OK, so we were watching this show on Discovery about pyramids around the world. One of the “facts” presented was that the three Great Pyramids of Giza are aligned exactly the same as the three stars of Orion’s belt. Moreover, mysterious shafts from the surface of the Great Pyramid to an interior chamber seem to have been designed
to enable someone inside the pyramid to peer up at one of the stars in Orion’s Belt–except that, due to the precession of the equinoxes, those stars wouldn’t been visible through that shaft–unless the Great Pyramid was built not 4600 years ago, as most authorities believe, but 12500 years ago. If memory serves, the Egyptians under the early Pharoahs were just beginning to use bronze, and many of their tools were still chipped flint. So one might argue that there was no major techological advance between 10500 B.C.E. and 2600 B.C.E., but nowhere have I read of evidence that Egyptian social organization was sufficiently advanced in 10500 B.C.E. to embark on massive construction projects.
Some of this evidence sounded quite compelling, but other ideas in the show seemed problematic. For example, they asked why everyone seemed to have built pyramids all over the world, and they left unmentioned the most obvious reason, which is that a pyramid is far easier to engineer than a straight-sided building.
So what are your arguments? I put this thread here because I’m hoping it will become a debate, and that some knowledgeable Dopers will share their expertise.
Well, the reason they were able to create such impressive architecture is because the Goa’uld gave them…
…never mind.
If you want to find out more of this theory, check out Graham Hancocks’ Fingerprints Of The Gods.
All of his books are pretty fun and easy reads-a couple hours at your local BookBorg and you’ll be able to read them.
He is the main proponent of the theory and goes into more detail and explanation. He also brings in Angkor Wat, Antarctica, and the submerged cities off of Japans’ coast.
I like it as an elegant exercize in creative use of coincidence, but there is just enough meat in there to keep me guessing.
Check out what a real astronomer has to say about the subject, and you’ll probably conclude that yes, “Discovery” is a crock, which will doubtless surprise nobody. Short answer: yup, the pyramid alignment may well have been related in some way to the Orion’s belt stars. Nope, there is absolutely no reason to infer a specific relationship that requires us to toss out everything we now accept about Old Kingdom Egyptian history.
Astrochronology (the dating of human history by supposed textual or artefactual references to astronomical events) is some weird shit, man. It never ceases to amaze me how eager people are to throw away entire historical models which are extremely well established and supported, simply on the basis of some “incontrovertible” astronomical evidence that itself rests on the way they choose to interpret the text or artefact. As a historian of Indian astronomy, I deal with lots of people who are absolutely convinced that the ancient Vedic texts are anywhere from three to ten millennia older than historians believe, merely on account of a few vague references to certain stars. That’s a crock too, IMHO. The “standard model” of ancient history certainly still has a lot of gaps and unanswered questions, but if you’re going to go tossing around assertions that the chronology of the whole thing is off by several millennia, you’d damn well better have an alternative model that’s more consistent and complete than a feeble “well, but the astronomical evidence proves it.” Pooh.
Don’t go to Hancock’s book for this. The real author is Robert Bauval, in his book The Orion Mystery. Bauval later co-authored books with Hancock. He has his own website.
FWIW, I think that Bauval is surprisingly correct in his first book. The positions of the belt stars in Orion are duplicated with considerable accuracy by the three pyramids at Giza. The shafts (as was recognized well before Bauval) do align with important stars, including the belt stars. This does not require a belief in the pyramids being 12,500 years old, however.
Bauval is a believer in Edgar Cayce, and it shows in his first book, although he keeps his beliefs in check. It is his later work, especially his collaborations with Hancock, that go beyond what I can accept. I find the idea of world-girdling civilizations tens of millenia old hard to reconcile with the lack of evidence.
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Sad, but undoubtedly true. Didn’t Discovery use to be fairly reputable? Did Fox take them over or something?
It doesn’t amaze me at all. In the popular mind, “proving” that civilized society is thousands of years older than previously thought is the next best thing to intelligent life on Mars. Ancient history seems to hit a “wall” at 3000 BCE; those who claim to breach that wall invariably command a lot of attention, though it is unwarranted.
If those “cities” are the basaltic formations that only look vaguely “built” if the camera angle is adjusted in the most favorable light, then I wouldn’t put much credence in anything else he presented, either.
It’s not that “the Discovery Channel used to be fairly reputable”, or that “Fox bought them and dragged them down”. It’s that they have always had an interesting mix of “science” and “fringe” and “out in left field” shows. So a show with a serious discussion of the human genome project can be immediately followed by a show on how “they” are using cloning to make lots of little Adolf Hitlers, and a show on the history of the Knights Templar can be followed by a show on the secrets of the lost Templar treasure. Javaman, I’d like to know which Discovery Channel show you saw this on. Was it something like “Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World”? Or was it something serious, like “Land of the Pyramids”?
Was it a repeat of the BBC show, “Atlantis Reborn”, which is what Professor Fairall in Kimstu’s link is addressing? (Curse you, K, for beating me to it. )
Undersea cities straight from the horses mouth, or should I say horses ass. If these pictures don’t convince you…
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it yet again, Hancock is the Erich Von Daniken of the new millennium. 95% of what he says has no evidence to back it up. The other 5% have very shaky and misinterpreted evidence in support.
Was this the same documentary that tried to show that the Sphinx was much, much older than imagined? That documentary featured a geologist who claims geologic proof, and at least one archaeologist/anthrolopologist is onboard suggesting a very primitive cultural beginning around 15000 BC. They even speculated that the Sphinx was perhaps a lion’s head at first. If so, it is conceiveable that the pyramids evolved over time. Started out a small cairns in 12000 C, then got huge. History loses most of its footing before written records, and some of those are just public relations.
On the thoroughly wretched Fox show Live from the Pyramids, a claim far more ridiculous than this was made:
The stars in Orion’s belt move a tiny little bit every year. This is called their proper motion. In this century, the proper motions of stars have been measured with great accuracy, and extrapolated forward or back in time many thousands of years. (This part of the claim is absolutely true.)
Some nutcase claimed that the arrangement of the Giza pyramids doesn’t precisely match the arrangement of the stars in Orion’s belt in the present day, nor does it precisely match the arrangement of the stars in Orion’s belt 5000 years ago – but it does precisely match the arrangement of the stars in Orion’s belt 10,000 years ago. And, therefore, the pyramids were actually built 10,000 years ago. :rolleyes:
I have no data on whether this claim about the positions of the Orion belt stars 10,000 years ago is true or not. I suspect that the belt stars don’t show enough proper motion to make a significant difference over a mere 10,000 years, and that the alignment of the pyramids with the belt stars is not so “exact” as the proponents of this hypothesis like to claim.
I don’t know if there was any documentary devoted entirely to that one subject, but this was one of the topics brought up on Fox’s Live from the Pyramids.
Fox did a very, very, very dirty thing when presenting this evidence. They quoted the geologist out of context.
The geologist claimed that the erosion on the sides of the Sphinx looked like water erosion. Since rain had not fallen in the Giza plateau for over 6000 years, the geologist figured the Sphinx had to be older than this. (Note: The geologist was wrong. It turns out that the same look can be produced by a process called “salt exfoliation,” which does not require water. But at least the geologist was using a real geological process, not making something up.) The geologist estimated that, with the climatic record of Giza and the amount of erosion on the Sphinx, if the water erosion theory was correct, it was probably about 8000 years old.
But this 8000 year figure wasn’t presented on the Fox show! They showed clips of the geologist claiming that the Sphinx was “older” than mainstream Egyptologists said it was, then quickly cut to clips of some wacko Cayce-thumping fringe archaeologist ranting and raving about how this proves that the Sphinx was 10,000 years old. This was 2000 years older than the geologist had claimed, but that didn’t stop the Fox network! God forbid Fox should ever let facts get in the way of sensationalism!
Had they let the geologist state his real estimate for the age of the Sphinx, it would have at least begun to throw the doubt on the fringe wacko’s 10,000-year-Sphinx theory that it so richly deserved. But they didn’t do this. And Fox news programs earlier in the day had the gall to call this show “journalism”!
Adam, as Canadian as you are (eh?), I know you live down here in Dallas by me. Did you know that Von Daniken was here in Plano last summer (June of 2000)? I was interested in going to his lecture…
Sort of “X-files” meets “Clash of the Titans,” I guess. I wouldn’t have gone without my tinfoil hat to block out the mind-control rays, though.
Pete
Long time RGMWer and ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!!
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