I’m using the word to mean a belief in anything that hasn’t been established as fact.
The ancient language had no concept of “belief”. People couldn’t act on what they believed and had to act on what they knew. If a modern person doesn’t understand something he won’t know. If an ancient wasn’t up with the state of the art he couldn’t even converse. Language is the way people think and ancient language didn’t allow misunderstanding about nature. It didn’t allow anyone to think he knew everything. There was no language, no words and no grammar for things that weren’t theory. You could propose a new word/ characteristic for natural phenomena but it didn’t become part of the language until it was established theory. Everything was tested by observation and natural logic.
I humbly suggest that in your “stripping down” process, you are losing the meaning of the text.
People have believed in gods and magic for all of recorded history; if that makes us bumpkins, then we’ve always been, and still are, bumpkins.
Similarly, massive public-works projects for the glorification of some leader or other are a fixture of history: the palace at Versailles, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Lincoln Memorial…
So use rollers, or wet sand, or any number of other methods. Ramps aren’t synonymous with a whole crew just shoving at a big stone until it moves.
I can’t design it, my field is financial services, not engineering.
Sure, maybe they did. I don’t have the background. But that paragraph was in service to my main point, which was that Ancient Egyptians aren’t considered ignorant savages.
That is, by far, your most extraordinary claim. Religiosity is biologically hardwired in humans, so unless we somehow evolved different brains in the last few thousand years, the Ancient Egyptians were religious too, like all other civilizations. Religion dates to the Paleolithic era, for pete’s sake! It existed before the Egyptians, concurrently with the Egyptians, and after the Egyptians.
I don’t know what science is or isn’t being done. I know Egypt is politically unstable and recently had a revolution that overthrew Hosni Mubarak, followed by the Muslim Brotherhood winning power, followed by a military coup, followed by a harsh crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood. That doesn’t sound very conducive to careful study of the local ruins.
You just don’t need to read their minds to know how the language works (it probably helps though).
No doubt there were various mental defectives or crazy people. But they all used the same language and learned the same things. It’s hard to imagine how even lunatics might come up with superstitions.
I could be wrong of course but I’m very confident that if I’m right about geysers then superstition was not a very common trait.
“Hence it runs on, till, close to the edge of the basalt pavement, it branches in two, and narrows yet more; one line runs W., and another turning nearly due S., emerges on the pavement edge at 629.8 to 633.4 from the N.E. corner of the pavement, being there only 3.6 wide. From this remarkable forking, it [p. 50] is evident that the trench cannot have been made with any ideas of sighting along it, or of its marking out a direction or azimuth; and, starting as it does, from the basalt pavement (or from any building which stood there), and running with a steady fall to the nearest point of the cliff edge, it seems exactly as if intended for a drain; the more so as there is plainly a good deal of water-weanng at a point where it falls sharply, at its enlargement.”
This says there is a water eroded canal that led to the exact point where I say there was a cliff face counterweight. These two counterweights are extremely well evidenced anbd this is proof positive it was fed with water.
Maybe if Petrie didn’t hide it in a 92 word sentence we wouldn’t have spent a century on the wrong path.
I predict it will happen first whgen Egptology is shamed into allowing infrared testing that will strongly support the theory and then they will be forced to do targeted testing that can prove it.
I already did and posted it, since you did not reply to that one has to assume that you did acknowledged already that indeed you are not doing science.
A huge part of science depends on the peer review that can guide others to push a theory forward.
Being alone and not pointing at the ones that are doing active research that are seeking to confirm your theory is a big sign that you are doing nothing more than arm chair ponderings.
I think your biggest error is in looking at the vertical seams in the sides of the Great Pyramid and concluding that they are tracks (scars?) from construction equipment.
If this were so, the tracks would be associated with rounding of the edges of the blocks in those locations. The scars would actually look like scars. Up close…they don’t. The vertical marks aren’t composed of scratches, scrapes, or scoring. They appear, instead, only as a change in the pattern of the blocks.
These vertical marks don’t support your hypothesis.
(I also wonder if “geyser” is the right word. When engineers arrange for water to be pressurized and then expelled into the air, the usual word is “fountain.” A geyser, such as those found in Yellowstone Park, is a natural phenomenon, not an artifice of engineering. The word could be used poetically – the Bible refers to certain large pots of water as “seas” – but it seems the wrong word somehow.)
Actually I believe these lines aren’t caused by mechanical means. I did at one time but no longer. I believe they are artifacts of the means used and all these means happened in the horizontal and vertical planes. I believe I’ve identified several way in which they could have been formed. Chief among them is that the stones were laid sequentially in the same order they came out of the quarry. Each looked much like the one in front and the one behind. These were then laid in rows on the pyramid which created the horizontal lines. But each of these stones that comprise the horizontal line had to first come to the course on which it was laid. Where the stones arrived on the course was necessarily the last stone laid. There was simply a tendency for these oddball stones to not match the horizontal line already in existence.
I believe the water sprayed and spurted up from the earth and they grew very dependent on its existence. In order to increase flow they dug down and this usually worked. This led to the invention of the drill in 3500 BC which worked spectacularly.
Most CO2 geysers today are still drilled wells, usually where water was already coming up. Today these geysers are of very little economic importance but they were of extreme importance in ancient times so they paid a lot of attention to them and learned a great deal about them. They learned it was the backflow (set) that was most responsible for their cessation.
So exactly how long does truth have to be ignored for it to become false? How much of the existing paradigm has to be destroyed by the truth before it is no longer ignored?
Science doesn’t deal with truth. It deals with publicly available evidence that has gone through peer review. Until you have that, you don’t really have anything.
Ok, I can see (mentally) how that could work, but it seems rather Rube-Goldberg-esque to be honest. And the thing is if someone was doing something like this, don’t you think there would be at least one drawing or picture of it somewhere in Egyptian art either of the time or later on? I mean, we have pictures of the Egyptians doing pretty much everything, from fucking to moving stones to making beer…yet, by your own admission there is zero physical evidence of this. No pictures, no artifacts of high pressure water systems, nada. Right?
On the other hand, though you keep denying it, there IS some archeological evidence of ramps used by the Egyptians. And, frankly, ramps are a much easier solution to this technical problem. I know you seem to have some hangup about ramps, thinking they show bumpkin tendencies, even after it’s been pointed out to you that ramps were used by much later and more technologically advanced cultures even into the modern age (while, as far as I know, no one including the Romans who were water experts used a system similar to what you are describing to do similar work).
However, at this point I think it’s kind of pointless to continue this. You are wedded to your pet theory, and have wrapped it in all sorts of mystical woo based horseshit, while your audience in this thread wants facts and cites, not feelings from your gut and speculations based on your interpretation of Egyptian writings filtered through a Greek historians writings thousands of years after the fact (and based on ‘priests’ or tour guides telling the foreigner a great fish story).
FWIW, it was entertaining…I actually white boarded out your idea with some brief calculations on what it would take (as well as helpful pictures of crocodiles and startled looking Egyptian workers with thought bubbles that were at least entertaining to my fellow cow-orkers).
“Peer review” is irrelevant to reality. Mother nature doesn’t sit down at a meeting of scientists and take notes for what she must do next. Reality doesn’t bend to the will of any man or any group of men. (mebbe women though )
Peer review is irrelevant in all cases. It doesn’t matter if they agree with a new idea or not. When each peer believes in geysers it will still be irrelevant. The reality might be that aliens operating under the earth forced the water to be carbonated or God planned it this way allalong. The peers won’t know but the state of the art will be that stones were pulled up the pyramid one step at a time using water from geysers. Prove me wrong or present evidence I’m wrong. Peers are always irrelevant to every argument.
I’m impressed you see it though. Yes, it’s a little rube goldberg but remember they had 800 years to develop the technology from 40,000 years of science. These were no babes in the woods as Egyptologists believe. Each advance was incremental just as it is today.
The entire language is built around pyramid building. All the art was built around pyramid building. We can’t see the art is about pyramid building because we misinterpret it just like we misinterpret everything else. They drew things like the “harmonious goddesses” who oversaw the “bull of heaven” which was one of the celestial kine (cattle). They were harmonious because one went down as the other went up and they wore wings because they flew up the pyramid represented by osiris (the geyser) standing between them in the djed which made him stable and enduring. In the djed with the geyser was the ankh which was “life” itself and a representation of the geyser because in a desert water is life. The arms are the life work of osiris which is the pyramid itself. There are depictions of every aspect of pyramid building and even a counterweight with a stone and the ribbing on the outside.
In ancienrt language they knew everything was dependent on perspective and they had three perspectives in all art; scientific, colloquial, and vulgar. Scientific perspective depicted everything in terms of processes and natural phenomena. Colloquial perspective was the interaction of man and his enviroment, and vulgar was just a drawing similarly to how we’d draw it today.
It’s not just the physical, historical, and cultural evidence that supports this theory. It’s all of the evidence but we can’t see it because we don’t think like they did. We jumped to the conclusion they were primitive and superstitious and the opposite is more true. It is we who are primitive and superstitious. We are armed with a more effective science but then use it to waste the earth’s resources with washer dryers that won’t last three years. We haven’t learned to apply our science in a century and most people are either beholden to a belief in God or a belief in science. The ancients may not have had the tremendous amount of knowledge we have today but they knew they were ignorant. They knew they were animals. Today we can’t see our ignorance and believe we exist at the crown of creation. We believe we are distinct from the animals and plants.
I’ve got lots of facts and physical evidence but people are blind to it. I point out a water worn canal leading to the cliff face and Egyptologists say it’s irrelevant. I point out that a “ramp” leads from this point on the cliff face to where the quarry is and they say irrelevant. I point out that the cliff face was extended to accomodate a counterweight run of exactly the lenght described by historians and they say it’s irrelevant. I say the water that caused the erosion originated in a mammouth water collection device built before the pyramid and they say irrelevant. I say there are vertical lines on the pyramid that allign with the counyterweights and they can’t see them. I show it’s all consistent with the culture and they say it doesn’t matter because they were gobbledty gook spouting bumpkins. I show the logic they provide bibliographies to experts who share their vapid assumptions.
I’ve done the calculations as well.
You might be interested to know that I believe they relifted a lot of the water. There is real evidence of this relifting. Also don’t forget that they were able to capture some 97% of the water and that it was all used a second time falling down the cliff face some 190’. Each pound of water delivered about 270 ft lbs of work even without relifting it. Each time it was lifted it gained another 81.25 ft lbs. The lifting mechanism was about 50% efficient and taylor made for human operation. The primary lifting means were about 65% efficient though some of this efficiency was lost in the time dimension due to erratic supply etc.
It might seem that way. I’ve had to amend my theory many times actually to accomodate new evidence (something I hadn’t known) presented by other posters. I’m quite confident there are no blatant errors in it now.
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