Hi,

I hope this is the right place to post this.

I have a colleague at work who told me about the “advanced technology” Egyptians used to have such as drilling tech 20 times better than current and wireless electricity etc. and ad nauseum. Obviously I rejected these claims, I’ve explained that whilst such holes may have been made (and to be honest I’ve no idea if that’s true) at bets it represents an open question and that outside of that such claims have zero supporting evidence and though it may be a shock to him that mainstream archaeological community are not a bunch of old fuddy duddies who are conspiring to prevent such things as these becoming public. I’ve tried to tell him how science works and how archaeologists adopt a highly methodological and rational approach to explaining sites of importance and that artefacts are not simply removed Indiana Jones style (good film though).

I also told him what “debunking” means and told him that I’ve decided to make him my personal project and debunk him.

What I haven’t managed to do is find any specific sites that debunk the whackier of claims about Egypt so if anyone can help I’d appreciate it ... a few links is all I need

Kyu

You can check out the Bad Archaeology website for some of that sort of stuff. There’s also a very good recent book out called Archaeological Fantasies edited by Prof. Garrett Fagan of Penn State University. It includes a chapter on Egypt.

As you know, though, pseudoarchaeology (and all pseudoscience) comes up with new nonsense all the time, and there’s no way to even read it all much less digest it.

But how much water over the Sphinx?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nSOrDu3B6I&feature=related

psik

[quote author=“dougsmith”]You can check out the Bad Archaeology website for some of that sort of stuff.

Thanks ... I couldn’t find anything specific there on Egypt but it looks like a good site.

[quote author=“dougsmith”]There’s also a very good recent book out called Archaeological Fantasies edited by Prof. Garrett Fagan of Penn State University. It includes a chapter on Egypt.

Yes I listened to him on a POI podcast the other day just after my colleague mentioned the Egypt stuff.

[quote author=“dougsmith”]As you know, though, pseudoarchaeology (and all pseudoscience) comes up with new nonsense all the time, and there’s no way to even read it all much less digest it.

Nor time to read all the material to debunk it :(

It’s so very easy to claim some of this stuff but far harder to mount a coherent argument against it and then, of course, they won’t listen as they are True Believers (tm).

Thanks

Kyu

[quote author=“psikeyhackr”]But how much water over the Sphinx?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nSOrDu3B6I&feature=related

Are you serious? It looks to me like yet another Discovery program based on fantasy archaeology.

Kyu

Kyuuketsuki UK - 26 February 2008 01:39 AM

[quote author=“psikeyhackr”]But how much water over the Sphinx?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nSOrDu3B6I&feature=related

Are you serious? It looks to me like yet another Discovery program based on fantasy archaeology.

Kyu

It is. The Mystery of the Sphinx TV show is specifically discussed in one of the chapters of Fagan’s book as an example of crackpot pseudoarchaeology.

BTW, another avenue for checking out this sort of nonsense is the Hall of Ma’at website. According to Fagan and one of his contributors, that the website and forum is the central one for responsible discussion of pseudoarchaeology. It has included a number of professors of history and archaeology (including Fagan himself). I have only barely checked the place out but it looks like your best bet.

Add: HERE is a list of some of their contributors and relevant articles. Pretty darned impressive!

[quote author=“dougsmith”]It is. The Mystery of the Sphinx TV show is specifically discussed in one of the chapters of Fagan’s book as an example of crackpot pseudoarchaeology.

Sp psikeyhackr is a proponent of that kind of stuff?

[quote author=“dougsmith”]BTW, another avenue for checking out this sort of nonsense is the Hall of Ma’at website. According to Fagan and one of his contributors, that the website and forum is the central one for responsible discussion of pseudoarchaeology. It has included a number of professors of history and archaeology (including Fagan himself). I have only barely checked the place out but it looks like your best bet.

Thanks Doug ... I’ll post this over there too

Kyu

Just some food for thought:

8 July 2000
Ancient Egyptian Telescopes

In 1976 ABC journalist Doug Crawford interviewed author Robert Temple about his book, ‘The Sirius Mystery’ which claimed that an isolated African tribe, the Dogon, had sophisticated astronomical knowledge. Now Robert Temple has written another controversial book, ‘The Chrystal Sun’. He talked to Wendy Barnaby in London.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2000/.htm

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2000/.htm

Try this angle when discussing this topic with your co-worker:

The ancient Greeks built the Parthenon between 447 BCE and 438 BCE.  When it was built, the ancient Greeks had knowledge of the optical illusions associated with geometric shapes.  With that knowledge in mind, they built the Parthenon so that vertical elements were purposely inclined inward to compensate for the illusion of leaning outward at the top.
 
Tall yet perfectly straight columns give the false impression of being shrunken in the middle.  So in the Parthenon they were purposely made to swell in order to appear more perfectly straight to the human eye.

Columns were not placed evenly apart from one another because by doing this columns at the end of a row appear closer together.  So they compensated for this and spaced these particular columns farther apart.  The result was that the columns appeared perfectly spaced.   

These are only a few of the elements purposely built into the Parthenon to make it as perfectly visually pleasing to people who viewed it as possible.  And this doesn’t even take into account the actual construction of this impressive structure including the carving of the Pentelic marble from which it is built. 

And this was all done nearly 2,500 years ago! 

Like the ancient Egyptians, the ancient Greeks had no power tools and no modern construction equipment such as cranes, bulldozers, etc.  Yet they built the Parthenon, a structure that at least equals, if not surpasses, anything the ancient Egyptians built.

With that in mind, ask your co-worker if he believes the ancient Greeks had any special advanced technology that modern science doesn’t know about?  The usual response is, “No, the Greeks alone built their structures normally without aid of advanced alien technology.”  Usually people just assume the dark-skinned Egyptians were the only people stupid enough to have never been able to build their Pyramids all by themselves with normal human labor and human ingenuity.

It is. The Mystery of the Sphinx TV show is specifically discussed in one of the chapters of Fagan’s book as an example of crackpot pseudoarchaeology.

I don’t particularly give a damn myself.  It is of no importance to me.  But water erosion on rocks should be a pretty hard geological science whereas carbon dating doesn’t work on rocks.  So is it water erosion or isn’t it.  It looks like our so called intelligentsia operates under social pressure to maintain the approved ways of thinking.

I find it very strange that in 4 years at IBM I never encountered the term von Neumann machine but every computer I was trained on was such a machine.  I didn’t learn it until after I quit.  It also turns out that von Neumann worked as a consultant to IBM in the early 50’s.  Now since a CPU has to select among millions of memory locations these days you can’t definitively talk about how a von Neumann machine works without talking about “address lines”.  Try searching for both of those with Google and see how many hits you get. 

We live in a world of watered down bullshit information with plenty of people pretending to know more than they actually do.  Making good important information hard to find.

psik

psikeyhackr - 12 April 2008 09:36 AM

But water erosion on rocks should be a pretty hard geological science whereas carbon dating doesn’t work on rocks.  So is it water erosion or isn’t it.  It looks like our so called intelligentsia operates under social pressure to maintain the approved ways of thinking.

Go to THIS page and look at the links for The Great Sphinx. There are a number of essays about its dating, many written by actual experts.

I went to a bunch of sites to find a picture.  Words alone don’t cut it for something like this

The work of Schoch and West on the Sphinx is highly flawed. For one thing they ignored the severe local atmospheric industrial pollution in the last century which has severely damaged the Giza monuments and fast, too. This is well known by the Egyptologists. I won’t get in to that story, you probably are up to date on their work and the many thorough refutations from well-qualified people.

http://www.catchpenny.org/sphinx.html

Now I find that statement hilarious.  “highly flawed” and “they ignored” so why doesn’t he back that up with evidence?  I saw a program about the effects of atmospheric pollution on the Parthenon.  Obviously the atmosphere comes into even contact with surface of the stone and the pollution doesn’t eat groves into it like that.  But if he is going to make that claim then the obvious thing to do is get some old photographs.  Are we supposed to believe that there aren’t photographs of this area of stone from the 1920’s?  Why not just show them to everyone?

On reading this paper’s abstract, it occurred to me that the weathering pattern on the Sphinx and it’s enclosure looks very little like that caused by running water, it looks more like what’s called spherical weathering. This process is driven primarily by chemical processes and, basically, turns cubes into spheres (thus, the name). Any object (in this case limestone), exposed to the environment, will be attacked most rapidly at those points which are most exposed, that is, on the corners. As the corners weather, the object presents a smaller and smaller surface area to the erosive environment until, in an ideal world, it achieves the minimal surface area it can present, - that of a perfect sphere. I recalled the shape of the stones Schoch had been leaning on in the rear of the Sphinx enclosure - what did they all have in common - they were all nicely rounded- in fact, nearly spherical on their expposed face.

http://www.hallofmaat.com/modules.php?name=Articles&file=article&sid=23

If he is going to claim something was a chemical process then he should specify what the chemical process was and that should be testable.  Shouldn’t it be possible to get good estimates of the RATE of the chemical effect.

As soon as you start talking about geology and chemistry you are in the hard sciences, not Egyptology, archeology or history..  And verbalization of “looks like” alone ain’t good enough.  There should be photographs of known sites of water weathering for comparison.

psik

Psik,

The Parthenon was also not partially buried or in a high wind/sandy environment.  Also, the Sphinx is about 2000 years older than the Parthenon.  I’m not asking this sarcastically: have you ever lived in such an environment.  It’s like being in a sandblaster.  my parents have a house at the beach on the east coast and the sand literally strips the paint off the house in the course of a few years.  Salt from the ocean corrodes all exposed metal in less than 10-15 years.  It’s not surprising that winds and corrosive chemicals are responsible.  If the Sphinx was buried up to the line where that channel sits for a long period of time, it could easily look like water. 

Further, the timing of the building of these monuments has been strengthened by the recent excavation of the workshops, homes and graves of the workers around the pyramids. 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/pyramid/excavation/hawass.html

http://www.nhne.com/misc/lostcityofpyramidbuilders.html

Psik, I know you don’t have to have a theory to oppose the conventional story.  I’ll assume you don’t support the alien/Atlantean theories.  Please correct me if I’m wrong.  So what is your theory and upon what evidence do you rely?

I’m not asking this sarcastically: have you ever lived in such an environment.  It’s like being in a sandblaster.  my parents have a house at the beach on the east coast and the sand literally strips the paint off the house in the course of a few years.

No I haven’t live in that environment but the entire point they are making is that wind blown sand erosion is totally different from water erosion.  And the destruction caused by air pollution is entirely different still.  I would think the air pollution excuse could be shot down by photographs from the 1920’s.  Are we supposed to believe no such photos exist.  I would think that would be scientifically incompetent.

I know you don’t have to have a theory to oppose the conventional story.  I’ll assume you don’t support the alien/Atlantean theories.  Please correct me if I’m wrong.  So what is your theory and upon what evidence do you rely?

I don’t have a theory.  You start from the evidence and then come up with a theory to explain the facts IF YOU WANT TO.  If that is water erosion then that is what it is.  Not having a theory won’t change it. 

When astronomers discovered that the orbit of Mercury didn’t match Newton’s equations they didn’t have a theory.  That did not change the facts of the orbit.  It wasn’t until Einstein came along that they had a theory to account for the facts.  Facts trump theory and anomalies mean there is something interesting to be figured out.  I consider figuring things out to be FUN.  Traditionalists that want to hold onto conventional ideas because they would have to admit they were wrong when they are contradicted by obvious evidence are not FUN.

psik

PS - I already have a problem with the economics profession.  A professor at the University of Calgary called me a “loony” another in North Carolina called me an “idiot.”  That doesn’t change the FACT that you can go to any automobile junk yard and see hundreds of piled up cars and then check dozens of economics books that say nothing about the depreciation of all of that junk.  I have had one PhD economist say that I am correct and the text books are wrong, but I have emailed 3,000 economists and gotten only 15 responses back.  LOL It is not my fault that the economics profession has painted itself into a corner by talking BS for the last 50 years.

Water erosion would only say something about the age of the Sphinx not who built it.  If Egyptologists say it was built by slaves 5000 years ago then why couldn’t it have been built by slaves 12,000 years ago?  I don’t see the change in dates having to bring up fantasies of aliens or Atlanteans.

psik