Egyptologists uncover rare tombs from before the Pharaohs
reuters.com
reuters.com
This is incredible. When you zoom out of your daily life, zoom out before smartphones, before electricity, before most modern countries exist... there were other civilizations, living daily lives, probably considering many of the same concerns we have today (family, health, work). Just wild.
Similarly, living history can sometimes reach closer to the modern day than one might appreciate. There were (probably—some of the stories lack documentation) a few people born into legal chattel slavery in the US still alive while Martin Luther King, Jr. was active. The "Old West" and settler/Western Expansion days were still very much in living memory when early western radio serials and films were made, so it's entirely possible (likely, even) that a couple honest-to-god gunslingers (rare though they may have been, and as unlike their film counterparts) or victims/perpetrators of settler/native violence sat down and watched romanticized Westerns on the big screen. Shane is set in 1889 and came out in 1953. Lots of people alive during the fictionalized events of the film were still alive then. At least a few people who fought in or witnessed actual fighting in the Civil War likely watched Keaton's The General in a movie theater, or (more ominously) Griffith's The Birth of a Nation.
Looking at that tag on kottke.org, the top few results are a Civil War widow dying in 2020, John Tyler (president in 1841) having a living grandson, and a 2020 interview with the son of a formerly enslaved person. Wild stuff.
She wasn't a "Civil War widow" per se. She was not widowed by the death of her husband in the Civil War. She was seventeen years old in 1936, and married a ninety-three year old Civil War veteran. She was the widow of a Civil War veteran.
This is one of my favourite things. It's an incredibly old, historically important text in a dead language and it's just a customer complaint.
>"You have put ingots which were not good before my messenger and said, 'If you want to take them, take them. If you do not want to take them, go away'.
3750 years ago some dude was still showing up and trying to rip people off and pull the "cash in hand" choosing beggar play.
It wasn't so much a scam, but a dispute over quality control of all things. Other tablets were found along with that one that included a customer complaining that he was tired of receiving low quality ingots. They knew enough about metallurgy six thousand years ago to have legal disputes over impurities!
What destroyed most of the empires was succession battles resulting in civil war, all through the late 1800s.
I've been watching the Fall of Civilizations Youtube channel, and the South Americans really messed up succession.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-26627941
https://www.curetoday.com/view/ancient-history-two-mummies-d...
- Early healthcare and medicine in Ancient Egypt:
https://ecancer.org/en/journal/article/746-the-past-and-futu...
The interiors of these vessels show machining marks incompatible with the tools they are imagined to have been made with. It will be very interesting when Zawi Hawass retires and, eventually, somebody figures out how they really were fabricated, and (moreso) why the method was lost.
Not so different, really, from a lot of professors and Wikipedia editors, but with the power of the State behind his opinions.
The official narrative that we were all taught in school of "Pyramids were built 4500 years ago as tombs by Khufu" I would say is understood to be highly inaccurate at this point by anyone outside of the Hawass circle.
I never heard of that before. What is thought to be more accurate?
No bodies were ever found in any of the Pyramids on the Giza plateau - and despite the Egyptians documenting everything, there are no claims by them that Khufu or anyone else in their documented history built the Pyramids. Pharaohs were buried in the Valley of the Kings.
Tellingly, the pyramids at Giza contain the same simple, unadorned carved granite sarcophagi you find in other Old Kingdom tombs. If the pyramids weren't intended to be tombs, you need to explain why they'd place sarcophagi inside them or explain how the sarcophagi are really something else.
Kings and nobles weren't buried in the Valley of the Kings until the New Kingdom. I'm not sure how that's relevant to the Old Kingdom.
They are among the mysteries that must await Hawass's retirement to explore properly. AFAIK, nobody knows when or how they were made, or moved into place.
The boxes are marvels that could not be produced even by the best modern stonecraft methods. The inscriptions are crude hammerings; one might equally-well equate genetic engineering with tattooing. Nobody knows how old the boxes are, or the tunnels they are in. All that is clear is that later people used the site.
But this is a digression. You want to use the refined, elaborately decorated Saite-period empty stone sarcophagi from Saqqara to suggest that the crude, unadorned stone sarcophagi of the Old Kingdom aren't really sarcophagi and the pyramids weren't tombs. If you're going to talk about how the impossible perfection of the sarcophagi at Saqqara means the Saites didn't produce them, for the sake of argument, fine. But you can't use the same reasoning to suggest the sarcophagi in the pyramids, which are by no means "marvels" of stonecraft, come from a different culture than the Old Kingdom.
The Rosetta Stone's uneven lines are markedly better-made than the crude inscriptions lately applied to the Saqqara boxes.
The quality and precision of stonework seen in the boxes at Saqqara most resembles that of the best archaic and pre-dynastic jars.
> First of all, nobody knows who built them, how they were built, nor why they were built.
> and despite the Egyptians documenting everything, there are no claims by them that Khufu or anyone else in their documented history built the Pyramids.
https://www.livescience.com/55439-ancient-logbook-on-great-p...
> Over a period of several months, [the logbook] reports — in [the] form of a timetable with two columns per day — many operations related to the construction of the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza and the work at the limestone quarries on the opposite bank of the Nile
I guess this Merer guy is one of those you were looking for.
2) Gold and copper are the metals available during Khufu's reign. Is it reasonable to you that copper (or even Iron) was used to cut granite?
3) 2.5 Million blocks were used in the construction of the Great Pyramid. Weight of blocks range from 1-10 tons each.
4) The granite for the "King's Chamber" was brought 934km to Giza from Aswan
5) A 20 year construction timeline as claimed would mean a block would have to be cut from the quarry, moved to location, and placed in the correct spot every 4 minutes with construction running 24 hours a day 7 days a week without stopping.
Is it not more reasonable to conclude Khufu simply performed maintenance on the outer casings? A 20 year project with a 200 men crew to polish outer casings seems about right to me.
> Is it not more reasonable to conclude Khufu simply performed maintenance on the outer casings?
No, it's not.
> A 20 year project with a 200 men crew to polish outer casings seems about right to me.
Nobody claims the pyramids were built by 200 people. Egypt had a population of over a million at the time, with a few hundred thousand of that population being seasonally bored farmers available for construction projects.
2) Archeologists who unseal pyramids don't steal bodies and then simultaneously claim there were bodies in there. That would be self incriminating.
3) If pyramids were looted and found unsealed then the tomb theory is unsubstantiated.
4) Countless civilizations have done construction on the pyramids (including our own). Evidence of construction is not evidence of creation.
5) Copper & Brass can not reasonably be used to cut Granite. The Great Pyramid had impeccable precision. It is BY FAR the most precise Pyramid ever discovered.
6) The link you provided me is where the 200 men figure comes from.
You clearly have an interest in this topic. I suggest you do more research or if I'm wrong about something, be so kind as to provide supporting evidence with your claims.
But the cases of the Sphinx and the Valley Temple are less persuasive. The deep tunnels, moreso.
There will be plenty of opportunity to shake things up someday.
That said, he no longer holds any official position with the government. The Ministry of Antiquities has continued some of his bad policy. He still probably has some influence. But the people in this thread seem more upset with his dismissal of crank theories that contradict the consensus chronology established through dendochronology, radiocarbon dating, and correlating written records. Hawass was not responsible for creating this chronology.
Given the technique's obvious utility, the lack of interest seen in applying it can reasonably be interpreted as unwillingness to have conventional interpretations tested.
"Crank" is a prejudicial term when applied to topics with only conventional consensus, without evidentiary backing.
In any case, there is plenty of Old Kingdom material in foreign museums that is available for testing.
Corundum isn't just "hard as ruby", they are the same material.
But if you brought home any random chip of corundum and said, "look, a ruby", you might get funny looks. People can be pretty particular about their rubies and (not incidentally) sapphires.
(As I understand it, the title of Pharaoh originates in the 18th dynasty almost two thousand years later, when Hatshepsut became ruler and it was difficult to call her "king".)
Also the traditional title for rulers of Egypt, 𓆥 (ny-sw.t bity—ruler of upper and lower Egypt, literally: (s)he of the sedge, (s)he of the bee), applies to females just as well as it does males.