Not if you want to be accurate: https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/were-the-egyptian-pyram..., https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/who-built-the-..., https://www.worldatlas.com/ancient-world/were-slaves-used-to...
Could it simply be a question of society’s priorities and resourcing? Nah. After all the Americans were a fairly primitive culture primarily known for hamburgers and baseball. Most likely Grand Central was built by aliens or an older Native American culture.
I guess demolishing an iconic building could itself be evidence for cultural decline, but stuff like TWA flight center was being built at the same time. the dollars followed the passengers.
Many construction theories otherwise paint a picture of a labor environment that's almost impossible to imagine.
Atlantis and 11.5ky is crazy talk though.
I guess with enough mind altering (diminishing) drugs anything is possible.
Idk why it’s always these wacko types who are into this kind of ancient history. It’s annoying.
don't even know why they need to get that far. we already know the younger dryas was a time period of extreme climate swings and natural disasters with purely natural causes. a civilization existing before that time could have been advanced without needing to have achieved nuclear. plus its pretty trivial to prove that no prexisting civilization made it to the fossil fuel era. never-mind NUCLEAR age.
So yeah - if this civilization falls - the next one won't be able to have their own industrial revolution.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis>
(Largely debunked.)
It's part of the broader new age movement. It coincided with the rise of commodification of the identity, individualism of the 80s and 90s, and the self-care movement. People express beliefs in a higher power as a way of dealing with many things, and many new age people look either to the stars or into "other dimensions" (whatever that means) for these higher powers.
I'd also like to point out that although you could view this as being cynical about the capacity of humanity, you could also view this as hope that someone will save us from ourselves. You can also see this in political belief with eg posadism (where dolphins/aliens elevate us after we destroy ourselves with nuclear warfare and recuperate by turning to communism, which to be fair is also basically the plot of star trek) or the belief that a free market expresses superhuman collective rationalism that will save us from individual failings.
EDIT: to be clear, I think the idea of alien involvement in pyramids is ridiculous. I'm just answering the question.
It's part of a broader new new age movement. The race to the bottom in the quality of online comments made any informative content immediately suspect of being produced by LLMs which got trained on the few trillion high quality tokens that are encoding all human knowledge.
Where are these high quality tokens you speak of? In the dark net?
Maybe my input filters are set incorrectly but I don't see too many myself. And I'm fairly sure most of the tokens I write are not up to training qwuality.
When people don't understand something they attribute it to a higher power.[0]
part of it is that its hard for many to believe that civilization can regress for very long periods of time. They were the tallest man-made structures for 3800 years. The engineering and quality of construction was mostly unmatched throughout that duration.
Another issue is that 'scientists' refused to acknowledge that Egypt and most of Northern Africa was lush and green for some time. The people claimed the gods pulled the sun accross the sky and changed the climate. 'scientits' were like "wow you are so stupid, it doesnt work like that, it was never green and you killed what ever green there was by over farming". Turns out, it was a change in Earths tilt.
going along with that theme, we tend to ignore what we are told. The egyptians left depictions of how they did it, by rolling the blocks on large logs and throwing water in front of them, and they left notebooks describing how they sourced the blocks and shiped them down the nile on the river. turns out, after 4000 years, we still don't read the f'ing documentation.
Obviously we could build bigger if we wanted. I literally work in one of the biggest buildings in the US by volume and it is impressive on a daily basis. But just because I know we are capable of more doesn’t mean the accomplishment of actually doing the world and constructing the pyramids isn’t amazing. Besides the pantheon, what other ancient or modern projects measure up?
The pyramid of Cholula (larger by volume), the Luxor hotel (smaller, but substantially more useful), and Ryugyong hotel (hobbled by the country building it) are all plausibly comparable projects.
Why are you impressed by unusable volume? Do spoil tips awe you?
If you set a 12,600 tonnes concrete cylinder in the middle of a city, eventually someone will give up trying to remove it and turn it into a historical monument instead: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwerbelastungsk%C3%B6rper
I'm not disputing the climate change part, I'm disputing the Atlantis part
That's definitely not true. They didn't build pyramids of that size after the Old Kingdom, but they definitely had impressive engineering and crafts. The largest computer ever built was finished in 1963—why don't we build computers that large anymore? Because "largest computer" isn't a useful metric.
Your argument suffers from flawed logic by attempting to directly equate the construction of a physical structure with that of a computer. Moreover, the greatness of the Great Pyramids of Giza cannot be solely attributed to their size; they possess other notable aspects as well.
Sure, but what other notable aspects are superior to later dynasties, however?
How do you explain Stonehenge then?
(which was built in England yet no one can explain how Brits did it)
> which was built in England yet no one can explain how Brits did it
To quote one of my favorite Adult Swim shows (China IL) - "F**ing people figured it out ... Nerd don't estimate all of humanity by the limits of your capabilites"
That's what the hypothesis u/tiffanyh EXPLICITLY says, and connects with the larger theory of Atlantis and Thule.
They already brought up the fairly discredited hypothesis that humans couldn't have built Stonehenge, ignoring the fact the prehistoric megaliths are actually fairly common, and "simple machines" are a fairly well known concept throughout much of history, and forced labor was VERY common throughout much of history.
No it isn't. The Sphinx water erosion idea says that the Sphinx is too old to have been built by the Egyptians, not that the Egyptians were incapable of building things like the Sphinx. The claimed evidence is apparent water erosion on the Sphinx and climate records, not the complexity of the Sphinx.
> They already brought up the fairly discredited hypothesis that humans couldn't have built Stonehenge
They didn't say humans couldn't build the Stonehenge, they claimed that nobody knows how it was done. They can clarify if they wish but I take this to be a rebuttal of your argument that "alternate" theories about ancient megaliths are obviously rooted in racism; Stonehenge is the subject of such interest despite being European. It's not motivated by some sort of racist desire to show that Britons are racially inferior people who can't stack some stones, it's just a legitimately interesting thing to wonder about.
There was a guy who rebuilt a section of Stonehenge using only techniques that could have been used thousands of years ago, and explained how it was possible to build it.
Human Innovation is amazing. If only we can channel that into renewables constructively (don't give me Big Oil bullshit. I told enough of them my mind and my peers did to which is why we have a renewables boom now)
Could you clarify here? Are you saying that Big Oil has reduced their interference in renewables research? or that it was never the case?
> the Neolithic migrants to Britain appear to have introduced the tradition of building monuments using large stones known as megaliths.
I mean, OK, yes, but Stonehenge was built in multiple phases by different groups of people over centuries. These farming migrants with Eastern Mediterranean grandparents built phases I and II, which had small stones (the bluestones from Wales, initially placed as grave markers before being moved around a lot) and lots of wooden posts.
The impressive phase with the sarsens, the big stones people picture if you say "picture Stonehenge", is Stonehenge III, and that was built by Beaker People, the steppe invaders. Inspired from the culture of their predecessors, I guess, but maybe for completely different purposes, in so far as any of it had a purpose.
The sarsens were connected at the top with woodworking joints, BTW, as if there was a risk they might fall off without pegs to hold them in place. I've never been sure what to make of that, but my best guess is "tradition". (A previous guess was "everybody in prehistory was drunk".)
> The 1,600 participants exerted over 180,000 pounds of force on a 2-inch thick nylon rope designed to withstand only 57,000 pounds. Amidst cheers, the rope violently snapped; the sheer rebounding force tore off the left arm of the first man on each side. [1]
https://priceonomics.com/a-history-of-tug-of-war-fatalities/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slipway#Slipways_in_ship_const...
- people can routinely construct ships weighing ~1000X the weight that any one worker (or crane) could lift.
There was a guy who rebuilt a section of Stonehenge using only techniques that could have been used thousands of years ago, and explained how it was possible to build it.
It’s a complex issue, but one argument is that the Egyptians seemed to get worse at building things as time went on while supposedly becoming more advanced in other areas of technology. While possible (we do forget things), it’s odd.
Just like Byzantines BECAME Arabs and Turks.
Arab is a linguistic designation, not a racial designation.
That's all of history in a nutshell. Ever heard about the Siege of Syracuse and the Achaean Wars?
"Islamic" Golden Age didn't mean "Arab" the ethnicity - which only became a formal identity in the 19th century. While Arabic was used as the lingua franca, the ethnic origins of the various thinkers were well known in their names (eg. Al-Khwarizmi the creator of Algebra from Khwarazm/Khorasan, Al-Biruni the sociologist from Beruniy/Беруний in what's now Uzbekistan, etc). The main thing was all these thinkers were Muslim.
History is brutal and dark, and while we should look at it to remember our pasts, we should not idealize it.
I think GP is complaining the credit seems a little weird; the religious conversion happened due to violent conquest, not peaceful proselytizing. The name implies to him the religion deserves credit when the conquests a few centuries prior really brought the region into a dark age out of which the “golden age” was merely a moderate recovery. It’s certainly true that large areas of the MENA never again regained their wealth and fame again, and some ancient centers of learning were permanently deserted at this time.
That's what I'm saying.
If UAE special services (some of whom are Baloch) are on here, yk. I got into a fist fight with an ethnic Baloch al-Nahyan bouncer a couple years ago in Novella (Iykyk)
But Islam was the first form of psudeo-globalism in the 8th century (along with the Tang Empire).
I agree with you that it was is Ajams that powered the "Islamic Golden Age" but that detracts from the fact that before the 19th century, Identity was inherently ephemeral.
But that does NOT mean Islam is inherently Arab. Say that shit and you will get a bullet in your jet in most areas
> I think GP is complaining the credit seems a little weird; the religious conversion happened due to violent conquest, not peaceful proselytizing
No argument there, but based on GP's history, it's just racism morphed as Islamophobia.
History was bad, and for some ethnic groups, "Muslims" were bad. No argument there from a Pahari/Koshur Hindu (I have Hindu/Sikh that died in the 1990s and 1947, but also protected Muslims in both decades - shit's tough)
But that's a statement for all fundamentalists. Doesn't matter what diety your rever - it's the -ism aspect that makes you a fundamentalist
During the Middle Ages, “Greek people, who spoke and read Greek”, still had an empire—actually, it was the Eastern Roman Empire, but without the Western half it had become increasingly Hellenized, with the emperor’s title changing from the Latin “Augustus” to the Greek “Basileus”. And they spent much of that time at war with the Islamic conquerors, only falling to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. I can assure you they did not greet the Turks as liberators or saviors.
How many of those existed there in the first place? You can't destroy something that did not exist.
Language is not race, but it is strongly intertwined with ethnicity and culture in most parts of the world.
The Egyptian pyramids easily make one wonder “How did people move such large stones?” I could never move those with strength alone. Some form of technology / leverage / something was needed for the Egyptian pyramids which wasn’t needed for the American ones.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/Comparis...
what is with the obsession that ancient egyptians were incapable of building these monuments?