# Pre-Egypt Technology



## Starbeast




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## J Riff

The Pregyptians had super-saws, or assistance from elsewhere. That one carving looks like a really cool rocketship.*


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## Starbeast

There was definately some amazing construction going on thousands of years ago, not only in Egypt, but all over the world.


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## Ursa major

I doubt that the average human of 10000+ years ago was any less intelligent than his or her modern counterpart. What they lacked were numbers (of people) and the exponential increase in information and data.

Theirs are the shoulders on which all of us stand today.


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## Nik

Don't forget that soft copper plus desert sand makes an excellent saw for stone, and a bunch of patient folk armed with hammer-stones and copper chisels can carve anything...


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## Vertigo

As Nik says it has often been shown that, given time, cutting stone with copper and sand is fantastically precise and the early Egyptians had plenty of time during the annual floods when most of their construction was done. I actually watched and chatted with some French archeologists at Karnak a few years ago who were experimenting with such techniques, and they said they were constantly amazed by what they could achieve and how surprisingly quick and accurate their work had been considering their personal lack of skill and experience with such techniques. 

Given such patience, it is astonishing what can be achieved with primitive tools; just take a look at the precision of Inca stone work.


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## Starbeast

*Futher information from other places in the world about ancient building technology.*​


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## J Riff

I watch this, and _Ancient Aliens_ is on TV at the same time. 
I'm convinced, sold. Van Daniken is still selling and I think we should all be made to march forth and drag and sand huge stone blocks and build various edifices, all fifty times larger than the empire state building, just to show our good intentions before _they_ arrive, which they obviously will, soon, any old time now. Imagine the buildings they will show us how to make_ this_ time. Ten-mile tall ailen casinos.


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## Ursa major

J Riff said:


> Ten-mile tall ailen casinos.


Am I the only one who suspects that this is a lot of spin...?





(And not just a lot; more a lottery.... )


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## Starbeast

J Riff said:


> I'm convinced, sold. I think we should show our good intentions before _they_ arrive, which they obviously will, soon, any old time now.


 



> "A great deal of ancient tribes who speak of aliens from beyond our planet, also mention that the aliens promised to return. And when they return to Earth, humankind will be quite surprised." - anonymous


 

You're correct *J Riff*, it could be anytime now..................


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## J Riff

One 3.5 ton block every 8.5 minutes, 24 hrs. a day for 100 years. And the one in Bosnia is bigger.
The more one looks at the giant stone structures, and the lack of detailed history of same, the spookier it gets.


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## Starbeast

J Riff said:


> One 3.5 ton block every 8.5 minutes, 24 hrs. a day for 100 years. And the one in Bosnia is bigger.
> The more one looks at the giant stone structures, and the lack of detailed history of same, the spookier it gets.


 
Spooky is the word, because that is how I felt when I learned about *Puma Punku* in Bolivia, it's located 4000 meters above sea level, and one of the biggest stones used there weighs 800 tons. Also, the types of stone that was used to create the interlocking pieces, were granite and diorite.


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## Starbeast

*Something incredible happened to Puma Punku*





 

It's obvious that some incredible natural catastrophy destroyed *Puma Punku*,
literally obliteratng this oldest known city on Earth.​


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## Ursa major

*Re: Something incredible happened to Puma Punku*



Starbeast said:


> It's obvious that some incredible natural catastrophy destroyed *Puma Punku*, literally obliteratng this oldest known city on Earth.


 
According to Pumapunku - Age, the complex is no older than the fifth century AD, which hardly qualifies as "oldest-known".

Not that this takes away from the effort and ingenuity shown by those who moved stone blocks ranging up to 131 tonnes in weight.


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## Nik

I was recently arguing with some-one about the Stonehenge Bluestones which had apparently been hauled down from the Welsh hills, across the English Channel and up to Stonehenge.

When he wondered how such monsters could be shipped in leather & wicker boats, I suggested log rafts. When he wondered how rafts could have been kept stable, I suggested slinging their rock load underneath. Given the estuary's famous tidal range, there would be no problem hauling a laden frame far enough down a firm beach that would leave it submerged save for tie-ropes at mid tide...

In fact, given several high tides and some temporary river weirs made by driving big stakes and placing hide-covered wicker screens, you could float each laden raft almost to Stonehenge's doorstep...


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## Brian G Turner

I think a key concern I have with the general presumption of Alient technology, is that the logic goes like this:

1. Thousands of years ago, humans didn't have modern power tools. 
2. So how could they built intricate structures?
3. I don't know!
4. Therefore if must have been aliens, because someone else said so

And the whole argument basically refers to 4. that aliens did it, and then refer to 3 on how it must be aliens because - you know - humans making a great effort to build something - unexplained!!

And yet you look all around the world now, and there are massive engineering works all over, usually driven by God worship, money, power shows, and necessary engineering works.

We really do treat our ancient ancestors as some sort of monkeys, and yet all through recorded ancient human history, there was a constant spirit of innovation.

That's not to say there may or may not be the unexplainable in Egypt or other ancient cultures - just that "the aliens did it!" just seems like a cheap get-out much of the time.

What anyone wants to believe is all their own business, but I just wish we could credit our species with a little more ingenuity in the absence of electricity.

(Besides, we all know the Vorlorns did it.  ).


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## Null_Zone

I said:


> I think a key concern I have with the general presumption of Alient technology, is that the logic goes like this:
> 
> 1. Thousands of years ago, humans didn't have modern power tools.
> 2. So how could they built intricate structures?
> 3. I don't know!
> 4. Therefore if must have been aliens, because someone else said so
> 
> And the whole argument basically refers to 4. that aliens did it, and then refer to 3 on how it must be aliens because - you know - humans making a great effort to build something - unexplained!!
> 
> And yet you look all around the world now, and there are massive engineering works all over, usually driven by God worship, money, power shows, and necessary engineering works.
> 
> We really do treat our ancient ancestors as some sort of monkeys, and yet all through recorded ancient human history, there was a constant spirit of innovation.
> 
> That's not to say there may or may not be the unexplainable in Egypt or other ancient cultures - just that "the aliens did it!" just seems like a cheap get-out much of the time.
> 
> What anyone wants to believe is all their own business, but I just wish we could credit our species with a little more ingenuity in the absence of electricity.
> 
> (Besides, we all know the Vorlorns did it.  ).


 
Whilst this is very good and probably very accuarate my own opinion of the thought processes is

Theses things are very complicated.
The people there are foreign.
Well foreigners scrounge off benefits/work in my garden not build things.
Foreigners can't build complex structures.
Must be aliens.

Plus aliens are cooler than people sitting around calmly figuring out how to move big lumps of rock.


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## Ursa major

Null_Zone said:


> Whilst this is very good and probably very accuarate my own opinion of the thought processes is
> 
> Theses things are very complicated.
> The people there are foreign.
> Well foreigners scrounge off benefits/work in my garden not build things.
> Foreigners can't build complex structures.
> Must be aliens.


"I bet they were illegal. Yeah, very smart but still illegal."


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## Vertigo

I have to agree with you on that one Brian, and don't get me started on the Incas (oh sorry I already did mention them once didn't I). They are supposed to have been in all sorts of alien pockets who helped them create awesome things like the Nazca Lines (because lets face it they must have been too stupid to do it themselves)... but never mentioned a little thing like the wheel to them?


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## Starbeast

*Puma Punku/Tiahuanaco*



Ursa major said:


> According to Pumapunku - Age, the complex is no older than the fifth century AD, which hardly qualifies as "oldest-known".


 
The only bad thing about using Wikipedia is sometimes the info that someone placed there can be inaccurate once in a while. My nephew discovered that the hard way when researching for a class assignment and his teacher informed him his facts were wrong.

But the same could be said for me as well, I tried to find out the carbon dating on the stones used at Puma Punku/Tiahuanaco and I found several different answers by scientists, ranging from 500 AD to 3000 BC. However, the nearby lake Titicaca's water level was higher roughly 4000 years ago and would have connected to the ancient ports that still stand today.

I was going by the position of the sun which would have been perfectly aligned with the main gate of Tiahuanaco, 12,000 years ago. I was getting the information from the Peruvian archaeologist Arthur Posnansky, who researched the site for 50 years of his life, he believed this was another astrologically built sacred site.


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## paranoid marvin

You have to admire the Egyptians for their business acumen though,developing the pyramid scheme millenia before the rest of civilisation.


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## J Riff

What's wrong is having to ask the question 'how did they do it', at all. Thousands, maybe ten thou years ago they were doing this, all over the place. Maybe using many animals, giant bulls and elephants, or just people working like ants for decades and decades on the same big structure.
Some of the stonework is incredible. I need to see an explanation for some of it, it's too good and the stones are too gigantic.
And if those pyramids in Bosnia are real, how could anything so massive ever be forgotten? The flood? The giant methane explosion in the ocean? 
Wha hoppen to the giant stone-moving people?


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## Vertigo

I think they just moved on to other things J as civilisation evolved, no great mystery. Think about the moon landings; comparing the level of technology now and then it would be easy to ask how they managed that without a lot more disasters than they actually had. The simple answer is that mankind when it puts it's mind to something is remarkably good at coming up with innovative solutions. It doesn't matter whether it is 50 years ago or 5000 years ago our intelligence then was not much different to today (if at all) so when they decided to build a pyramid they figured out ways to do it. They simply didn't see the need to document those ways for future generations.

Oh and PM, never mind pyramid schemes, you have to admire their business acumen in creating one of the biggest tourist attractions in the world. You know that they were already a serious tourist attraction in Roman times and that there is Roman graffiti scattered around!


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## J Riff

All alien theories aside, it still doesn't add up to anything sane, or admirable. People would have to work like ant-slaves for generations to build those things. Creepy. Huge termite mounds, or worse - Govt. buildings. 
 How many people died sanding stone blocks or pulling ropes, all over the world? It looks like all people ever did, haul big rocks about.
 There's something wrong with history, it's out of wack and some thousands of years are missing or misinterpreted or just bloody unknown which is pretty seriously wrong somehow. More or less proves that history has been rewritten, and various cultures or whole eras completely obliterated, more than a few times. We must peer amid the pyramidal ruins, and disprove those silly alien theories oncet and for all. )


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## Vertigo

Interestingly enough it is now pretty certain that the pyramid builders were not slaves. There was a core workforce of artisans that worked permanenty on them and the archeological record shows that they were as well fed and medically cared for as many of the aristocracy (evidence of well repaired broken bones etc). Much of the labour force was itinerant and came to work whilst the floods made working the land impossible. It is now thought that this was considered a religious duty and that they went willingly. It was seen as accumulating good Karma (or the Egyptian equivalent). Remember the pharoh was not just _like_ a god to them, he _was_ a god. And doing good work for their god meant they would do better in the next life.


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## Ursa major

And they built more than the pyramids; they showed that with proper organisation and a willingness to innovate, the species is capable of producing wonders that still speak to our imaginations all these thousands of years later.

I've been to Egypt and have to say that the true scale of the Ancient Egyptian monuments does not come over in pictures, in films, or on TV.

As to the workers being slaves: many dynasties later, the first strike in recorded history took place amongst those working in the Valley of the Kings. This was no revolt, as this Wiki article** (Deir el-Medina - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) describes:


> In about the 25th year the reign of Ramses III (c. 1170 BCE) the laborers were so exasperated by delays in supplies they threw down their tools and walked off the job in what may have been the first sit down strike in history. They wrote a letter to the Vizier complaining about lack of wheat rations. Village leaders attempted to reason with them but they refused to return to work until their grievances were addressed. They responded to the elders with "great oaths". "we are hungry", the crews claimed; "eighteen days have passed this month" and they still had not received their rations. They were forced to buy their own wheat. They told them to send to Pharaoh or vizier to address their concerns. After the authorities heard of their complaints they addressed them and they went back to work the next day.


 

** - Somewhere I have a book about Deir el-Medina that goes into more detail about this industrial action, so this isn't simply another dubious Wiki article.


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## Starbeast

Vertigo said:


> Remember the pharoh was not just _like_ a god to them, he _was_ a god. And doing good work for their god meant they would do better in the next life.


 
I wonder if anyone (at the time) ever asked questions:

"If you're god, how come you can't build these structures yourself?"

"Why do need to eat and sleep?"

"How come you're not immortal?"

But the curious might have been executed too.


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## Ursa major

The concept isn't so strange. Or, rather, the concept has had currency amongst many people until very recently, under such names as The Divine Right of Kings.

The pharaoh was seen as a man (or, on one occasion, woman) chosen by the gods, to intercede between his subjects and those gods. That wouldn't make him superhuman. But still, he could achieve superhuman results, by mobilising the faithful to do the gods' wishes.


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## Vertigo

Yes, of course, Ursa's comment is more correct, they weren't strictly gods until after they died and were then elevated. However their most important role was I believe making sure the gods brought the floods each year!

Also remember in those days (as best we can tell) people simply didn't question the existence of their gods, they were a part of everyday life; as real to them as the air they breathed.


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## Ursa major

I have to admit that I was also thinking of Thulsa Doom's demonstration of the power of flesh (contrasting it with the power of steel) in the 1982 film, Conan the Barbarian.


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## paranoid marvin

Look at the size of the Colosseum in Rome - surely that was just as impressive as the Pyramids.

And also the Pantheon ; builders still cant replicate the dome of that buildings without the use of reinforced concrete (which wasnt around back then)

So how were they built , by aliens?

The reason speculation is so rife about the Egyptians is that we know so little about them; and if it wasnt for the Rosetta Stone we would know even less.The Pyramids were meant to impress ; they were built to stand forever and they were designed to impress forever. I'm sure they weren't easy to conceive,design or build , but they have served their purpose admirably.

What is such a shame is that these monumental er..... monuments.... were originally clad in reflective white limestone which must have looked (literally) dazzling ; all we see now are the wind-blown sandstone underneath , but that's still impressive enough.


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## Vertigo

You can get some idea of what they may have looked like with their cladding from the so called Bent Pyramid of Snofru at Dahshur. It still retains more of its cladding than most, though obviously weathered now rather than it's original polish. I have included some (not very good) photos I took of it some years back.

It is also interesting in that it shows that the ancient Egyptians didn't always get it right. If you look closely you will see that the angle of the pyramid changes about half way up. It is believed that they hit a major engineering crisis, possibly the underlying bedrock began collapsing under its weight and they figured it wouldn't take the original design. Collapsing of the underlying bedrock is one of the limiting factors in the size of the pyramids. There is a better shot showing how the angle changes on the Wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahshur


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## Ursa major

Not only the Ancient Egyptians; wasn't the building of gothic cathedrals more of an art than a science?


Regarding the _Southern Shining Pyramid_ (aka the _Bent Pyramid_): it's original, unsustainable angle of incline is 54°27'44"; the adjusted angle is 43°22'. The later** _Shining Pyramid_ (aka the _Red Pyramid_) also has an angle of incline of 43°22', suggesting that they'd found something that worked (given the other dimensions involved) and kept to it.



** - The _Shining Pyramid_ was built immediately after the _Southern Shining Pyramid_. The immediate predecessor of both was, I believe, the "pyramid" at Meidum. As can be seen in the Wiki article, Meidum - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, this wasn't a total success, as it later collapsed, revealing the original step pyramid within.


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## J Riff

How did they make those perfectly spherical giant stone balls- and why? 
I don't buy into the 'civilized' approach, I'll plunk for tens of thousands of people worked right to death -starved slowly, to erect a useless pile of rocks honoring a god-monkey.
 I mean - what good is the bloody thing to the average slave who died making it? Nada. 
 I've climbed on the Giza pyramid. It's too big. Nobody did that kind of work willingly.
 Don't know what's happening re: Bosnian pyramids, they may change the overall time scale and that's what's interesting, where did the Egyptians learn this stuff? Who was travelling around the world building things everywhere before Egypt even existed? 
 They have excavated all around the Great Pyramid, and found a cemetary, a huge bakery, and giant piles of slag reputed to be the remains of the giant ramp they built in order to construct the thing.
That's half again as much work as the pyramid itself, supposedly erected in a mere 70 years. They are saying they put in a stone every two minutes. 
 I've seen those stones. Doubt whether they could get one in every two hours today. There's still something wrong, missing. There should have been detailed records, and the art should have been passed on. Instead, thousands years later and people aren't sure how their primitive ancestors made a stone building?


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## Starbeast




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## mosaix

J Riff said:


> I mean - what good is the bloody thing to the average slave who died making it? Nada.



As has been stated before in the thread they weren't slaves.

But, you might as well ask the same question regarding, say, Salisbury Cathedral. The people who started building such as these knew that they wouldn't be finished until after they were dead.


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## The Ace

Errr PM ? The Pantheon _is _made of concrete. The Romans invented the stuff.

There're a thousand things we don't know about how our ancestors built their ziggurats, pyramids, temples etc. , but the point is that we are their descendants and it was people just like us who invented farming, domesticated animals and the thousand other steps on the road to civilisation.

Flapping your gums about aliens is an insult to our ancestors and their legacy, and people like Von Daniken should be pinned to a board.

I don't know about your Japanese pyramids, but I _do_ know that, under the right conditions, certain types of rock actually form cubic blocks.  It's rare, but not unknown.


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## mosaix

The Ace is right about this. We must not allow Von Daniken and others of his ilk to mask the fact that our ancestors were cultured, intelligent and capable of doing the most amazing things.


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## Starbeast

mosaix said:


> The Ace is right about this. We must not allow Von Daniken and others of his ilk to mask the fact that our ancestors were cultured, intelligent and capable of doing the most amazing things.


 
I do agree, some of the ancient building techniques were lost through time, but with the help of new technologies today humankind will eventually unravel the mysterious of the past.

I've seen a recent interview with Von Daniken, he said at the beginning when he published _Chariots of the Gods_ he had only posed the question:

"What if the Gods that were worshipped by ancient people, are really extraterrestrials?"

But today in his latest book, he states that he is totally convinced that aliens came here to Earth ocassionally to help humans recover and rebuild after major disasters have ruined the planet.


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## J Riff

Leave the aliens out and it's still wrong. The guy with the power station theory makes far more sense than aliens. 
 The interior chamber is tuned acoustically. Free standing granite blocks, tuned to a giant F sharp chord.(!) Evidence of chemical reactions, stuff poured down the tunnels... this makes sense, a giant machine of some kind, not a monument to a bad king who just felt like working 200,000 guys to death to make him a tomb.
 The Atlanteans, the tenth planet, the face and pyramids on mars, all this junk gets focused on, and it seems to debunk the whole issue but really doesn't. The egyptologists have an explanation for everything, readily available, and half of it is debatable. 
 Again: Scientists in 2011 are having trouble explaining stone buildings made thousands of years ago? Ouch. Same argument went on 50 years ago, I listened and someone was already on about it being a machine, a giant battery or some such, but is it? 
 I'm not going back to Egypt because I'm afraid of the curse of Tut, but someone should seriously dig into it, and put the answer up onto YouTube, so I can stop wondering about it and losing valuable sleep and writing time.


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## svalbard

It was the Cylons...


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## Null_Zone

The Ace said:


> Errr PM ? The Pantheon _is _made of concrete. The Romans invented the stuff.
> 
> There're a thousand things we don't know about how our ancestors built their ziggurats, pyramids, temples etc. , but the point is that we are their descendants and it was people just like us who invented farming, domesticated animals and the thousand other steps on the road to civilisation.
> 
> Flapping your gums about aliens is an insult to our ancestors and their legacy, and people like Von Daniken should be pinned to a board.
> 
> I don't know about your Japanese pyramids, but I _do_ know that, under the right conditions, certain types of rock actually form cubic blocks. It's rare, but not unknown.


 
Technically Roman concrete -which is disntictly different from the stuff the stuff we use today and has pros/cons over it - is mainly of Egyptian origin, the dynasty before Ptomleys rather than the Pyramid building ones (I believe). The Egyptians just didn't use things quite right with the Romans doing their famous "wait a minute is we do this..." thing.

But yeah if you were going to be an alien uplifting humanity you could have done a much better job, seriously guys the best part of six thousand years to come reveal the secret of the printing press to us? 

Humans are great, there's been no significant changes to our brain structure in a long time so we've been great just as long.


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## Ursa major

Isn't there meant to be a letter found on a tablet in Mesopotamia where the letter writer complains that "Nowadays, everyone is writing a book"?

Perhaps those aliens took heed.


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## paranoid marvin

I _did_ say re-inforced concrete , only invented in the last couple of centuries. How the Romans built a dome that size a couple of centuries ago , they still have no idea.

Just because we don't know how something could be done doesnt make it impossible ; the more we rely on machines , the more we will lose the skills we used to have.


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## J Riff

The one I like, is this: The latitude of the Kings Chamber is the same _exact_ number as the speed of light. Can someone check on that please? If that turns out to be true(as someone is claiming online) then I don't know what to think.   Otherwise, the fellow who moves large objects for a living, Whippen? - has a comprehensive theory involving horizontal movement via tumbling in grooved notches (!) and vertical lift provided by water-pistons inside the pyramid. He claims they built large stones/small stones, then moved over and up a level via water pressure. Good stuff.
 The French architect demonstrates the chambers as part of a counterweight system, a machne which dragged stuff up a ramp, only used until a certain height, then dismantled to make the rest of the main pyramid. Neat. There's scratches where the ropes would be, and grooves and notches to keep the largely wooden apparatus on line.


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## Nik

"The latitude of the Kings Chamber is the same exact number as the speed of light."
Google found a bunch of enthusiastic folk who, of course, reference each other exhaustively...

Given latitude and speed of light are profoundly different units, they're working to absurd precisions unwarranted by their environment and the whole lot is measured in the still-uncertain pyramid inches or eg deci-cubits, I'd say it was all a load of tosh...

Pyramidology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


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## Ursa major

You only have to look at the Great Pyramid of Giza to see that there's no point in those speculations.









​


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## The Ace

It's like the old one that the Giza pyramids, together with a couple of others picked at random, together with the Nile, match the exact pattern of Orion and the Milky Way.

No matter how many people gush about this, it's amazing that none of them remembers that you have to turn one of the images upside-down first.


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## J Riff

The numerological, astrological and Biblical references are legion, but that may be reverse engineered. The speed of light in metres per second is the exact number of the north latitude of the king's chamber in the great pyramid, that's this guy's factoid, based on the google earth specs for the great pyramid. That is one spooky 9-digit number if it's true.
 Oh well. Researching the pyramids for a story and it's great. Theory after theory. Scaffolds and pulleys. Water power, magnetic antigravity, counterweight systems. Built in 20 years, 30, 70, 14, 200. Slaves or artisans.
 10,00 years old vs. 4000. Black Egyptians or white. A tomb or a machine.
What were the thousands of inscriptions on the outer casing blocks? All destroyed. 
 The possible internal ramp system. Evidence of the great pyramid being submerged. The cracks in the huge granite blocks above the chamber, and the tunnel dug through solid rock to go up and check on them. Plaster inserted in the crack to see if it was spreading. Details still emerging.  
 Napoleon's comment after a night in the king's chamber "You wouldn't believe me if I told you."
 Someone calculated Bill Gates couldn't afford to build the thing today.
 Many of these interesting ideas seem to come from level-headed scientific-minded people who have done a lot of research.
 I should go look up carbon-dating. Is it possible to prove when an ancient strucure was _built_, as opposed to the age of the building materials? Probably not. The mind boggles. (Boggle, boggle)


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## Stephen Palmer

The Ace said:


> It's like the old one that the Giza pyramids, together with a couple of others picked at random, together with the Nile, match the exact pattern of Orion and the Milky Way.
> 
> No matter how many people gush about this, it's amazing that none of them remembers that you have to turn one of the images upside-down first.


 
... and that the resemblance is in fact not that accurate...


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## Vertigo

Wasn't the problem with that one that they were trying to match the position to the constallation as we see it now rather than how it was then (significantly different I believe).


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## Nik

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_precession_(astronomy)

YMMV, but wiki suggests temples were rebuilt every couple of centuries to keep their alignments...


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## Vertigo

Yup that's what I thought but it would be pushing it a bit to move the great pyramids every couple of centuries


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## The Ace

Naaah, 4 aliens'd just take a corner each.

Even taking procession into account, you'd still have to turn Egypt upside down, that was my point.


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## Nik

It's those new-fangled instrumental astronomers and their inverting optics !!

Now, back when you had dark skies, astrolabes and dutifully humble scribes...


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## paranoid marvin

Well in my opinion the pyramids are just massive heat sinks cooling the worlds first CPUs.


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## J Riff

After more long hours research I reach the conclusion that the so-called historians are as far out of whack as some of the Alien/Atlantean crowd.
 Who are these nutbars want to 'clean up' history to fit their notion of 'what would be best' for everyone. Kuh-razy.
 You can't read the newspaper today and get the truth, yet they wanna imply everything from ancient scattered random evidence that they can't even convincingly date.
 Once that 'Egyptologist' or 'Historian' degree is present, they hew to the story as if yoked like mules.
 Obviously, Great Pyramid, and others, are not tombs. Yet that story is still held up. The other irritating one is the 'they didn't use slaves.' They are actually trying to tidy up their fairy tale, and will fake evidence to do it!
 Who are these whackos? They seem like the kind of people would build a pyramid and live on top of it throwing rocks down on anyone they didn't like. ) 
 Anyway, lots of people with degrees.... disagree. There's a few thousand years missing or a cataclysm or two. 
 Astonishing to still be arguing about 4-10,000 yr. old tech. Unbelievable. Really, it shows just how far people have gone to cover things up.
 I notice that perpetual motion machines, magnet-based, are appearing on youTube. This's the gizmo rumored to be used by Ed Leedskalnin to build Coral Castle in Florida. 
 I saw one of these gizmos back in the sixties, made from a record player and magnets, essentially. It'll run for months without touching it. The guy built it was trying to get a patent, or at least some recognition but gosh nobody would even talk to him, like he was some kinda nut. He currently languishes on the canuck welfare rolls, like a lot o' talent, and other people are showing up with the same gadget.
 Whoo, the mystical power of magnets! Hardly. Did Ed figure some way to use electromagnets to help him lift big stones? Probably. Did the Egyptians have this tech? Apparently not.
 But, the Great Pyramid is ....a giant cathode-ray tube? Or a hydrogen power plant... or something useful. Should be obvious to modern scientists. I'm ashamed for you guys can't figure this out.) 
 Really, the more you delve into it, and there are oceans of info, the more the mainstream crowd, who want a nice tidy world of civilized primitive people, are looking more like the fringe loonies than the people with the far-out theories.


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## Ursa major

There are a lot of obvious reasons for building pyramids:

power, because the ruler can order it done and it will be done;
pride, as seen at San Gimignano, but using pyramids other than towers;
security, e.g. keeping a lot of idle hands (because the fields are inundated) busy at a task that unites the society rather than letting the lesser folk sit wondering why they have to do all the work when the fields aren't under water;
religious zeal (which can be seen in the many huge edifices built over the millennia: churches, mosques, temples, etc.);
vanity.
I'm sure that there are many more, none of which need involve our wacko theories (although they might include _their_ wacko theories ).


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## J Riff

Just when you think you've seen it all.
The shaft theory. A giant steam engine/ water pump. The whole thing was a giant mining operation, probably doubling as a sauna for the Pharoah and crowd.
 Well, you go try an write about it, as if you're there. Fictional, but based on the evidence - as you interpret it. Imagine the pyramid is done, just finished, and you are just sitting there looking at it one moonlit night. Maybe smoke is coming out of it, maybe not. What the frag were they doing?
 Marsheopatra gazed abstractedly past Faroukmans head at the huge pyramid looming over them in the darkness. He was saying something.
 "What ?" she said. "It's so noisy I can't hear you."
 "Yes." he yelled. "And all just to make ___ for ___ so we can use it to ___."
 "We must leave this place of evil ___"
"I will prepare the flying __."
"The Pharoah will __ when he learns of this."


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## Nik

Well, given that the pyramids' evolutionary path went something like small mastaba, big mastaba, stacked mastaba, stepped pyramid, bent pyramid, great pyramids, modest stuff...

Harking back to the 'how did they build them' argument, there's a French architect who's proposed that the bottom third of Great Pyramid was built using traditional ramp, then a semi-internal spiral passage was used, opening at the corners, which was subsequently back-filled.
Khufu Revealed - Dassault Systèmes
Naturally, he's not being allowed to poke his endoscope into likely gaps...


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## Vertigo

I thought they had already found those internal ramps complete with larger chambers at the corners for turning. Though naturally not everyone is in agreement that that is what they were for!


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## Nik

AFAIR, there's *hints* on the scans. Snag is the notion flouts the established mythos, and it would really, really spoil umpteen Egyptologists' careers to be upstaged by an outsider...

IIRC, last time this happened was when that young American was 'allowed' to re-excavate and map some empty tombs in Valley of the Kings: Not only did he produce superb 3D models, but he stumbled upon extensive extra levels to one and, decades later, is still digging those out...

Uh, one off-beat possibility is such corner recesses is where they mounted huge timbers for craning blocks. The legendary 'Cedars of Lebanon' were up to 40 metres tall. Even trimmed, that's humungous...


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## RJM Corbet

You don't need aliens, y'all just need to read Graham Hancock's book 'Fingerprints of the Gods'. All will be explained. I promise! The fact that no-one on this thread appears to have read it, stuns me. It's easily available in most 2nd hand bookshops ...


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## Ursa major

I've seen a less than convincing documentary about Hancock's theories, so I'm aware he believes that there was an advanced human civilisation about 12000 years ago (if I remember correctly).

I can't say that I was much impressed.


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## RJM Corbet

Documentaries are TV sound bites, Ursa. Please read the book, then say the same. The original premise was endorsed by Albert Einstein, by the way ...


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## Ursa major

Every one has their off days.

To save me reading a whole pile of tosh, I'll quote a sentence from the Wiki article on Hancock:


> One of the main themes running through many of his books is the possible global connection with a "mother culture" from which he believes all ancient historical civilizations sprang.


You can tell me if this isn't really one of his ideas.

Frankly, this sort of things seems to be based on the premise that different people, in different cultures and at different times, cannot come up with similar cultural ideas** or independent solutions to similar problems. And if the solutions look similar, it may be because they're the most obvious solutions to that similar problem. We see this sort of thing all the time, today and in history -- Darwin and Wallace (evolution), Newton and Leibniz (calculus) -- where 
similar developments can occur in parallel. But perhaps this piecemeal, distributed progress in knowledge is too untidy for some people and they have to find a neater solution?

Well, human development isn't going to be neat; it isn't like physics where it's possible that there may be elegant solutions. Humans just aren't like that. They use their brains to cope with the world in front of them (which includes carrying forward ongoing scientific and engineering investigations). They don't sit around waiting for the latest snippet of information from some imaginary store of ancient wisdom. (If they did, they wouldn't have got anywhere or achieved anything.[/rant]



** - The common factor is, of course, that they're all human beings and are very closely related to one another.


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## RJM Corbet

Uh, well. You can't winnem all. You wouldn't get past the 1st two pages if you thought it was going to be junk, but then again, you might keep reading? 'Nuff said ...


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## Vertigo

I'm with Ursa on this. I don't have the patience for these sort of ideas. I'm sorry but the idea that there was some human civilisation 10000+ years ago that left no trace of itself; no artifacts, no fossil records etc. it simply too ridiculous to waste time on. I know proponents of these sort of ideas claim that there are examples of cryptic remains that don't have an explanation as yet that "prove" their theories. However it seems very strange that such a prehostoric civilisation leaves almost nothing and every civilisation since has left masses of artifacts and ruins. Whilst there are still a couple of gaps - "missing links" - in our prehistory they are getting ever smaller as we discover new evidence and are simply not big enough to encompass a whole missing civilisation.

Incidentally, Ursa, evolution itself, of course, is an excellent example of what you describe; of how independent solutions to similar problems produce remarkably similar but unrelated mechanisms.


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## Nik

I've vague memories of reading Hancock a long time ago. I don't recall being convinced...

One problem, IIRC, was that he seemed to assume contemporary folk were utterly unable to do mega-stuff themselves...

This is essentially the same argument as the Apollo-deniers: It *must* have been faked because getting to the Moon is so difficult...

Tosh !! The British Interplanetary Society had a workable Moon-mission design in ~1938, using solid rockets, yet !! (After the first V2s fell, the design was quickly upgraded to liquid fuel ;-)) Okay, the chances of that project succeeding were 50/50 at best, but that was because they didn't know about the Van Allen belt etc etc...

Slightly OT: There was a parallel argument over exactly how Medieval master-masons got all that stone to the top of their many cathedrals. It was rather an anti-climax when some-one remembered there was a genuine Medieval tread-mill crane in one of the towers...


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## RJM Corbet

Vertigo said:


> I'm with Ursa on this. I don't have the patience for these sort of ideas ...



What ideas? How on earth can you know what his ideas are unless you read them? There is a party game where one person says something to someone else, who repeats it to someone else, etc. By the time it comes back to the origin, it's become so garbled it bears no resemblance?

And yes, he DOES have an explanation -- a very good explanation that has nothing to do with 'aliens' or mystic mumbo jumbo --  but which makes a lot of 'serious scientists' very uneasy. 

Another thing: Wikipaedia isn't always reliable. A lot of people just skim it on Wiki and think they have what they need to know. But just because something's on Wiki doesn't make it true, it doesn't even have the information checks and balances of a decent Sunday newspaper.

Sorry ...


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## paranoid marvin

Humans  are pretty ingenious creature ; once we set our minds to something - however seemingly impossible - it's amazing how often we are capable of achieving it.

The other thing is that back then time wasn't so much of an issue ; for a cathedral to be built in the designer's lifetime wasn't expected or planned. It was widely expected that with the most momentous of scructures that,given the limited manpower available, they would take as long as they would take. The same was not true in ancient Egypt however , where the available workforce was much larger.

The main purpose in the lifes of most ordinary Egyptians was that of agriculture and ensuring that the harvest was successful. Carrying out the will of the Paharoah (and by association the gods) and thus ensuring the success of the harvest - involved not only irrigation but also pleasing their Pharaoh ; building structures such as the Pyramids , Sphinx etc was an integral part of the agricultural process.


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## RJM Corbet

That is all quite true, Marvin. And humans ARE amazingly inventive. However, things remain that cannot easily be explained. 

Take this one, for instance: the speed of drilling on the granite in the King's Chamber (ie: the rate that the drill spirals downward) is greater than any drill today is capable of -- or if they can now do it, the technique is very recent indeed. (I stand correction?) Granite is a HARD stone and they drilled it in seconds.

There's also the question of 200 ton stone blocks in Peru,that even the most modern lifting equipment would struggle with -- transported from quarries hundreds of miles away and plonked on top of mountains that are even today accessible only by arduous travel, like child's toys, thousands of them, and slotted together in zig-zag shapes, perfectly flat and level etc.

I will labour the point no further, but Hancock DOES explain it -- without 'aliens' ...


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## J Riff

It's still a hot topic! Some guy just posted a wind-power solution. Big rotating wooden poles with wings/props at the top, hauling stone blocks down a runway on wooden rollers. It would probably work.
Personally, the lazy approach seems most likely here. Think of the Nile, and the amount of mud and limestone dust. Those blocks are joined seamlessly and the sides are dead flat. That would take weeks of chipping. Apparently limestone blocks harden in hours, and do not further expand or shrink. It's gotta be, too easy to pour them in minutes instead of carving for days. It was enough work to get the big granite blocks up there and tune up the chambers.
Chemicals were coming in, there's salt deposits, and Gypsum. The small shafts were built deliberately at the same time as the pyramid, so they are channels for something to pour in there, one theory says Hydrochloric acid and Zinc Oxide. I'm no chemist.
The spiral staircase looks good too. There seemed to be something about 16 feet, they could hoist blocks up that far no prob.
What else? Oh yea, the age. Well, if it can be proven the Pyramid was partly submerged, then perhaps it was pre-flood. But when was that? 
It's these pre-cataclysm cities that are drawing the nutty theories. However, they did exist, and some are awe inspiring. The one off Japan is a mystery, though they aren't even sure if it's natural or man-made.
This is all leading up to more accurately dating the disaster that struck the earth. It must have been a doozy to dump whole cities into the ocean, it's no wonder early history was eradicated.
If Egypt isn't 10,000 yrs. old, it may well be built on top of a civilization that was. 
And that's when the giant people lived! Woo! Woo!
The granite carving IS amazing. What about that huge unfinished one. They can't figure it. Maybe it was so long ago that rocks were softer. )


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## RJM Corbet

Yah, that's so true -- the looney fringe take over with their giants and stuff, and make people like Gerald Hancock or Buzz Aldrin look ridiculous, to people who have not studied the original stuff but just skim the web. (That observation is NOT directed at anyone in this thread. I have great respect for all.) But Riff, there is a BIG difference between cutting limestone, which is a very soft rock (Mohs hardness 3 on scale of 10) and cutting granite -- which is a mixture of feldspar and quartz (Mohs 6 and 7 respectively) with a bit of mica and some other stuff thrown in.


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## Vertigo

OK I have just read all of chapter 45 from his book on the official Gerald Hancock site (www.grahamhancock.com).

In the first part of this chapter he talks a lot about the age of a buried building suggesting it is older than the current accepted thoughts. I have no problem with that and it would be no great surprise and also no great mystery.

In the latter half of the chapter he is talking about the buried solar barges near Abydos. I note that he never gives them the accepted title of solar barges. He compares these to the "140 foot ocean-going vessel" at Giza. Now this is where his stuff starts to fall down. I have never seen any other description of this boat as "ocean-going". It is only 143 feet long and that's really not very big, it has a flat bottom with no keel, and very low sides (see a picture here File:Gizeh Sonnenbarke BW 2.jpg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and yes that is Wiki but I have been there and that is an accurate picture). If you would like to try an "ocean-going" trip in that boat, please be my guest. This boat unlike almost all other solar-barges (including the Abydos ones and numerous others found (but not dispalyed) at Giza, which Hancock declines to comment on) does show signs that it has actually been in the water at some time and was probably used as a funerary barge on the Nile. Most have purely ritual use and show no sign of ever having been in the water, which is why it is not a problem, as Hancock seems to think it is, that the Abydos boats are so far from the Nile.

He cites all this as evidence of an ocean-going civilisation that pre-dates the Egyptian civilisation. I have to say that is one massive great leap of faith based on decidedly shaky evidence, which does not lead me to thinking I want to spend my money on this book.

Sorry...


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## Ursa major

RJM Corbet said:


> What ideas? How on earth can you know what his ideas are unless you read them?


Why should I care what his ideas are if he can't persuade a serious number of others in his field. I watched the programme _that_ _he_ _made_ (i.e. not one about him, written by someone else) and simply wasn't convinced. Time is too short to read a lot of old tosh. If persuasive evidence does arise - and I haven't seen any backing his theories - I'll take more notice. 


RJM Corbet said:


> There is a party game where one person says something to someone else, who repeats it to someone else, etc. By the time it comes back to the origin, it's become so garbled it bears no resemblance?


There's also the joke where the message, "Send reinforcements; we're going to advance" is, through the process you've mentioned, transformed into "Send three and fourpence; we're going to a dance." I'm not sure of its relevance to this discussion, though; the only material I've seen about Hancock's work was presented by the man himself.



RJM Corbet said:


> And yes, he DOES have an explanation -- a very good explanation that has nothing to do with 'aliens' or mystic mumbo jumbo -- but which makes a lot of 'serious scientists' very uneasy.


I get uneasy when someone (in this case, Hancock) builds a whole edifice on top of not much evidence (or, in this case, none) and then expects the world to take any notice.



RJM Corbet said:


> Another thing: Wikipaedia isn't always reliable. A lot of people just skim it on Wiki and think they have what they need to know. But just because something's on Wiki doesn't make it true, it doesn't even have the information checks and balances of a decent Sunday newspaper.


I quoted one sentence from Wiki, about Hancock's ideas, and asked if the article was misrepresenting them. Given that no-one has said that it was, I can only assume the sentence was giving the true picture. 



RJM Corbet said:


> That is all quite true, Marvin. And humans ARE amazingly inventive. However, things remain that cannot easily be explained.
> 
> Take this one, for instance: the speed of drilling on the granite in the King's Chamber (ie: the rate that the drill spirals downward) is greater than any drill today is capable of -- or if they can now do it, the technique is very recent indeed. (I stand correction?) Granite is a HARD stone and they drilled it in seconds.


Do we know really how fast the holes were drilled? I'm going to stick my neck out and say that no-one has any proof that they were "drilled in seconds". But even supposing the ancient Egyptians could do what we probably can't, so what? All that shows is that someone, in the past, was very clever in devising the technique. It doesn't say _when_ they devised it other than it can't have been after they used it. (And really, saying that an Ancient Egyptian was in no position to develop the technique doesn't really persuade me that if we trek back another 8000 years into the past, we'll find someone who could. Frankly, that's just a silly line of argument. Sorry: it isn't an argument of any sort; except, maybe, bogus.)



RJM Corbet said:


> There's also the question of 200 ton stone blocks in Peru,that even the most modern lifting equipment would struggle with -- transported from quarries hundreds of miles away and plonked on top of mountains that are even today accessible only by arduous travel, like child's toys, thousands of them, and slotted together in zig-zag shapes, perfectly flat and level etc.
> 
> I will labour the point no further, but Hancock DOES explain it -- without 'aliens' ...


The point isn't whether aliens were involved or not - they weren't - it's the topsy-turvy view that if someone 4000 years ago (or only 1500 years ago in the case of the Peruvian stuff) couldn't be expected to know how to do something (because, somehow, people then were more stupid than us, despite all the evidence to the contrary), we have to invent a more advanced and far earlier civilisation. (And it must have been very advanced: it managed to remove just about every scrap of evidence that it existed before withdrawing from public view.)


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## RJM Corbet

Ursa, didn't Gallileo have the same sort of problem with the establishment of his time? (Yes, I understand you're talking about scientific peers, not churchmen.) 

Vertigo: thank you for at least reading chapter 45. I'm being sincere. I wish though that you had read Chapter One, where he describes an accurate map of the Continent of Antartica, as it was before covered by the southern polar icecap? Which only modern sonar techniques have verified as accurate?  Which scientists have studied, and which Albert Einstein endorsed? Thank you also for the site link.  

Never mind, y'all. Poor old G. Hancock. I understand his frustration. But let's leave it there? These discussions aren't meant to become too heated. Certainly no reflection upon anyone's intelligence was meant, and I apologise if that impression was created ...


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## Ursa major

When polar ice covers a sea, there's no effect on sea level, because ice floats: the extra volume of the ice over the equivalent volume of liquid water is raised above sea level.

However, when ice is on land (as in Greenland, Antarctica, various other arctic islands and in non-Arctic glaciers) none of it adds to the volume of the world's oceans. If that ice melts, and makes its way to the coast, the sea level rises. (This is one of the reasons why global warming - whether man-made or not, or called climate change - could be disastrous: much of the world's population - including me - lives not far above sea level.)

Now from what I recall of Mr Hancock's TV programme, it showed underwater structures that were meant to be the remains of ancient cities. If Antarctica was ice-free** (and to be fair, I don't recall him mentioning that continent in his programme), those cities would have been far deeper in the ocean than they are now.




** - By the way, the last ice age ended around 8000BCE, about 2000 years closer to our time than the civilisation Hancock was referring to in his programme (assuming my memory is not playing tricks on me).


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## RJM Corbet

At least I can chuck for Dartmoor ...


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## paranoid marvin

Just because we don't know how something was done , it doesnt mean that we should assume aliens/super-intelligent beings were responsible. In many ways our ancestors WERE superior to us ; they were better with their hands and undoubtedly in better shape physically for the job at hand. As I mentioned humans are inventive , but they also adapt very well to their surroundings. The problems man faced millenia ago are not those we face today , and so there are many things that have been forgotten , and we have lost or changed many abilities - physical and mental. 

For example , if we suddenly lost the ability to generate energy then who would stand a better chance of survival - a human today or a human from 200-2000 years ago? Most people wouldnt even have a clue as to how to produce their own food , or even light a fire. Undoubtedly most would just sit around waiting for someone else to do it for them.

What I'm basically trying to say is that we cannot judge what was possible by man _then _by today's standards ; we have to judge him on his own merits.


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## Vertigo

I agree, there are some well informed people out there, but the vast majority of us living in the modern technological world would be completely lost in a non-technological world. How many people would know how to tan leather, make bronze never mind iron, make animal traps, make an effective spear/spear thrower, make bows and arrows, make a shelter that actually keeps you dry, forage for food, hunt for food, store food over winter so it doesn't rot etc. etc.?

I'm not saying no one out there could do it, just that the majority of us couldn't.


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## J Riff

Man evolved from apes, so the early civilizations were effectively built by monkeys and men, working together. Strong, big, giant trained apes? Just a theory...)
 To be fair, I've read the Hancock book, and a lot of it is pretty dry. Discussions about Giza for example - are between egyptologists, not nutbar stuff at all.
 Those same arguments from the twenties are being carried on today. How old is the Sphinx? Water erosion puts it waaay back. Unless there's another explanation for said erosion? And the valley temple - cut from the same exact quarry as the Sphinx - problems figuring how it was quarried and erected, that long ago.
 The early monolithic structures, worldwide, are _huge_ and largely unadorned.  
The Sphinx had its head replaced, everything has been stripped and plundered many times over, deliberately eradicating the previous culture. 
 Worse, in recent times, people scribbled graffitti inside the Great Pyramid. This shows how seriously the whole thing was taken.
 Alien(s)? No comment is possible, pro or con. Can't prove that Aliens haven't visited, only theorize what may have happened if they _did_. SF does a good job of that! Too many theories, in fact.
 Have people repressed archeological finds in the recent past? Wouldn't surprise me.
 We all want it to be true - a fabulous earlier civilization, a lost age of marvels. Giant people, cities of gold. 
 The Peruvian legends of the strange man who came and taught them how to live. He 'caused the great terraces and roads to be built'. Lots of other legends, and the more you think about it, the more the word-of-mouth legends are the most likely to be true. 
 History is not going to fall into a neat box, where people behaved as we do today, it was savage brutal stuff and all attempts to sanitize it move away from the truth.
 Logic says there's only two ways those giant granite blocks could be cut. There was a technology or technique that is lost - or else they were made in much more _recent _times, a nutbar theory I haven't seen anywhere yet.


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## RJM Corbet

Vertigo said:


> I agree, there are some well informed people out there, but the vast majority of us living in the modern technological world would be completely lost in a non-technological world. How many people would know how to tan leather, make bronze never mind iron, make animal traps, make an effective spear/spear thrower, make bows and arrows, make a shelter that actually keeps you dry, forage for food, hunt for food, store food over winter so it doesn't rot etc. etc.?
> 
> I'm not saying no one out there could do it, just that the majority of us couldn't.



What if some enormous global upheaval forced the few survivors into exactly that position? Back to the stone age? What if entire continents shifted their position, parts of the earth were suddenly submerged, and others rose from the ocean? That kind of catastrophe? What if we knew it was going to happen, but could do nothing to prevent it?


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## J Riff

Yup, crustal displacement. Ice builds up miles thick and eventually drags the entire skin, the crust of the planet along when it shifts. Then it melts and the pole freezes again.
 Massive worldwide flooding, and even a place like Tiahunaco gets knocked apart. The titanic floor stones there are clamped together, as if they already had issues with them coming apart.
 Gigantic stones to withstand gigantic flooding. Made by giant people, who are making quite a comeback it seems. Giant monkey-men. Every other animal got big, why not us?
 Anyway. Even recent stuff is gone, wiped. Old movies are missing or altered, pictures, books, anything that doesn't fit the program it seems, so the ancient world is probably no different. 
 To my mind the history re-writers, who at one time must have been deemed necessary - seem to have taken this to mean that they actually have a permanent job now... rewriting history... into a version that's best for everyone. As they see it. They need to be written out.


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## Ursa major

J Riff said:


> They need to be written out.


Told they're history, you mean...?


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## RJM Corbet

J Riff said:


> Yup, crustal displacement. Ice builds up miles thick and eventually drags the entire skin, the crust of the planet along when it shifts. Then it melts and the pole freezes again.
> Massive worldwide flooding, and even a place like Tiahunaco gets knocked apart. The titanic floor stones there are clamped together, as if they already had issues with them coming apart.
> Gigantic stones to withstand gigantic flooding. Made by giant people, who are making quite a comeback it seems. Giant monkey-men. Every other animal got big, why not us?
> Anyway. Even recent stuff is gone, wiped. Old movies are missing or altered, pictures, books, anything that doesn't fit the program it seems, so the ancient world is probably no different.
> To my mind the history re-writers, who at one time must have been deemed necessary - seem to have taken this to mean that they actually have a permanent job now... rewriting history... into a version that's best for everyone. As they see it. They need to be written out.



That is a very good and concise explanation. Lose the giant monkey men, and we're on the same page ...


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## J Riff

Aha. The giant monkeys though - won't go away. The legend goes that a handful of the so-called giants were kept alive. Were these men or simply giant gorillas?
Remember Gorillas in the Mist? Very intelligent, gorillas are, no question.  Gorillas 5000 years ago? Very huge, very strong, very enslavable. See, I have my own theories.
 There are darker theories than people want to hear. The Pharoahs, for example, who built this or that huge pyramid - perhaps worked thousands of huge animals to death, as well as legions of human slaves. Horrific, brutal, primitive savage stuff that makes one queesy trying to visualize it. Ritual killings, massive drug control of the population, attempts to grow giant animals or cross-breed things, bizarre practices of stretching the skulls of infants...this is the everyday stuff of life pre-Egypt. Or Sumeria. Or South America or Atlantis. 
Egypt may well signify the beginning of civilization, but that's it - all bets are off before that, written records or not.
 Hell, most of the theorists, Van Daniken included, end up with Giant Aliens. The elongated skull, the giant stature, it's all there in Sumerian characters, as is the Solar System. The tenth planet.
 I heard the whole story- the twin planet and all of it - way back in the fifties, told as a story that was supposed to be true. 
The fun in this is in watching it change daily as new theories are proposed or altered, in re: the ancient world. 
 I did want to be an archaeologist as a child, and work with a toothbrush uncovering ancient mysteries, but gumbeating and writing about it will have to suffice. Stay tuned for the latest in ancient rumors.


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## RJM Corbet

Well, keep the monkeys then. But please!!! keep Von Daniken out of this thread. His 'spacemen' were supposed to have come to earth in the same sort of tin can Yuri Gagarin used. Aaargh!!! You see, I'm doing it ...


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## J Riff

I'm about to watch a BBC documentary entitled: _The Ape that took over the World._
That's us. 
 All this fun research has resulted in two stories and a docu-rantary here, and the lineup of youTubeage still unwatched is impressive. 
 Ran into a strangeone - showing newpaper clippings from 1909 describing pyramid finds in the Grand Canyon, that pushed history back thousands of years.
1909! The coverup rages on.


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## J Riff

Well. Looks like the big block mystery is over - it took an actual Egyptologist near 30yrs. to break the denial.
 Chip soft limestone into water. Add salt, dump into large wooden frame, adjustable, pound down with rammers, wait a few hours. Indistinguishable from natural limestone. Bricks, they were already good at, so... there's further proof, but Davidovitz(?) adds more ideas, tho' these pro historians are careful to stay out of each others way - explaining the ashes, palm ashes, also used to cook their food, make bread.
 Without the Palms, crops failed from lack of shade. Famine comes next, possibly the reason the society disappeared. Possibly over-exploited their environment building pyramids!
 The granite blocks... hmmm, well...
But the salt, literally tons of it removed from the chambers.... uhhh... Gypsum?
So- pre-egypt technology is... pre-brick and pre-giant-machine-of-any-kind technology?

They had the idea of _liquid rock_ - but how far back does that go?


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## J Riff

The early granite carvings are suspicious. They are too damned perfect. What is the secret?
 And why... is this early machine society being covered up to this day? Strictly because of the Egyptian tourist industry?
 Why, huh... why? Obviously people know, have known for decades, what the Great Pyramid is... yet youTube is full of wild theories and fringe cultiness, instead of the,very simple, truth.
 I can see why they are covering and burying and obscuring recent stuff... there's money to be stolen... but the pyramids?
 People may be crazier now than they were back then. Always, they destroy evidence of the previous civilization. Crazy.


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## anhalo

I agree with someones earlier post. I don't think earlier humans were any less intelligent. In fact, reading greek texts, you sometimes think they may have been smarter in some ways. We just have had the benefit of working upon years of older people's work, although it seems that there have been developments that have been forgotten. I've heard one person who thinks that things are never discovered, just rediscovered. It's an interesting thought. Too bad after so many years we still have wars though.


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## Brian G Turner

Good point - the ancient Greeks knew about steam power, and even children in the Roman Empire could get little steam-power novelties as toys. However, with a slave class in existence, and profiteering frowned upon, across these ages, there was never an incentive to develop the power of steam.


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## Starbeast




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## Nik

"...never an incentive to develop the power of steam"

There was also the issue of fuel-- Without coal or oil, there was only wood and charcoal, or even hay, meaning progressive deforestation...

Uh, okay, the *later* period of Roman empire included some huge water-wheels, especially in Spain, but there was no driver for steam-power...


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## RJM Corbet

I said:


> Good point - the ancient Greeks knew about steam power, and even children in the Roman Empire could get little steam-power novelties as toys. However, with a slave class in existence, and profiteering frowned upon, across these ages, there was never an incentive to develop the power of steam.



I don't know about that Brian. The Romans were a very military race and military applications, as in the atom bomb, are usually what powers the exploration of these things? Profiteering was definitely a big part of what Rome was all about. It was all about money and power. But perhaps they just never saw a military application.


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## Brian G Turner

Coal and oil was certainly available to the ancient Greeks and Romans - they just didn't see much of a use for it - on a large scale at least.

Roman authors at least wrote about the fields of pitch near Baghdad, which were used to fuel lamps for lighting - but aside from that, no great necessity to use it.

In fact, if I recall correctly (or not) I read an argument suggesting that a major driver of the Industrial Revolution in the UK was precisely because mass deforestation had made coal one of the only (relatively) widely available fuels, and that there are barely any trees known to exist from before the 17th century because of this.


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## RJM Corbet

Even if the pyramid builders somehow used the same steam power that later Greece and Rome had no practical use for, it's doubtful it would have helped them much.

The Great Pyramid covers 13 acres at the base and consists of 2.5 million blocks of limestone, cut with 'copper' tools. The central structure is built of granite blocks as large as 200 tons, quarried hundreds of miles away. Granite is MUCH harder than limestone and there just is no WAY copper will cut granite. Copper is a very soft metal and granite is a very hard stone. In fact iron and even tungsten will not cut granite. Topaz or ruby will cut it, but slowly. A diamond saw does the job, though.

These blocks were rolled on wooden logs, but there aren't ANY trees. The nearest were in Europe, and it would have needed millions of logs. Egypt was many things, but never a maritime nation?

According to the 'Egypt model' the Great Pyramid was not only built in 20 years, but in three months of the year, when the Nile was in flood. All this can be checked. Ten hours a day, seven days a week for 20 years flat out gives you one block every 2 minutes. Divide by four gives you one every 30 seconds -- 2.5 million 2 ton blocks laid over 13 acres and rising to an apex with an accuracy of 1/4 inch?

This is for a monument that would costs billions to build today, although never  to such accuracy -- diamond saws and cranes and railways to move the stone.

The list of impossibilities just goes on and on.

Oh yes, and they left hundreds of thousands of heiroglyphics describing every facet of life, from what they ate to how they made love and what they wore, but never ONCE -- never once -- did they write about building pyramids.


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## Ursa major

RJM Corbet said:


> The Great Pyramid covers 13 acres at the base and consists of 2.5 million blocks of limestone, cut with 'copper' tools. The central structure is built of granite blocks as large as 200 tons, quarried hundreds of miles away.


There is comparatively little granite in the pyramids, and what's there is for specific purposes, like the King's Chamber and the "stack" of small chambers above it. Wiki (yes, I know) reckons the largest slabs weigh 80 tons, which is well within the Ancient Egyptian's capabilities as far as quarrying it and transporting it downstream from Aswan. (There's an unfinished obelisk in the Aswan quarry that would have weighed 500+ tonnes had it not cracked during the quarrying. Even the small one now in London, made of red granite, weighs 187 tons.)



RJM Corbet said:


> These blocks were rolled on wooden logs, but there aren't ANY trees. The nearest were in Europe, and it would have needed millions of logs. Egypt was many things, but never a maritime nation?


Ancient Egypt did have trees, although not to anywhere near the same extent as, say the Europe of that time. They also imported them (most of them, presumably, as logs). There are still trees there today.



RJM Corbet said:


> According to the 'Egypt model' the Great Pyramid was not only built in 20 years, but in three months of the year, when the Nile was in flood. All this can be checked. Ten hours a day, seven days a week for 20 years flat out gives you one block every 2 minutes. Divide by four gives you one every 30 seconds -- 2.5 million 2 ton blocks laid over 13 acres and rising to an apex with an accuracy of 1/4 inch?


The accuracy "only" has to be at the corners and the associated rising edges. The whole structure does not have to be built as a series of perfect layers. And even if the edges weren't perfect, the real accuracy - on the exterior, that is - was only needed when cutting and placing the facing stones (which have long since been removed from the Great Pyramid). 



RJM Corbet said:


> This is for a monument that would costs billions to build today, although never to such accuracy -- diamond saws and cranes and railways to move the stone.


The workforce would have been cheap: the labourers couldn't work on their fields because of the inundation and I'm sure the authorities, with the power of the state religion behind them, would have been hard bargainers with the more-skilled amongst the workforce. The Nile would have been used to carry the stones (although I know there's a railway there now, as I've travelled on it ), as it was for those later obelisks. And speaking of obelisks, the Ancient Egyptians had no insuperable problems with working them, sharp edges, carvings and all.


The list of impossibilities just goes on and on.[/quote]
...all the way from zero to zero. 



RJM Corbet said:


> Oh yes, and they left hundreds of thousands of heiroglyphics describing every facet of life, from what they ate to how they made love and what they wore, but never ONCE -- never once -- did they write about building pyramids.


Not that many pyramids were built, not using those methods at any rate. (Later pyramids used rock fill and mud bricks and were faced in stone, which is why they look like heaps of rubble, the stone having been removed, leaving the weather to do the rest; some of the below-ground chambers survive, having been cut into the rock of the ground.) I expect those who knew how to build them had other, more lucrative, things to do than make life easy for modern historians. The other descriptions - of everyday life - had religious significance, and so were recorded as such; in/on tombs, for example.


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## RJM Corbet

The apex is 1/4 inch off true center.

One block every 30 seconds?

Cut to millimeter tolerance?

2.5 million of them?

(I'll give you 'only' 80 tons the biggest granite block in the king's chamber. Sorry, my mistake.)

Surely the Great Pyramid had religious significance too?


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## paranoid marvin

it seems that some experts think that something is impossible just because we don't know how to do it today. 

As I have already mentioned , we are reliant on machines to do much of the work for us these days to the extent that we cannot comprehend anything being built otherwise.Ancient civilisations didn't have modern machinery to do what they wanted ; it required them to us the tools and (consierable) brute force labour freely at hand.


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## RJM Corbet

paranoid marvin said:


> it seems that some experts think that something is impossible just because we don't know how to do it today.
> 
> As I have already mentioned , we are reliant on machines to do much of the work for us these days to the extent that we cannot comprehend anything being built otherwise.Ancient civilisations didn't have modern machinery to do what they wanted ; it required them to us the tools and (consierable) brute force labour freely at hand.



Yes, they certainly DID do it. 12 000 years ago!
(Watch SB's latest video, below?)


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## Ursa major

RJM Corbet said:


> The apex is 1/4 inch off true center.
> 
> One block every 30 seconds?
> 
> Cut to millimeter tolerance?
> 
> 2.5 million of them?
> 
> (I'll give you 'only' 80 tons the biggest granite block in the king's chamber. Sorry, my mistake.)


But as I said, they're not all cut to millimetre tolerance and they don't have to be. Only the outside of the facing stones has to be. As long as the basic shape is there (i.e. the four rising edges don't veer off at an angle), the facing stones can be adjusted to give the required accuracy. (That's how later pyramids could be built with rubble at their core, enclosed by relatively accurately placed mud brick walls and covered in a thin layer of stone.) We see the Giza pyramids, without the casing, as very precise, but that's because we're looking at a simply huge edifice from a distance.



RJM Corbet said:


> Surely the Great Pyramid had religious significance too?


But not in the same way. I think the descriptions of everyday life were related to how the deceased would exist in the afterlife. I don't think that they had the concept of dying once dead, and so had no need of a pyramid (or mastaba or tomb) once they'd left this world.


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## RJM Corbet

I wonder if the apex of St Pauls, or of the latest skyscraper, is within 1/4 inch of true? I don't know. It's a question?


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## paranoid marvin

Probably not - it doesnt have to be. We've sacrificed the art of craftsmanship for that of haste.


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## Ursa major

I think the main consideration for buildings like St Paul's was that they don't collapse on those inside. Probably.

Where height was an issue, it would have been of the type: "My cathedral's taller than yours."


By the way, as the outer casing is missing from the Great Pyramid, we can't really say how accurate its position was. (The flashing light on the top doesn't count. )


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## RJM Corbet

paranoid marvin said:


> Probably not - it doesnt have to be. We've sacrificed the art of craftsmanship for that of haste.



The builders of the Great Pyramid were supposedly in a tearing hurry. They were placing one block every 30 seconds?



Ursa major said:


> I think the main consideration for buildings like St Paul's was that they don't collapse on those inside. Probably.
> 
> Where height was an issue, it would have been of the type: "My cathedral's taller than yours."
> 
> 
> By the way, as the outer casing is missing from the Great Pyramid, we can't really say how accurate its position was. (The flashing light on the top doesn't count. )



They've been all over the thing with every sort of scientific instrument ...


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## Ursa major

There's no original outside surface and no original apex (pyramidion), so I'm not sure how they can make that statement with anything like a clear conscience.


I'm looking at a full-page picture in my _Atlas of Ancient Egypt_ (did I ever mention that I love maps and atlases), on page 159, which shows one of the rising edges. There is no edge. You can see the boundary between the two "triangular" "surfaces", because one's in shadow and the other is not. The "line" weaves about all over the place, although you can see the general direction in which it's heading.


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## RJM Corbet

Ursa major said:


> There's no original outside surface and no original apex (pyramidion), so I'm not sure how they can make that statement with anything like a clear conscience.



No I didn't know you like maps.  I like rocks and stones, you know, minerals -- they are so hard and ancient and pure.

Back to business: it should be possible to intersect the plane of the top square from corner to corner and where the two lines intersect, that's the center?


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## Ursa major

True, but it would be in the air quite a way above where the stone stops. (Or, possibly, it would be where the flashing light is, but that's a modern addition.)


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## RJM Corbet

Well you've seen from close up and I only know from pictures and what I've read. I'm not too keen on alien theories, though one should keep an open mind -- who really knows -- but I'm pretty convinced by now that the Great Pyramid and Sphinx had to already be there when the Egyptians arrived, as were the Mayan pyramids when the Maya and Inca moved in, etc.

The evidence for this 'pre-civilization' is mounting steadily and seems to date the origin of all these megalithic monuments that are turning up all over the world -- the Japanese sunken pyramids, the Bosnian pyramids -- at around 12 000 years ...


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## Ursa major

Changing the date changes nothing. The builders would still have to be people and they still wouldn't have had access to modern technology. (And if they had have had that technology, why use it to build something made solely of stone?)


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## RJM Corbet

Ursa major said:


> Changing the date changes nothing. The builders would still have to be people and they still wouldn't have had access to modern technology. (And if they had have had that technology, why use it to build something made solely of stone?)



There I'm in agreement: people, not aliens. But pre-dating Egypt, etc. Whatever technology they had 12 000 years ago, and whatever else they did with it, the ice-age came to a very suddenly end for some reason, flooding their own civilization. There are only these great stone edifices left.


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## paranoid marvin

Basically , one way or another there was a race of people who had developed ways of erecting monumental buildings.Those skills have been lost over the years, or were at least transferred to a different end.And if they lived in Egypt (or whatever they called it) they were still Egyptians ; personally  Idon't believe they transformed pre-existing buildings into tombs , I think they were erected for that reason.

As for aliens; I'm sorry , I just don't buy that. I accept the possibility of beings on other worlds , and I accept the possibility of them visiting Earth at oe time in our past. What I do not accept is that they allowed the use of their tools to ancient civilisations , but made sure that they took them all back when they had finished,making sure none were eleft behind ; why on earth would they do that? What would the care if people millenia later found out it had been alien beings and not humans who had built the Pyramids? If they were so bothered about being discovered , why bother helping the Egyptians (or whoever) build them in the first place?


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## Nik

IIRC, a careful investigation of the 'Japanese pyramids' found they were natural, like the 'sunken pavements'...

There's a 'gotcha', though: During the ice ages, the sea level was significantly lower. You had settlements, yes, but also erosion of exposed strata, to form such head-scratchers as natural 'limestone pavements'...

Uh, if you want to know what a genuine sunken city looks like, consider Alexandria, whose old temple and palace area apparently succumbed to liquefaction during a quake. It is now under the bay, and marine archaeologists are picking through the jumbled remains...


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## J Riff

well, Marvin said it there, 'let us use their tools'.... in fact, Aliens are absolutely for real, the idea they taught people anything is what's wrong.


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## RJM Corbet

Nik said:


> IIRC, a careful investigation of the 'Japanese pyramids' found they were natural, like the 'sunken pavements'...



Oh please! A careful investigation by who?
Name, address, qualification?

Graham Hancock took a geologist down there with him for about 20 minutes, who in effect said that, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, they could still, just possibly, be natural formations -- which is not exactly a 'careful investigation' or a 'scientific finding' ...


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## Ursa major

Isn't there a phrase, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof"?

It is up to Mr Hancock to prove that the structure was a man-made pavement. It is not up to those who disagree with him to prove that the structure is natural.

(So even that half-hearted statement by that geologist is enough to make me doubt the claim, if only because I haven't seen Mr Hancock's irrefutable evidence that this was a man-made pavement.)


If it's any consolation, I take a lot of what mainstream archaeologists say in TV programmes about their finds with a big pinch of salt. Their enthusiasm and desire to engage the general public sometimes seems to get the better of them.


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## Brian G Turner

The standard dating of the Giza pyramids puts their construction somewhere in the 4th millenium BC. What I find very interesting is the fact that this was a time of monumental climate change - the Sahara had been savannah until then. I've often wondered if the building of the pyramids was a response to this massive climate change.


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## RJM Corbet

But how do you date stone?
It can't be carbon dated.
You can carbon date the paint on a wall, or the bones around it, but not the stone itself.


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## Ursa major

RJM Corbet said:


> But how do you date stone?
> It can't be carbon dated.
> You can carbon date the paint on a wall, or the bones around it, but not the stone itself.


The age of the stone is immaterial rolleyes. The "pavement" is either a deliberate arrangement of paving stones, an area of the underlying rock that has been worked to make a pavement, or a mixture of both.

It is the need for a human hand in its creation that is in dispute, not what it's made of. I'm assuming Mr Hancock has reasons why he believes that the structure was a man-made pavement. All he has to do is take these reasons and prove, one by one, that he's correct in his belief (which, presumably, means showing that nature couldn't produce the effects, or that so many unlikely natural processes would need to have been involved that the most likely cause is man).


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## RJM Corbet

Ursa major said:


> The age of the stone is immaterial ...



Sorry, I was going back to the great pyramid there, not Japan.

Regarding the latter: these guys are begging for someone to study them properly. Scubaring around for a few minutes and then giving a verdict that can be interpreted 50/50 at best is not a proper investigation. 

I accept that they could, just possibly, be natural formations -- in which case they would be a geological freak of nature and earn a special place in the geology books. You would have to study the foundations and surrounding bedrock to say anything conclusive about them, really?

There are very few straight lines and right angles in nature. They occur in crystals, of course, but seldom in rock formations -- like the Giants Causeway in Ireland.

On the other hand, they do look a lot like man-made structures  ...


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## Ursa major

Oh, sorry.

As it happens, there _are_ examples of paint. I've just been glancing at the New Scientist article on the investigations into those tunnels that reach up from the Queen's Chamber. (The picture they've used seems, to me, to be of Pyramid of Khafre, not Khufu. *shakes head* ) Inside the hidden chamber (i.e. beyond the first blocking stone), there are hieroglyphs written in red paint. If a sample could be taken, that should provide some sort of date. (I suppose, the hieroglyphs might even include a written date.)

The location of those hieroglyphs would make it more than unlikely that they could have been written by Ancient Egyptians millennia after a suggested earlier date of construction.


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## RJM Corbet

Ursa major said:


> The location of those hieroglyphs would make it more than unlikely that they could have been written by Ancient Egyptians millennia after a suggested earlier date of construction.



Well, 'grave robbers' are supposed to have somehow entered the 'great' pyramid and stolen everything, including the mummy from the sarcophagus, and then replaced the 6 ton lid and re-sealed it with cement, and then tidied up so carefully after themselves that they left not a single trace of their intrusion ...


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## Ursa major

The location is 63 metres up a tunnel that's 20cm square. Between an intrepid climber and the chamber is a block of stone. A hole was drilled through this in 2002 (i.e. nine years ago). The recent investigation required using a camera on the end of a flexible, and controllable, stalk.

As there is one hole, and we know when it was drilled (2002), no tomb robber could have seen the inside of that chamber, let alone painted anything. And why would they paint anything if they were there to steal treasure? Why would a tomb robber have paint? How could they paint through solid stone? That would make the Ancient Egyptians (i.e. not the fictional civilisation from 10000BCE) not only far more advanced than us, but in possession of technology we only see, if at all, in SF.


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## RJM Corbet

Ursa major said:


> The location is 63 metres up a tunnel that's 20cm square. Between an intrepid climber and the chamber is a block of stone. A hole was drilled through this in 2002 (i.e. nine years ago). The recent investigation required using a camera on the end of a flexible, and controllable, stalk.
> 
> As there is one hole, and we know when it was drilled (2002), no tomb robber could have seen the inside of that chamber, let alone painted anything. And why would they paint anything if they were there to steal treasure? Why would a tomb robber have paint? How could they paint through solid stone? That would make the Ancient Egyptians (i.e. not the fictional civilisation from 10000BCE) not only far more advanced than us, but in possession of technology we only see, if at all, in SF.



Mmm I know about a shaft. They sent a robot up and it just came to another stone partition. But that's not where the 'khufu' glyph was found. It was in one of the higher 'hidden' chambers above the 'king's chamber'. But the entrance to the pyramid wasn't known until recently? Yet it appears people were in and out of there in the past closing up after them? If they had the ingenuity to do that it wouldn't be a great surprise that they also scrambled up into the 'hidden' chambers?

Yes, it's surprisng no-one has carbon dated that glyph. Or perhaps they have and it fits the 'model', which proves nothing ...


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## Ursa major

They could have scrambled up as far as the first blocking stone, but the chamber is on the other side of it, out of reach. But why take any paint? And why only paint on the walls they couldn't reach (!) but not the ones they could? As far as I can tell, just about every creator of a graffito wants it to be seen (although that may not be the case with all builder's marks).


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## RJM Corbet

Ursa major said:


> They could have scrambled up as far as the first blocking stone, but the chamber is on the other side of it, out of reach. But why take any paint? And why only paint on the walls they couldn't reach (!) but not the ones they could? As far as I can tell, just about every creator of a graffito wants it to be seen (although that may not be the case with all builder's marks).



Are you referring to the 'great' pyramid here?
A builder's mark? Yes, possibly ...


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## Ursa major

It isn't the only hieroglyph: they were showing the one in the top chamber (the one with the sloping ceiling above the King's Chamber) on the TV as recently as Monday evening.


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## RJM Corbet

Well I'll have to brush up on recent developments before taking this further and making a twip of myself with usubstantiated statements, ok? Any suggestions?


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## Ursa major

The programme should be on iPlayer, though as the scene in the top chamber was a minute or two long, the whole programme was an hour-and-a-half long long (and its material could have been fitted into 45 minutes), I'm not sure if I should recommend it.


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## RJM Corbet

I'll see what I can find, but in the meantime I've watched again the video with which SB launched this thread and come away with the same 'phew' factor. Is it by coincidence that the apex of the Great Pyramid marks the intersection of the longest LAND latitude and longitude lines and that the sides are precisely facing the cardinal points of the compass?


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## Vertigo

Yes I watched that program Ursa, and thought there was rather a lot of fluff around a few very interesting facts. One other of which does impinge on this discussion. It now seems possible that the Egyptian population around that time was an order of magnitude bigger than had previously been thought meaning the available pool of workers to draw on for monumental construction was much higher than originally thought.

Oh and just a comment on another post from earlier. Granite is very hard, much more so than limestone and certainly you could not cut it with a bit of copper; you couldn't even cut limestone with just a piece of copper (at least not effectively). However both limestone and granite can be cut very effectively by sand! And that is almost certainly what was done. Much harder with granite of course but still doable. 

In fact the pyramid of Menkaure (the smallest of the three Giza pyramids) was started with granite and the first 16 courses are all granite (including the facing stones). There is a good picture half way down the wiki page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_of_Menkaure showing the two types of stone. This picture also shows that the granite facing stones were not all finished. The Wiki page does not say much about why they switched from granite to limestone but when I was out there the accepted theory seemed to be that it was simply taking them too long to work so much granite and then Menkaure died was buried in the pyramid and his son finished the job (as was quite common and is well documented by the ancient texts). However whilst his son might have felt obliged to finish the pyramid he didn't feel obliged to make quite as expensive a job of it as his father may have wished. This is also shown in the temple complex associated with that pyramid which was started in granite and then finished in mud brick.

Incidentally the fact that many of the granite facing stones were not finished has allowed archeologists to get a much better idea of the processes they used to do this job (though I haven't dug too much into their findings).


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## RJM Corbet

Here's a link to proper data about the Great Pyramid. In spite of the title, which appears to use the word 'mystery' in the simple sense of questions to be answered, it appears not to be a mystico mumbo-jumbo article, and it looks quite comprehensive, so far:

www.world-mysteries.com/mpl_2.htm


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## Vertigo

That's not a bad site in many ways it gathers together quite a lot of data (although some of its references cite nothing better than Wiki as a source). However as you say it poses the questions without too much speculation. Which is fine; it would be quite extraordinary if we could ever find out everything from that period and had no more unanswered questions. Not going to happen.

One interesting thing to my mind about the discovery of places like Gobekli Tepe (SB's more recent vieo link) is that it just goes to show how much is still out there to be discovered. It's always going to be hard to find stuff over 10000 years old, so it's no surprise we haven't found many other similar sites. Most would probably have been cannablised over the centuries (try and find an old house built anywhere near Hadrians wall that doesn't have part of that ancient wall in its own walls!). It also highlights the fact that if humans were building structures like Gobekli Tepe 12000 years ago then we shouldn't really be too surprised to find that techniques for working stone had advanced sufficiently for the Egyptians to construct their pyramids some 5000 - 7500 years later.


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## Brian G Turner

RJM Corbet said:


> But how do you date stone?
> It can't be carbon dated.
> You can carbon date the paint on a wall, or the bones around it, but not the stone itself.



I believe measurements of rain damage contribute to the dating, which some people argue means the pyramids and sphinx should be dated older - depending upon what presumptions of rainfall you have.


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## RJM Corbet

I said:


> I believe measurements of rain damage contribute to the dating, which some people argue means the pyramids and sphinx should be dated older - depending upon what presumptions of rainfall you have.



Yes, particularly on the Sphinx ...


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## Chaoticheart

RJM Corbet said:


> But how do you date stone?
> It can't be carbon dated.
> You can carbon date the paint on a wall, or the bones around it, but not the stone itself.



There are a variety of methods:


Thermoluminescence dating
Archaeomagnetism
Argon-Argon dating.
The various uranium isotope dating methods
Rubidium-strontium dating

The problem is that they'll give you the last time a stone cooled  rather than when they were cut. So dating the stone itself is an absolutely pointless exercise in this situation.

However Liritzis's surface luminescence dating method could in theory be used to determine when the pyramids were constructed. The method extended the principles behind both optical and thermoluminescence dating to "include surfaces last seen by the sun before buried, of carved rock  types from ancient monuments and artifacts, made of granite, basalt and  sandstone." The technique has previously been used to date the construction of two Hellenic pyramids and though the dates determined have been subject to criticism, in part due to lack of precision, most archaeologists will concede that, due to the likelihood of such structures being reused, the earlier dates determined by this technique are a distinct possibility.


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## Vertigo

RJM Corbet said:


> Yes, particularly on the Sphinx ...


 
Why so?


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## RJM Corbet

Chaoticheart said:


> ... The technique has previously been used to date the construction of two Hellenic pyramids and though the dates determined have been subject to criticism, in part due to lack of precision, most archaeologists will concede that, due to the likelihood of such structures being reused, the earlier dates determined by this technique are a distinct possibility.



So what is the proposed date for the pyramids in question, and where are they? Are they in Greece?


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## Chaoticheart

RJM Corbet said:


> So what is the proposed date for the pyramids in question, and where are they? Are they in Greece?



Yes they're in Greece.

Hellinikon Pyramid - 2730±720
	

	
	
		
		

		
			





 (meaning it predates the oldest Egyptian pyramid by a century.)
Ligourio Pyramid - 2260±710
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	




Prior to this they were generally thought to date to the classical/Hellenistic age (due to pottery finds).

For the record this study was done back in '95.


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## Vertigo

Here's two wiki pages on the subject that I found RJM:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoluminescence_dating
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_of_Hellinikon

The first one is just about the mechanism. The second is about the dating of the Pyramid of Hellinikon. The date they have come up with is around 2720 BC which is about 100 years before the first Egyptian pyramid. The page also contains an argument against those dates stating that they were biased towards getting the result they wanted... "in order to confirm a predetermined theory about the age of these structures".


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## RJM Corbet

Vertigo said:


> Why so?



Sorry your post landed while I was drafting mine. Graham Hancock (...again) has pretty clear findings by geologists that the lower part of the sphinx was weathered by very heavy rainfall, which has not happened in Egypt during the whole extent of Egyptian history as we know it.


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## Nik

IIRC, the simplest solution to the paradox would be that an existing outcrop was customised to become the Sphinx...

A similar head-scratcher could eventually be caused by Mt Rushmore...


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## Vertigo

OK well there seems to be some debate on that point:



> Most Egyptologists, dating the building of the Sphinx to Khafra's reign (2520–2492 BC), do not accept the water erosion theory. Alternative explanations for the evidence of weathering, from Aeolian processes and acid rain to exfoliation, haloclasty, thermal expansion, and even the poor quality limestone of the Sphinx, have been put forward by Egyptologists and geologists, including Mark Lehner,[19] James A. Harrell of the University of Toledo,[28] Lal Gauri, John J. Sinai and Jayanta K. Bandyopadhyay,[29] Alex Bordeau,[30] and Lambert Dolphin, a former senior research physicist at SRI International.[31]
> 
> The chief proponents of the water erosion theory have rejected these alternative explanations. Reader, for example, points to the tombs dug into the Enclosure walls during Dynasty XXVI (c. 600 BC), and notes that the entrances of the tombs have weathered so lightly that original chisel marks are still clearly visible. He points out that if the weathering on the Enclosure walls (up to a metre deep in places) had been created by any of the proposed alternative causes of erosion, the tomb entrances would have been weathered much more severely.[32] Similarly, Schoch points out that the alternative explanations do not account for the absence of similar weathering patterns on other rock surfaces in the Giza pyramid complex


 
However even the water erosion theory still only puts it at around 5000 BC, which is not before the current accepted start of the Egyptian civilisation.

Also I would have to add (though I certainly don't know the facts here so pure supposition) that maybe the tombs dug into the enclosure walls came much later or were faced with better quality limestone (I have been there and as a rock climber I can truthfully say that the limestone of the Sphinx is some of the poorest quality limestone I've seen ). Maybe poor quality limestone was chosen because it is softer and therefore easier to work into such a huge statue.


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## RJM Corbet

Nik said:


> IIRC, the simplest solution to the paradox would be that an existing outcrop was customised to become the Sphinx ...



That is probably quite likely.



Vertigo said:


> OK well there seems to be some debate on that point:
> 
> 
> 
> However even the water erosion theory still only puts it at around 5000 BC, which is not before the current accepted start of the Egyptian civilisation.
> 
> Also I would have to add (though I certainly don't know the facts here so pure supposition) that maybe the tombs dug into the enclosure walls came much later or were faced with better quality limestone (I have been there and as a rock climber I can truthfully say that the limestone of the Sphinx is some of the poorest quality limestone I've seen ). Maybe poor quality limestone was chosen because it is softer and therefore easier to work into such a huge statue.



So water erosion looks more likely than dry erosion, taking into account the quality of the rock, balanced against weathering patterns to other structures in the vicinity, and of course the Egyptologist's propensity to support their 'model'? But the water erosion, if that's what caused the erosion -- happened not 12 but 7 thousand years ago? At around the earliest beginning of the Egyptian civilization as we know it?

Yes. The sphinx may have been built before then. There would still have been a lot of lesser floods and global disasters happening -- aftershocks, so to speak, of the initial 'great flood' -- that would have continued for perhaps 1000 years or more after the main event, as the ice age rapidly melted away.

If this happened after sudden global crustal displacement, where continents shifted latitude/longitude by thousands of miles and the polar ice caps were very suddenly shifted to equatorial latitudes -- even the subsequent flooding caused by the ice caps melting would be gradual compared to the disasterous effects of that very rapid continental displacement?

One cannot even imagine what would happen if today the crust of the earth were to suddenly slip around over the lower mantle that it floats on, and all the continents were to change their latitude/longitude position, while still keeping their positions relative to one another.

Albert Einstein supported this possibility, in writing.


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## Nik

"If this happened after sudden global crustal displacement, where continents shifted latitude/longitude by thousands of miles"

Sorry, no. The sea-floor magnetic stripes aka 'barcodes' caused by magnetic reversals would flag such excursions beyond reasonable doubt. The Atlantic's mirror-stripes cover at least the last twenty million years, and other areas go much further...
http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/platetec/kula.htm

http://scienceblogs.com/highlyallochthonous/2009/12/6_fields_a-flipping.php

Don't hold this error against Einstein: Acceptance of Sea-floor Spreading came later. In fact, I remember that when the definitive paper was published, our college's entire Geography department went out and got drunk-- The young folk to celebrate, the old folk as a wake for their demolished paradigm...

ps: Here's a fun page...
http://www.geology.sdsu.edu/kmlgeology/magnetics.html


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## RJM Corbet

I'll check out the link, Nik, and also go out and celebrate if it's true -- but, just to clarify: this is not 'continental drift' or tectonic subduction we're talking about here? It's the whole thirty mile thick crust slipping over the mantle in one piece, like the skin of an orange slipping over the orange inside, if that were possible?

_EDIT_: And sorry I'm not getting it from that. Its sad but its true. All I'm seeing there is plate tectonics and magnetic pole reversal -- unless those magnetic time markers can also mark the latitude/longitude position of those strata on the globe at the time when the pole shifts occurred? But I can find nothing there that says it's more than an effective chronological dating tool for sub-oceanic geological time periods -- it doesn't appear to mark their latitude/longitude position in relation to the above?


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## Vertigo

As I understand it after a bit of digging (no pun intended I promise) the Sphinx was not "built", it is a monolith; it is carved into an existing outcrop and the "body" was faced with cut stone. However also digging a bit further the erosion business is not refering to erosion on the Sphinx itself. If it is just an outcrop with a head carved on it (like Rushmore) I don't suppose the erosion would tell us very much since it was obviously there and being eroded long before the Egyptions were around. It just hadn't been carved then! However I think the erosion argument is about the enclosure wall around it which I suspect was also carved out of the existing rock and therefore should have less erosion. Haven't managed to find out much more than that though.


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## J Riff

Well I've remembered everything about Giza, but never mind.
I scratched my initials inside the not-so-great-pyramid.
How many wonders of the ancient world have you managed to put graffitti on?
Ha. Thought so. Some experts. Snikr.* )


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## Nik

" ... it doesn't appear to mark their latitude/longitude position in relation to the above?"

Sorry for the delay replying, I'd forgotten about this thread...

You can check the rock's magnetism's 'horizontal' and 'vertical' components. Former gives you direction plus NS/SN, latter's tilt gives a measure of latitude.

There is a 'gotcha' as, during magnetic pole reversals, global magnetic field goes through a tangled 'multi-pole' arrangement which may collapse to either NS or SN. The currently growing 'South Atlantic Anomaly' may be evidence of the start of a future switch.

But, when you have some-where like Hawaii, with layer upon layer of lava in successive strata, it would be easy to spot a sudden change in magnetic latitude. Also, lake and sea sediments would show a switch in climate zones...

IIRC, the 'crustal shift' idea sought to explain some of the geological features which were later resolved by tectonic plates. Hapgood wrote before, then did not accept plate tectonics or the evidence of the magnetic stripes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_shift_hypothesis

This link also mentions 'true polar wander' which is completely different from 'pole shift'. 
"... the geographical poles have not deviated by more than about 5° over the last 130 million years.[19] More rapid past possible occurrences of true polar wander have been measured: from 790 to 810 million years ago, true polar wander of approximately 55° may have occurred twice.[4]"
... at rates of 1° per million years or less.


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## Ursa major

J Riff said:


> Well I've remembered everything about Giza, but never mind.
> I scratched my initials inside the not-so-great-pyramid.
> How many wonders of the ancient world have you managed to put graffitti on?
> Ha. Thought so. Some experts. Snikr.* )


I've been inside three Egyptian pyramids, including Khufu's, but didn't get round to defacing even one of them.


Not that I'd call myself an expert on anything associated with Egypt (or anything else, really).


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## J Riff

Well, we were there in the early fifties and such things still happened. I think they stopped any such behaviour right around that time. 
 You know what it's like to stand in those structures then Ursa, it's not something that translates well to TV, is it? )


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