Gizapon my works and despair

September 12, 2019 1:23 PM

A history of the Pyramids of Giza and the people who explored them. Jimmy Maher (The Digital Antiquarian) with an extensive history on the Pyramids at Giza and the people who explored them.
posted by GnomePrime (5 comments total)

The 'NotAliens' tag made me think of this little gem I happened to see online:

This honestly reminds me of a show on the history channel where they spent like 25 minutes wondering how the sides of all the pyramids seemed to be perfectly divisible by pi or something, and people where theorizing about aliens and some lost form of mathematics, but then at the end they interviewed a tiered looking paleontologist and he was just like “maybe they just used a wheel to do all their measurements.” and the whole show just immediately collapsed.

can you imagine being so far up your own ass with conspiracy theories that you forget about circles

(also, +1 for the title!)
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:26 PM on September 12, 2019 [10 favorites]

This is an extensive write-up, thanks for sharing!

can you imagine being so far up your own ass with conspiracy theories and racism* that you forget about circles

* Because discounting the potential for the Egyptians to build the pyramids of their own ingenuity often comes from latent or overt racism, trying to cast ancient Egyptians as inferior to (northern) European counterparts. At this time, Druids were possibly using pig grease to slide stones in place to make Stonehenge, and later, erecting the Durrington Walls.
posted by filthy light thief at 2:54 PM on September 12, 2019 [5 favorites]

Favoriting to come back to. Nice first post, GnomePrime!
posted by cortex at 3:17 PM on September 12, 2019

This goes well beyond what I was expecting it to be. Such a fascinating subject matter and assembled all in one place! Thanks so much for posting -- I'll be coming back to this for a while.
posted by hippybear at 6:51 PM on September 12, 2019

I think the writer is maybe not such a good writer as he thinks he is, but maybe I'm not his target demographic. It is readable though, and I plan to return to it. One passage in the Introduction stuck out to me:

Much of our species’s collective history is a chronicle of mistakes made and then repeated, injustice piled on injustice, might making right again and again. But, thankfully, that’s not all our history is made of. There are also these other things that stand above the fray, manifestations of a creative impulse that vies constantly with the impulse for destruction in the human soul. The noblest, most human act of all, I’ve decided, is to make one of these worthy and beautiful things, (emphasis added)

These Wonders that he's referring to were almost certainly constructed at the cost of horrendous human suffering, so I'm not so sure I can agree with the italicized conclusion.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 8:21 PM on September 12, 2019