A coherent story of Stonehenge may be beginning to emerge | Hacker News Reader

A coherent story of Stonehenge may be beginning to emerge

bbc.com

37 pointsohjeez24 comments

Well, that's a clickbait title if I ever saw one, but it is a good article. It's basically a summary of everything we know up to now about Stonehenge. If you haven't read about Stonehenge in a couple years, there's some good recent work done that's worth catching up on.

From the article itself:

>But a coherent story may be beginning to emerge. That has been particularly true over the last decade.

Basically "here's the new stuff we've got on Stonehenge."

Nothing was cracked really. Still no explanation of who built it and how it was built.

The fact that it was a religious area for many centuries has been known for a long time.

Same can be said about pyramids in Mexico and great pyramid in Egypt, as well as many other sites like Pumapunku, etc.

Ancient mega structures are one of the biggest mysteries of our world.

We heave a pretty good idea who built the pyramids and why since they wrote about it.

Not really. Which pyramids are you talking about? What we have are some lukewarm explanations which do not hold up to scientific scrutiny of all the historic sources. If you are talking about the Great Pyramyd of Cheops in Giza then plenty of evidence show that Cheops had nothing to do with building that pyramid. He was a Stone Age monarch at the time when writing and mathematics have not been developed in Egypt. The pyramid has no indication anywhere on it that it belonged to Cheops, one would think that if a guy spent over 20 years and killed over 20,000 slaves building it, then he'd put his name on it. :)

The idea that pyramid belonged to Cheops comes from Herodotus who travelled to Egypt long after Cheops, and in fact what he wrote down is an urban legend from the local folk, because no historic Egyptian documents could verify who built the great pyramid. There are other much earlier historic accounts about the great pyramid from Arab historians. Who have a very different story about the pyramid.

>a very different story about the pyramid.

Do you have any sources or articles? I'm a huge ancient Egypt nerd and would love to read more about it - as is unfortunately usually the case with nuanced historical topics, Wikipedia just breezes through the common assumptions (that it was built for Cheops).

Few historical points that we know for certain:

- Cheops lived in 26th century BC. This is Stone Age territory. A time where humans still didn't master metalworks, and understanding of mathematics and written language was very poor.

- Herodotus traveled to Egypt and later made his claim in 5th century BC. This is about 2100 years after the rule of Cheops! To say that his historic account can be deemed as verifiable is a joke.

- Up until 820 AD the pyramid was completely closed off by the granite plates that covered all external walls, and an Arab caliph Al-Mamoun broke most of them and found a way in.

- The architectual complexity of the Great Pyramid is unbelievable. On top of everything that most people know, it also has an underground chambers with an artificial lake (water comes from underground sources) and a really big sarcophagus submerged in the water. The sarcophagus is larger than the walkways leading up to the underground chamber.

- All the consequent pyramids that came after the great pyramid are much smaller and much less sophisticated. We know that Egyptian empire was growing substantially in wealth and power at that time, so why the pyramids are less sophisticated? Shouldn't we see technological progression, not regression in a rich developing society?

What I think is that we have a serious case of Cargo Cult where emperors try to emulate the greatness of the pyramid.

- The Arab historians I mentioned refer to the legend of Enoch.

According to http://archive.archaeology.org/9909/abstracts/pyramids.html carbon dating makes the old kingdom pyramids older than their historical dates, although they suggest they may have been using old wood.

This seems to just lump all of the pyramids at giza together.

The smaller pyramids can be dated because there are the remains of worker villages around each of them.. nothing similar exists for the great pyramid.

Few historical points that we know for certain:

None of these are 'known for certain' and they are at odds with archeological evidence and well-accepted egyptology.

Cheops lived in 26th century BC. This is Stone Age territory. A time where humans still didn't master metalworks, and understanding of mathematics and written language was very poor.

Egyptians at the time had copper tools, two different writing systems, papyrus.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ancient-egypt-shipping...

Herodotus traveled to Egypt and later made his claim in 5th century BC.

Herodotus is by far not the only source of information we have about the Old Kingdom.

Up until 820 AD the pyramid was completely closed off by the granite plates that covered all external walls, and an Arab caliph Al-Mamoun broke most of them and found a way in

You can easily find references to egyptologists who believe most pyramids were robbed by the Middle Kingdom.

On top of everything that most people know, it also has an underground chambers with an artificial lake

The only reference I can find to that is on crackpot sites. Do you have anything better?

Shouldn't we see technological progression, not regression in a rich developing society

We see exactly such a progression in the first four or so pyramids.

What I think is that we have a serious case of Cargo Cult where emperors try to emulate the greatness of the pyramid.

Again, do you have any decent references to all this stuff? Because otherwise it's 'internet person vs all of Egyptology' which is not very convincing.

Asking for references, but providing none of your own?

Saying stuff like:

Herodotus is by far not the only source of information we have about the Old Kingdom

and

We see exactly such a progression in the first four or so pyramids.

You're not only not providing references, you're not even supporting your argument at all..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_the_stone

I didn't ask for references, someone else did and then this person spouted a whole bunch of obviously inaccurate stuff. You can hit the relevant pages on wikipedia and trivially verify that no egyptologist thinks Egyptians during the fourth dynasty lived in the stone age or had barely developed written language (and for that, I did put in a helpful link). The rest is exactly the same - uncontroversial consensus stuff you can get from wikipedia - I don't really need to defend egyptology with meticulous citations.

You can also google the weird claims made by this poster and you'll find that underground lakes below the great pyramid, 'legend of Enoch' and a strange obsession with Herodotus invariably appear on crackpot sites. It seems reasonable to ask for better references for such claims.

The evidence is not limited to what Herodotus wrote. But that doesn't matter much, we know they are tombs, we know a great deal about the civilization that built them. We know far less about who built Stonehenge and why. They're not in the same category of knowing at all.

Well, if he was a monarch before writing had been developed, he would have had a hard time putting his name on it.

He would have had even harder time designing the pyramid

Well, children can design pyramids using sand.

Yeah. Only those pyramids are about knee high and last for about a day. :) The great pyramid stood for at least 5000 years.

You said "design", not build. My point is that designing pyramid is not really that hard. Building it is totally different thing (but still doable by thousands of uneducated slaves).

> In other words, the landscape was used in religious or ceremonial processions related to the monuments.

Surely it was the Glastonbury Festival venue of the day. There were even sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.

Not to mention bearded patriarchs delivering messages of spiritual renewal to the rapturous masses [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rN07fnvGomo

Anyone interested in Stonehenge should also check out this book: http://www.lynnekelly.com.au/the-memory-code/

It goes into some new ideas about what it was used for.

Ah, I thought it was only 46 miles from Wales! [ 1 ]

[ 1 ] https://youtu.be/mbyzgeee2mg

"We found that there were some other structures near here and it's a bit older than we originally thought. Also, some of the rock came from quite far away. We still have a lot of questions." isn't really what comes to mind when the title claims that a mystery has been cracked.

Interesting read -- thanks.

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