That was a humbling experience...

[onager]

Science Channel is currently re-showing the 2005 series, What The Ancients Knew.

The answer is - a lot! Today they showed the segments on Egypt, India, China and Greece. I think all these are playing again next week, along with shows about the Romans and the Japanese.

Some of the most recent discoveries are amazing. Like the Delphic Oracle actually functioned as an early version of a think tank, sort of like the Alexandria Library. Plus, a central intelligence agency. The Delphic priests had spies and agents all over the place, so their "mystical revelations" were usually based on solid data. Those drug-addled, half-naked yowling young women were just show biz - something at which all successful religions must excel, anyway.

Watching these shows just made me even madder at the asshats who claim our ancestors learned this stuff from the aliens.

[Tobin S.]

1. Yes, indeed.

"Watching these shows just made me even madder at the asshats who claim our ancestors learned this stuff from the aliens."

I think the problem with people who hold those views is that they lack an ability to think logically and critically. Take the Egyptian pyramids for example. They don't understand how such things could have been built by people who didn't have a modern understanding of engineering. They don't think the capability existed in people who lived so long ago so the only answer for the existence of those pyramids built so long ago is that they must have been put there by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization.

I think it's a projection of sorts of their own ignorance. They don't understand how such things were done, therefore those "primitive" folks surely didn't. So they make the magical jump to ET. The same kind of thinking is at play in most religions. Anything that is not understood is simply attributed to the workings of a god or gods.

[Odin2005]

2. I find the claim that the Egyptians could not have built the pyramids to be quite racist, frankly.

Seriously, it's not THAT hard to build a pyramid, even with early bronze age technology. All you need is a sufficiently large work-force and some decent surveying equipment. And there is plenty of evidence how pyramid-building developed just by looking at the pyramids themselves, starting with the very first, the step pyramid of Saqqara. Then there was the first attempt at a smooth pyramid, which was the flop we call the Bent Pyramid.

The "water erosion" on the Sphinx is simply because it was built over an already existent rock outcrop.

[onager]

3. Me too. And more proof the ancients were just like us...

When I lived in Egypt, I used to talk to Egyptians all the time about the "alien pyramid" theory. They REALLY hate that BS, and correctly see it as patronizing at best and (as you note) blatantly racist at worst. What really embarassed me - the Egytians said it was almost always Americans who spout off about the aliens.

Often expressed by the Egyptians as: "The Americans like to come here and lecture us about our own history." That really goes over well, since many Egyptian tour guides are moonlighting graduate students in history, archeology, etc.

Your point about the development is one I often make (to no apparent good...) On a (rare) clear day in Cairo, you can stand on the Giza Plateau and see the whole history of pyramid development, right in your line of sight. You can see the Red/Bent pyramids at Dashur and, way off in the distance, the Step Pyramid at Saqqara.

How The Ancient Egyptians Were Just Like Us: I read this story while living in Egypt, in a book about Howard Carter and King Tut. It's always tickled me:

When Tut's tomb was discovered, the finders also discovered something very weird - the doors on the wooden outer sarcophagus faced the wrong way. The doors were facing to the west, which was unheard of. For religious/symbolic reason, those doors always pointed east - toward the rising sun.

At first, they thought the priests might have been sending a message. Tut was the son of Akhenaten, the "heretic pharoah" who tried to break the power of the priesthood by inventing a new religion. So the priests might have punished Tut by dicking around with his Afterlife experience.

But as they disassembled the sarcophagus, the reason for its bizarre construction became obvious. Every outer sarcophagus came with detailed pictorial assembly notes by the designers - just like Ikea furniture. "Insert Tab A into Slot B," etc. in pictures. These notes were written on the internal sides of the parts, so they wouldn't show when it was finished. And also like Ikea furniture, the sarcophagus would only go together one way. Tolerances were tight, and if somebody goofed, the wooden cover would not fit.

After disassembling the wooden sarcophagus, the archeologists also found a big pile of wood shavings under it.

They eventually figured it out - the workers who assembled Tut's sarcophagus didn't RTFM, so they put it together exactly BACKWARDS. By the time the workers realized that, it was too late - they couldn't take it apart again. So they desperately chiseled and hacked away at the wood, to make it fit.

I think they were working on the Ancient Egyptian Friday, and wanted to get done in time to sample another ancient Egyptian specialty, beer.

And I'm pretty sure they are immediate ancestors of the last contractors who worked on my house...

[Odin2005]

4. That thing about Tut is hilarious! thanks!

[trotsky]

5. Well of course they knew a lot.

The aliens told them everything!

[LeftishBrit]

6. Fascinating!

Thanks for posting that.

[semillama]

7. For something closer to home:

Check out William Romain's "Mysteries of the Hopewell" - very good book, well-reasoned arguments. Focuses on how the Middle Woodland culture in Ohio of 2000 years ago were able to construct the geometric enclosures using a standard unit of measurement, and shows how they demonstrate detailed knowledge of lunar and solar maximums, minimums, and equinoxes through the alignments of their earthworks. Very fascinating read.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

8. True about the Oracle

It helped that almost every City State potentate confided very sensitive information in her. When you were generous with your gifts to the Oracle you could obtain some very useful pointers.

Westerners can be rather racist when it comes to the Middle East. When Bin Laden launched his attacks on the US, it was disbelieved by some who thought "a man in a cave just couldn't pull that off". Only US citizens could have done was the implication, as well as the insidious racist inference to Arab cavemen.