OFF: Re: Pyramids

[Gordon Hundley]

WARNING ** this has no HW or BOC reference at all - except that HW would
be writing songs about Atlantean civilistaions building pyramids if they
weren't already writing songs about aliens ** :)


Jill writes:

> However I remember being less convinced by the other pyramids (there
were
> significant gaps as I recall and, as always in these cases, sufficient
> stars in the sky to assign any pyramid to something, whether obvious or
> not).

Yes, sure, but that's not the case here. These megalithic monuments tie
up very closely indeed with the positions of several very bright
celestial objects, particularly if you take into account the precession
of the equinoxes and reference a date of 10240BC. Bauval isn't fool
enough to take on the wrath of every egyptologist by suggesting that the
pyramids are of that age (though other scholars have) but instead says
that the ground plan must have been fixed at that time. Incedentally, our
dating of the pyramids and sphinx to 2686-2181BC is based entirely on
later texts that ascribe these pryamids to the pharoahs of that time, and
numerous 'holes' have been filled in for convenience and consistancy.
This is depite other texts of similar age and later that suggest that
they are older than the pharoahs that claimed them.

> > That's strange enough, but the degree of accuracy, and the knowledge
of
> > advanced astronomy, physics and mathematics that it suggests
completely
> > goes against all previously accepted views of ancient civilisations.
>
> However I must protest this!    I don't think anyone, particularly
> not any scholars of 'ancient civilisations' ever, ever, underestimates
> the intellectual capability of the scholars of that civilisation or
> culture.

Oh, I think you're wrong. There are plenty of people still desperately
clinging onto older 'evidence' that the age of man is some 6000 years,
and that the alignment of the pyramids is happen-chance because ancient
man did not possess accurate enough timekeeping to correctly make
longitudinal calculations.

> There is absolutely no question that folk of 7,000 years ago were
> perfectly capable of the sort of empirical observation that leads to
> theories about the physical world, the space around it and the capacity
> to engineer constructions that might reflect it.  It is fully accepted
> that the only things 'ancient civilisations' may have lacked are 20thC
> resources but they had plenty of their own and so ancient civilisations
> are only that - ancient.   Not dumb.

However, it seems that the folk of 7000 (?) years ago possessed
exceedingly high knowledge. Indeed, the earliest scholarly texts that we
have (primarily Greek) support this view. Much of this knowledge seems to
have been lost, leaving a few tantalising clues that it once existed.
Some of the knowledge, such as the timekeeping require to make maps as
accurate as some very early ones based on source maps from Constantinople
has not been rediscovered until very recently indeed.

> no problem here - if you are creating a tall stone structure that is to
> hold a building on its top and you don't want it to fall down then a
> pyramid is the inevitable shape it'll take!

Yes, but why would you build such a huge burial mound and pack it full of
pointers to a high knowledge that you are unable to keep from being lost
otherwise? It seems to me that we're supposed to 'wonder' at these
megaliths, and we're supposed to learn from them. In our modern
arrogance, we assume that our scientific knowledge outshines the ancient
world. However, it is only recently that we've acquired the knowledge
that has allowed these modern interpretations to be correlated. It seems
likely to me that these structures - the sphinx in particular, are time
capsules of high knowledge, lost after some political or religious
upheaval.

> The trouble is that a lot of wild speculation gets put forward as
> absolute statements of truth without the theories ever being tested or
> satisfactorily proved. Sadly this happens a lot in archaeology and any
> scholar in this discipline who puts forward a theory must expect it to
> be argued against and doubted for a very, very long time until
> sufficient proofs are amassed for general acceptance.   And sometimes
> this never happens.   But there are still an awful lot of folk who
> publish their speculation as the *only* correct theory despite
> argument to the contrary which makes fringe or speculative archaeology
> very deep water to trawl around in.

Let the wild speculation continue - it generates more potential ideas
which can susequently be rejected or worked on by those in possession of
the skills to interpret the sources. It is, after all, likely that any
high knowledge that has been lost is based on a quite different
perspective of life than our modern scientific knowledge. It seems
reasonnably safe to assume that ancient man may therefore have been more
advanced than current knowledge about some things, but ignorant of other
things that our classical sciences have not been so good at explaining.

> jill   (still waiting to hear the definitive explanation about crop
> circles)

I'm sorry, I can't provide you with that - I doubt anybody can. However,
I'd venture to support Arthur C. Clarkes view that there is indeed some
unknown natural effect that forms these circles under very rare
circumstances, but that the bulk of recent circles are no more than
man-made 'hoaxes'. And very pretty hoaxes too.

Gordon.