When Zawi Hawass retires virtually every existing Egyptology book will worth less than the paper it is printed on.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.