Being uneducated. I believe that Ancient pyramid civilizations were just part of a large scale Quantum Levitation network for flying saucers.

Cuz that is more fun than just thinking they drank good beer.

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It seems strange to me that this thread would now be teetering on the point at which, were I myself a "moderator" here, I might be looking at the button which does not appear on your (or, my) screen. But, to quote Charlie Brown, "Good Grief!™" Can't we haul this thread back from the brink ... and, if I may say it plain, treat one another more civilly? This sideways step is ridiculous!

Someone came up with an original idea for a Water-Cooler Topic. Please don't butcher it.

- - -
Meanwhile, back to the topic:

There's just so much that we do not know about these civilizations, simply because physical evidence did not survive. For instance, is it not perfectly reasonable that they would have known about a "block and tackle?" The general principles of mechanical advantage? I think that we can safely presume that they did, because I can't imagine that there exists any (wo)man who thought, "isn't there an easier way to do this?"

... even though some archaeologists refuse to acknowledge anything, if they did not dig it up.

(Hey, the last time you used a block and tackle, didn't you take care to preserve it for the next five thousand years?)

Let's all take a lesson from the poem, Ozymandias, which remains a sober reminder of the truth of both human fame and archaeology. Arbitrarily choosing the less well-known version of this poem ... considering it maybe to be more apropos, in this case, to his friend Percy Shelley's:
Thousands of years from now, archaeologists are likely to conclude that our civilization consisted of plastic bottles and aluminum cans or pop-tops, because those items will have survived the centuries.

to Ken Jackson and any offended member - In retrospect, it appears "Big Boy Pants" was over-the-top. You have my sincere apology for not stating my opinion less harshly.

@ BW-userx - since your last two posts have nothing to do with Egypt and Lost Technologies (even how they were allegedly lost) I'm not going to answer you here again but will in the appropriate F&R Mega Thread.

Firmly back On Topic - It seems to me that people who entertain the notion that any ancient civilization had technology more advanced than ours may be guilty of not thinking this through completely. Currently we can't even imagine how to provide large quantities of energy or the machines to use them without massive infrastructure. Where are the land fills, mines, or devastated mountains that support such technology?

One key element is that we can't even imagine how technology would be possible without metals, and not only just for electrical wiring. Despite Ken Jackson's hypothesis that some "worldwide flood" not only covered the entire surface of the planet but also thoroughly mixed up the Geological Record by mixing strata miles deep and equally all over the globe, that is actually impossible and Geological as well as Archaeological studies show consistency rather than "mixology". One example of this is how we know that an asteroid roughly 6 miles in diameter impacted the Earth roughly 65.5 Million years ago near the Yucatan Peninsula probably the major cause of the extinction of most dinosaurs. There is now other stronger evidence but initially it was the discovery of the existence of up to 130 times normal concentration of iridiumn at the K-T (or K-Pg) Boundary, which is the boundary between the Cretaceous Period and the Tertiary and Paleogene Periods.

The Cretaceous Period is the period lasting approximately 79,000,000 years in which the last of the dinosaurs flourished. The Tertiary Period is the following period in which sea life and smaller land mammals (most notably our distant ancestors) managed to survive and soon flourish. Because so many species died out within just a few years, this is the easiest and most studied Period Transition in Earth's History. It is trivial to find the Strata that is the KT boundary because the ones below and above are so dramatically different. There were over 350 drillings and excavations all over the world by the turn of the Century and 100% of them all agree. There was no global churning or mixing of strata then nor since. Period.

So, if there was high technology in Ancient Egypt, there would be vast amounts of evidence of it, certainly way more than one questionable jar. Our mapping of the Ages of Man are based largely on what tools were made and used. The transition from The Stone Age, through early copper use around 9,000 years ago to The Bronze Age around 5000 years ago in which smelting and alloys first show up, and then advancing to and through The Iron Age is very well known and has been studied so long with so many technologies that there is almost zero room for any anomalies or doubt.

Did ancient civilizations know things we have forgotten? That is certainly true. Did any of them have advanced technology like modern metals and better or widespread electrical power? Certainly not!

-- Scientific American - KT Asteroid Confirmed ---



-- Science Magazine Update on Dinosaur Killer --

It's fun to speculate, but speculation must always take a back seat to actual study and humans have always been really good at that and our ever improving tools make us ever more accurate.

But . King Tut had a steel dagger in his grave.

https://eos.org/articles/pharaohs-ir...study-confirms

So only a time machine knows for sure.

Aluminum found with bones dated in Communist Romania to be tens of thousands year old. Next link is gonna be hard because science hates these unexplained facts.

http://www.ancient-origins.net/news-...origins-021034

Hard part about all of this. Global warming. Like finds like these. Fall under a agenda. Science be damned on that. We are talking money.
So it not all the facts jack. One grad says one thing is so. The other grad says the opposite.
Because not enough hard evidence. Like a Time machine. Can prove a point.

Groom Lake. Area 51. The Alaskan Harp project. Wright Patterson in Ohio. Tons and tons of top secret you do not get to know stuff.

It is why I keep a open mind and don't believe everything I am told by experts. I use common sense and benefit of the doubt.
Because there is a lot of exposed junk on this planet that defies conventional explanation.
Besides. It makes life more enjoyable to think we had a enlightened age before the mess we seem to be in now.

ropes, slaves, and come alongs. Cmon now.

http://www.ancient-wisdom.com/lebanonbaalbek.htm

God was probably a astronaut. We had help.

http://www.ancient-origins.net/unexp...ey-peru-002449

I should not post after a 12 pack.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/egypt/r...rspective.html

Hard to ignore radioactive bones in India

http://veda.wikidot.com/ancient-city...m-atomic-blast

A very interesting theory is that the blocks used in the pyramids at Giza are actually concrete cast in-situ. Of course the ancient Egyptians did not have access to Portland cement, or even to the chemically similar pozzolanic cement that the Romans later used for their harbour works. But they did have access to large amounts of malachite and natron, and apparently when these are mixed with mud, they will react to form a workable cement.

This would have allowed the pyramids to have been constructed using quite low-tech methods. There was no need to hoist large and heavy blocks of stone to a great height, just a lot of men going up and down ladders, with simple pulleys to pull up buckets of crushed stone mixed with cement and water. Each block could have been cast against the existing ones with reusable wooden planks forming the rest of the form. Hence the snug fit.

The cement matrix formed from these materials is crystalline, like the binding matrix in natural stone, and not an amorphous gel like hardened Portland cement, so it would be quite difficult to detect by non-destructive means. One giveaway would be the presence of a lot of residual water in the core of the pyramid, and this has indeed been detected. Needless to say, the stone in the Giza quarry is dry as a bone.

That is indeed interesting. I've run across it before, but I'm skeptical that texture of the resulting stone could be similar enough to quarried stone to fool geologists.

And there's still plenty of other unexplained indications of technology: tool marks, perfectly drilled holes in stone, saw kerfs in stone, and the near perfect levelness, alignment and orientation.

I wish someone would propose a poured-rock solution for the polygonal megalithic walls in Peru. They really do look like they were poured in situ. But andesite and basalt?

A civilization could "know about electricity' from storage batteries, and it is speculated that the Egyptians did.

Likewise, aluminum can be extracted without the Hall-Heroult electrical process, just not in the quantity needed to make aluminum cans. (An aluminum pyramid sits on top of the Washington Monument in DC. At the time, it was a semi-precious metal.)

And so it goes.

I don't know why it surprises anyone to think that these artisans were craftsmen, and/or that they certainly could have invented and used tools which no longer survive. Also, tools used at a particular work site would probably then have been carried away to the next project when the work was done. Over the intervening centuries, they could have reduced to a puddle of metallic oxide. No one would have thought to somehow preserve them, and they also probably wouldn't have just left them lying on the ground waiting to be buried so that some future archaeologist could dig them up.

We also should not be surprised by evidence of engineering knowledge capable of tackling large-scale projects – like clearing a jungle and building Mayan temples in them – and the surveying knowledge necessary to position those temples precisely over many, many miles. We shouldn't suppose that they "just threw a bunch of slaves at it," because they were entirely unaware of the principles of mechanical advantage. Per contra, they very obviously were. But, if they ever wrote a textbook on the subject, we don't have a copy.

We should remind and re-remind ourselves that these people were just as smart as we are, and just as resourceful. Yes, they used the technology that they had ... whether we know about all of that technology or not! They could well have invented and used things that we don't have physical or written evidence of. It really is possible for something to "disappear without a [historical] trace," and an awful lot of things do just that!

After all, it wasn't until the invention of the time machine in 1492 34BC 2042 that all archaeological puzzles were ultimately worked out!

As for "Noah's flood," we can calculate the amount of water on the planet and know that it simply isn't possible for the entire planet to be submerged in water. We also know that neither man nor beast could survive in a wooden boat as described. However, we do know that there are consistent accounts, not only by the Hebrews but by several of their contemporaries, of a flood "that covered the entire Earth." Although we do not see "global flood" stories in the ancient stories of other places, we do see stories in which (God|the gods), being dissatisfied with having created man, "re-invents the world again" in various ways. We can only speculate what events these might have been referring to – if anything at all.

I think that it was a huge mistake to "stuff and mount" certain Hebrew (and Roman) texts, proclaiming them to be "the Bible,™" and even calling them "the infallible Word of God." Texts are not meant to be used in that way – although they certainly are. The process of selecting "authorized" ("dogmatic") versions of texts, and even of compiling them together in one volume, is a very recent act that many users of that book know nothing about. It is neither scientific nor archaeological. If you're going to read something and then treat it "as Gospel," you damn well better understand where it came from ... and by that I do not mean, "the mouth of God."

(Of course, that main-topic should be pursued on the mega-thread, if you care to.)

But maybe that's part of where the desire for "historical or archaeological certainty" comes from. If we read it in a book, it must be true. If we can't read it (or dig it up and hold it in our hands), it must be false. Both of these ways of thinking are very common, but very wrong. There are "big holes" and inconsistencies in our "knowledge" about just about everything. "So it goes." Everything that we "know" about the past – or anything else, really – must be tempered by the realization that we don't know many more things, and especially that we also don't know what it is that we don't know! "Sux to be an inquisitive mortal human," maybe, but here we all are.

Excellent point. In fact, I think on reason there is so much friction and irritation on this topic is because observation goes against the grain of accepted belief.

The accepted belief is that man is now the pinnacle of evolution, the smartest beast to ever grace the surface of the earth. So to suggest that man was more accomplished millennia ago grates. And yet neanderthals had larger cranial capacities than modern man. And repeated copying of DNA from generation to generation accumulates the occasional mutation, all of which seem to degrade as thermodynamics and information theory suggest.

The Bible is certainly not intended to be a book of science and not primarily history. My view is that if there seems to be a conflict between it and the observed universe, then one or the other is misunderstood. For example, the widely accepted belief used to be that the universe has been in steady state existence for eternity, which contrasted sharply with Scripture. Now both agree there was a beginning.

Yes, the worldwide flood still has problems with water. But it answers many many other questions that flail for answers without it. Like why the whole world is covered with fossils including marine fossils on mountaintops, why whalebones proliferate in desserts, why the white cliffs of Dover have no intervening layers of dirt, why there are fossil grave yards that look like animals (even dinosaurs) were tumbling in a washer when they died, why frozen woolly mammoths were found with undigested tropical food in their stomachs, why recorded history seems to start roughly 5000 years ago, why ancient maps exist of the land beneath Antarctica's ice, why fossils of dragonflies are so large.

One non-flood theory I've seen is that the earth's crust has shifted in millennia past, like an orange peel moving relative to the orange, moving the poles to where they are now. This attempts to explain several things including the maps of Antarctica. But I reject that theory in part because of the pyramids in Egypt. If any such shift took place, it's extremely unlikely that the pyramid would still line up so perfectly N-S and E-W.

One thing that troubles me is the 12,000 references I see. The Egyptian pyramids and a temple in (I think) Tiahuanaco, Bolivia have astronomical alignments that seem right for 12,000 years ago. I'm having difficulty fitting that into the framework.

The Greeks and Romans certainly did, and we have a very fine illustration surviving of a Roman crane worked by a treadmill. They also used Lewis bolts! But the problem here is the strength of the rope: there's a limit to how much you can lift that way. In the days of megalithic architecture, you just dragged things. To get one stone on top of another, you built a ramp and dragged it up.

Thank you for that link. It's long been assumed that meteoritic iron was used, but the theory wasn't tested. As you can see, the iron dagger was as exotic as a gold one. Even when they started smelting iron ore in Anatolia, the technique was so difficult that for years an iron dagger was still a suitable present for a king: a similar situation to that single piece of Chinese aluminium.

I wonder if the craftsman who made it gave a 3000-year guarantee.

Instead of a "universal flood that covered the Earth," a more plausible (to me) hypothesis is simply that portions of the Earth lifted. But we also know that the sea-level has changed, sometimes quite tremendously.

One thing that one must be very wary of is looking for explanations or evidence to support what you already [want to ...] believe, such as "Noah's story is literally true." Or the entire travesty that calls itself, "creation science." What can easily happen is that you cherry-pick the things that support your preconceived notion and specifically interpret them in ways that support that notion. The result is literally self-deception. The premises do not necessarily support the conclusions, and someone who does not share the belief might not come to those conclusions – or, perhaps, any conclusion. (S/He may simply remain mystified.)

Actual knowledge ... and, I would venture, also actual faith ... is a very different thing than what we might wish it to be. Which is one reason why I like this quote from the Book of Job (actually one of the oldest books in the collection): "Were you there when the foundations of the world were laid?" The answer is, "no." And that is true for everyone who explores the past. We were not there at the time. We strive to make our conjectures as solid as they can be made to be, but they remain conjectures. This is what we have to work with, like it or not. As badly as we want "certainty" and "proof," these cannot be found. These do not exist.