THE major flaw in all of this is your need to have the Tower of Babel story to be literally true.
From which ‘follows’:
That there was one single ancient language.
That this language is the Egyptian language of around 2500 BC.
That they had no Gods and any mention of them is meant to be a physical phenomenon.
Everything falls flat when you realise that Egyptian is NOT the only language around in 2500BC and that it is basically the same as the Ramesside Egyptian as written 1000 years later.
There is absolutely no reason to assume that the Pyramid Texts are in this mythical language of yours. Even less because there are more ancient Egyptian writings and they differ more from the PT in style and glyphs than the writings from the time of Ramses.
Draw any comparison you like. The point is that you accept as genuine, whether reasonable or not, the motives for building cathedrals, but deny that those could be essentially the same motives for building pyramids. Can you explain what difference you see?
There seem to be several prpoblems here rather than a single one. Among those who are more knowledgeable about these specifics it’s not that my “facts” are questioned but that they are interpreted differently. It seems almost every single individual has one specific and overriding objection and these mostly fall into several categories. This leads me to suspect that the cause is chiefly language.
One individual told me recently that his primary hangup has been use of the term “metaphysical”. Apparently this word has been usurped in recent times by the pitchers of woo and it has no real concrete meaning and is more like a buzzword. But this is an important word that refers to the basis of science. People have lost sight of the basis of science so they have necessarily lost sight of the meaning of science since all scientific truth applies strictly within its metaphysics. Extrapolation scientific knowledge is like applying math to the real world inappropriately. We must build models and paradigms but these models are strictly to help in visualization rather than a mental version of reality itself.
This is where we have gone so far astray. We take our beliefs as reality rather than axiomatically. As soon as I say “pyramid” people picture stinky footed bumpkins who were exactly like us dragging stones around made strong by their superstitions. To win an argument you must find the premises on which you differ and these premises are obviously very very deep. They were learned as language on their parents knee.
cladking, I’d like to back up a step. You’ve been posting bits and pieces of your pyramid-building idea, and it’s been pretty fragmented, so someone would have to read many pages of this thread just to understand the basic outlines. But I have a more fundamental question:
How did you come to know this stuff? Are you getting it from reading the Pyramid Texts? I’m no Egyptologist - I had never even heard of the PT before this thread. Do you read the hieroglyphics themselves, or do you read the English translations? It seems your interpretations differ from those of everyone else on the planet who reads them - how do you know your interpretations are the correct ones?
It’s almost as if he has some different, hidden agenda. Hmmmmm…One notes that ever since cladking joined this thread, we’ve stopped talking about the aliens. Which raises the interesting question: is cladking one of the Lizard People? :eek:
Of course it’s not impossible that they had the exact same motivation. Perhaps they used geysers for religious reasons.
I’m merely saying that it is highly improbable that any sane society would throw away tens of thousands of manlives for religious constructions. If the pyramids were tombs and they were dragged up ramps then the ancient Egyptians weren’t sane. It’s not only the wasted lives but the endangerment of the entire population caused by wasting (consuming) vast resources while there was no crop in the ground.
Our view of the reality of pyramid building must be wrong.
Why would they do it the hard way and then leave evidence for an easy way?
There simply were never any ramps so maybe this thing was far easier to build than people are imagining. Just getting rid of the ramps cuts the job in two and makes it far easier for the workers. I believe if we pursue the physical evidence using moder science we will discover and prove these structures were made with a small fraction of the work than we currently believe.
It’s a complicated answer and i’d be happy to provide more details if you like.
It started in 2006 when I first saw an aerial picture of the Great Pyramid with objects to estimate size. My visceral knowledge told me at a glance that they didn’t use ramps tolift all these stones. Almost immediately I figured they must have used counterweights but then I knew efficiency of counterweights was poor. Within a few seconds I had simply stumbled on trhe idea that they used water accumulated naturally to lift the stone. Of course you’re thinking “confirmation bias”. I fully expected five minutes of googling would show that this was an impossibility but instead everything just fell in line.
Of course I lacked a water source and looked high and low for one. There was none but there was a tantalyzing clue early on. The ancient name for Giza meant “Mouth of Caves”. I was still toying around with artesian wells and the like when an Egypotologist told me I could never understand the Egyptians until I understood the Pyramid Text. I read it and was aghast. It simply was gobbledty gook but there were bits and pieces that looked “familiar” so I kept reading it over and over trying to deduce the meaning of words. These words started to resolve themselves so I began a more systematic process to solve it. Eventually I realized I needed to understand each of the gods individually and then many more things began falling into place.
One of the earlier terms I solved was “I3.t-wt.t” (risings begetter) which was their word for carbon dioxide and, of course this gave me the concept of “geysers”. I stilldon’t know many of the grammatical rules and no doiubt a lot of information will be hiding here.
I started by tripping over the answer but the first months was largely taken up searching physiucal evidence in order toreverse engineer the pyramid. I hadn’t made a lot of progress in this until I began solving the PT which told me exactly where to look for the evidence. This was a very important part of the reverse engineering process but it wasn’t the entirety of it. To a real extent these questions did resolve themselves and are still resolving themselves simultaneously.
I doubt I can make a lot more pregress on the PT but there are bits and scraps of other data. For instance my most recent discovery was the lead quarryman was called the “Chief Sculptor”. This solved the minor inconsistency in my theory that the most numerous job wasn’t represented in list of known titles. This makes sense now since there would probabvly just be a few low level straw bosses and lots of “sculptors”. The other workers in the quarry were overseen by the “Weigher/ Reckoner”.
There are still dozens of leads. I make good progress when I work on it but I devote more time to trying to get Egyptologists to do their damn jobs. It won’t happen until people demand data… …and maybe no even then.
That’d lead me to conclude that there were multiple, serious, flaws with your theory, but that’s just me.
If “we must build models”, then how about you actually build a model? It’s bizarre to complain about “mental versions of reality” and “taking our beliefs as reality”, then refusing to use something concrete and external to yourself, like a model, to support your theory. Instead you rely on purely abstract and internal evidence, such as your interpretation of texts, or your confidence that your theoretical machine would actually work.
Take your own advice, is what I’m saying. Do the work, build models, falsify your ideas. Get outside your head.
To win, you’d have to demonstrate that your premises are correct, not merely that they exist.
And those are just the purely religious ones, things like Lenin’s Mausoleum or the Emperors Yan and Huang are just as extravagant to people who don’t value the subject being honored.
It’s not that the human race is insane, it’s that you can’t conceive of valuing religion to the point of expending resources on it; a failure of imagination on your part.
No, it’s highly probable. As we have thousands of examples, throughout history, of people spending hughe amounts of resources on religious buildings and tombs.
Again! While the land is flooded there is plenty of time to do other stuff.
You are entitled to your opinion, but it ignores the scores of other religious erections around the ancient world, all built for religious reasons. To say otherwise is just denialism.
[QUOTE=cladking]
It started in 2006 when I first saw an aerial picture of the Great Pyramid with objects to estimate size. My visceral knowledge told me at a glance that they didn’t use ramps tolift all these stones. Almost immediately I figured they must have used counterweights but then I knew efficiency of counterweights was poor. Within a few seconds I had simply stumbled on trhe idea that they used water accumulated naturally to lift the stone. Of course you’re thinking “confirmation bias”. I fully expected five minutes of googling would show that this was an impossibility but instead everything just fell in line.
[/QUOTE]
My emphasis. No, actually I’m thinking strawman…you have a strawman concept of what ramps are and how they were used in the past, and you have a very tenuous idea of physics and material science so this lead you to the belief that ramps are impossible and the only viable way to do the job was your magical lifting machine.
Really? I can’t find a cite for this assertion. Do you have one?
It’s highly ironic that the very thing you accuse ‘Egyptologists’ of is the very thing you are most guilty of…which is bothering to test a hypothesis in the real world to see if it works.
I’m no linguist but I do know how to ask linguists questions. I know they believe there were distinct languages before 2000 BC but as far as I can tell they can’t show it. I believe the ancient language had dialects. Vocabulary was only similar and writing was very different but they were all formatted and expressed meaning the same way. It was a relatively process to open up a dialog between these dialects. All dialects were the “words of the gods” so it was merely a matter of learning different pronunciations of a relative handful of words.
So, basically, you know nothing of the language, you just read the translation, nor about the religion, which was gobbeldy gook to you.
You then started to stare yourself blind on these translations, making shit up, ignoring the vast array of other texts and the language itself, plus known history.
You are trying to hammer your square peg through the round hole, while the round peg is just lying there.
Why study the round peg when you can make shit up for yourself. I mean, what do all these people know who have studied all this shit for over 200 years.
Got it.
What is this “visceral knowledge” of which you speak? My initial impression is that it’s your euphemism for your gut feel. Is that right?
Did you read the hieroglyphics directly, or translations? And what do you mean that they started to resolve themselves? I don’t understand what you’re saying with that.
How did you solve it, and how do you know it’s right? I saw you post earlier about this and yeast, but I strongly doubt that the ancient Egyptians would know that bread rising would be the same molecule as what carbonates water. Have you convinced others that your translation is correct?
How did you discover this? What makes you think your discovery is correct? Have you convinced anyone else?
You’ve walked me through some of the timeline, but what I was really asking is: how do you know? It looks to me suspiciously like making shit up then using your own, uh, let’s say “unique” translations to confirm it.
There were already multiple distinct writing systems for multiple languages by 2000 BC, and since long before then. Considering how different many of these scripts and languages were back then, there’s no way they split from a common ancestor recently – it must have been long, long before that time, which means that any ‘universal language’ (e.g. the first language used by humans) was long, long before 2000 BC.
You know how Eskimos have 20 words for “snow”? Egyptians had to use the SAME word for snow, water, rain, tree, coat, stick, feet, oar, fig, brown, cat and anniversary.