How old are the pyramids really. Some say they 10,000 years old and others say only 5,000 years. And is it ture that they are only 0.01 degree off longitude where as Greenwich Meridian is 0.7 degrees off, and that was built way after the pyramids with our “modern technology”?
Check out the transcript from a recent NOVA presentation: How Old Are the Pyramids? http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/pyramid/explore/howold.html It was the first entry at google.com. You should try searching google before posting your question here.
The Pyramid of Khufu (The Great Pyramid) was built about 4500 years ago. The oldest known Egyptian pyramid, the Pyramid at Sakkara, was built about 5000 years ago.
Welcome to the SDMB, by the way.
More direct answers for your OP…
In over 200 years of archaeological investigation in Egypt, there is no evidence of any civilation before about 5000 years ago - nothing - not even one pottery shard.
It was not difficult for ancient civiliations to build with precision. The “advanced” layout techniques you refer to could have been accomplished with a few sticks and a ball of twine. Every now and then a documentary will appear on PBS or TLC or DSC demonstrating the likely construction techniques of the ancients. They tend to be simple common-sense approaches - no MacGuyverism, no magic, no aliens from beyond the solar system.
“The oldest known Egyptian pyramid, the Pyramid at Sakkara, was built about 5000 years ago.”
—Really? Never would have guessed. It doesn’t look a day over 4490.
Depends on what you mean. Off of what?
It’s cuz of clean living and that dry desert air.
Not true at all. Plenty of artefacts have been found prior to 5000ya. Admittedly no monumental pyramids or temples, but plenty of shards and small art objects. Have to go now but will return with cites tomorrow.
Encyclopedia Britannica. I’ve read of these finds elsewhere, but EB is the most readily available source at the moment.
Perhaps it was an over simplification, but the essence is true - No civilization capable of erecting a pyramid-like structure existed prior to about 5000 years ago, which your cite confirms.
Checked my references last night-best data on the oldest pyramids put them at 2700 B.C.E., about 4800 years ago. Obviously, these aren’t hard numbers-but 10,000 years ago is out of the question.
Regarding the ‘.01 degree off the meridian’ comment, I assume that what’s being referred to here is the orientation-the Pyramid of Khufu is almost perfectly aligned with the Earth’s poles, with the east and west sides running almost exactly straight north & south, and the north & south sides running almost exactly straight east & west. I haven’t found any hard data explaining what ‘almost exactly’ means at this time.
Those advocating a greater age for the Pyramids, and especially the Sphynx, often cite what looks like water erosion, indicating that the climate was much wetter when they were built, and therefore, it was much longer ago than commonly thought. They’re actually right to a point. North Africa did use to be much wetter than it is now, but you need only go back 4000 years to see a significant difference. So it isn’t enough to support the belief that the Pyramids go back to the end of the Cenozoic Era.
At that time there were, it is believed, rivers in the Sahara, some of which emptied into the Nile. This is a whole other topic for elaboration and sources are hard to find, but FWIW I will cite the Time Life book African Kingdoms, in which I first read of this fact many years ago. The book had a photo essay showing some prehistoric paintings from southern Algeria, from about 8000 y.a. to 3000 y.a., and it was evident that species long vanished from the Sahara–or even the earth–were abundantly in evidence. Giraffes, elephants, hippos were all common.
However, the pictures are maddening because they cannot tell us where the people who made them came from, or where they went as their country started to dry up. The book speculates that, as the land got drier, they started to fan out, some going north and becoming the ancestors of the Berbers, some toward Egypt, and some to western and southern
Africa.
I’ll try to return with a web site later.
I’ve been waiting for one of these pyramid debates…
I have read some somewhat contraversial(sp?) books (mostly by author Graham Hancock) on the subject of the pyramids and many other ancient monuments. (I am not claiming to be an authority in any way)
As I recall there is no definite proof of the age of the pyramids, but most Egyptologists agree that they are about 4000 to 4500 years old with the Sphynx being a bit older.
To shed some light on the 10,000 years or older issue, from what I have read there are many indications that the pyramids point to, or map out, a period of time over 10,000 years ago. There are shafts inside the pyramids that point to stars in the Orion constellation that, by using procession, would indicate knowledge of a much older period. As to the alignment of the three pyramids, they are aligned almost perfectly north, south, east, and west, and their aligment relative to one another also seems to indicate the stars in Orion’s belt.
[hijack] I personally find the pyramids an amazing thing to study, as are many other man-made ancient monuments like Ankor Thom and Ankor Wat in Cambodia. I have been contemplating starting a thread in GD about ancient monuments and their relationship to constellations - anyone think this would be interesting? [/hijack]
-hashiriya-
The BBC’s science programme Horizon sometimes looks at these “controversial” types and subjects their claims to scrutiny. Their quiet, matter-of-fact, perfectly reasonable hatchet jobs on von Daniken and the Bermuda Triangle freaks still give me a warm reminiscent glow after more than twenty years.
More recently, they turned their attention to Graham Hancock, whose thesis, if I have him right, is that the positioning of various ancient monuments at sites all over the globe can be shown to relate with “uncanny accuracy” to the positions of various constellations at a specific point in the far distant past. Unfortunately, Hancock doesn’t pick out all the monuments at a given site, only the ones which support his thesis - for example, there are hundreds of monuments, large and small, which comprise the complex at Angkor Wat, but Hancock only highlights the ones that match a constellation pattern.
The snag is that if you have a lot to points to choose from, you have a pretty good chance of being able to find the patterns you want, whether they are designed that way or not. The Horizon people demonstrated this by picking a site with a lot of significant landmarks clustered together, and finding that some of them gave an “uncannily accurate” picture of the constellation Leo. The landmarks chosen included, IIRC, Bloomingdales, Madison Square Gardens, Grand Central Station…
IIRC, even Hancock now accepts the conventional dating for the construction of the Pyramids, although he has been taken in by the alternative theories which propose a far older date for the Sphinx.
I have wondered about that. While I found Hancock ideas and theories facinating, I have always wondered about why his claims were not supported by mainstream researchers. I suppose it comes down to one of those “hmmm…if it were true” sort of ideas.
None the less, I thought many of his books were a great read. Great Photography also.
Are there any videos available of the Horizon program? I would love to see the counter-point arguement to Hancock’s theories.
IIRC, in Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods he seemed to be “certain” that the pyramids were around 10,000 years old - however in a newer book Heaven’s Mirror he does indeed seem to retract from his previous claim and go with the 4000-4800 year idea.
-Finally, although the idea that these monuments point out constellations may be far fetched, what is the general consensis about the alignments to the cardinal directions and in some cases - near perfect alignment to sunrises and sunsets on the equinoxes? (sp?)
Graham Hancock is an example of pseudoscience at its very best.
Fingerprints of the Gods is not based on science. Virtually every claim that he makes in the book has been debunked and relies on sketchy logic at best. Debunking the book is a whole different thread, though.
My favorite is his conclusion- that Atlantis was in fact Antarctica, which used to be much more northwards than it is now. See, there was this big catastrophe, and everything just shifted…
For excellent debunking of pseudoscience in general, I recommend Why People Believe Weird Things by Shermer, Fantastic Archaeology by Williams, and Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries by Feder. They discuss some issues raised by Hancock as well as many other archeological frauds.
Thank you for the titles, I will look them up so I can see just how far off the beaten path Mr. Hancock really is.
I liked that one too - Earth Crust Displacement was it?! :rolleyes: