.
Well, sort of. Stonehenge was built over the course of thousands of years, by at least three distinct cultures. The earliest constructions on the site are older than the Pyramids, but most of it is much newer.
Here’s an interesing link with a more in depth examination of the process and issues for the most likely method of building the pyramids.
https://cheops-pyramid.net/en/
BTW, if you visit Luxor’s Karnak Temple Complex, (OK, so it’s Middle Kingdom) there’s a spot behind the first pylon where remains of a mud brick ramp is still visible to get blocks up to the top. They were still building the wall when the dastardly foreigners invaded, and everyone decided drop tools and make themselves scarce. There’s also at least one unfinished pillar, they built a pillar of rough square stone blocks and then would carve the nice round shape with the fancy capital once everything was mortared in place.
Julius Caesar is quite famous for the scale of earthworks and construction that his forces undertook in the aim of conquest. I believe that one of their undertakings was to turn a massive island into a peninsula, in a matter of a few months.
The ability of sheer manpower to accomplish megalithic tasks would probably have been well understood by the Romans.
If you think about it, the Roman system of paved roads was, in total, a far greater architectural wonder than the Pyramids. And the aqueducts weren’t too shabby, either.
Caesar, or Alexander?
Good points.
Mind you the Greeks had some wonderful hypothetical ideas…