Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/notes-from-a-tired-egyptian-guy-whose-job-is-explaining-that-humans-built-the-pyramids

by Geekette • 1 month ago

210 185 1 month ago

mcsweeneys.net

buffer_overlord2• 1 month ago

Not saying it was Aline’s but it was aliens

dabadabad00• 1 month ago

Humans. The “aliens” do not like to leave overt signs of meddling.

The glyphs of Peru had more to do with the off worlders. Such are how tribesmen “represented” their local identities to the sky peoples.

In ancient times, the Greys did in fact visit primitive tribes peoples. They introduced themselves, chatted for a bit.

The Hopi and other end of the world myths were instigated by these conversations. Without their intervention the world was to be consumed by nuclear fires before 2012.

https://pastebin.com/42dTemNe

snapcaster• 1 month ago

So it's a sci-fi short story? what reason would anyone have to believe this stuff?

WalterBright• 1 month ago

Saying that aliens built them is as likely as claiming magic built them.

iamarobot• 1 month ago

For real

echelon_musk2• 1 month ago

The Testament of Solomon indulges this craziness.

the text describes how Solomon was enabled to build his temple by commanding demons by means of a magical ring that was entrusted to him by the archangel Michael.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testament_of_Solomon

irishcoffee• 1 month ago

The Testament of Solomon is a pseudepigraphical composite text ascribed to King Solomon but not regarded as canonical scripture by Jews or Christian groups. It was written in the Greek language, based on precedents dating back to the early 1st millennium AD, but was likely not completed in any meaningful textual sense until sometime in the Middle Ages.

Yeah that’s super reliable…

kulahan4• 1 month ago

Magic is explicitly something outside the realm of possibility, but I get what you’re saying.

empath753• 1 month ago

the wild thing about this is that _we have contemporaneous records of how they were built_. They know the names of architects and managers. There's no mystery to it at all.

soperj• 1 month ago

links?

empath753• 1 month ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diary_of_Merer among many others.

spogbiper• 1 month ago

the aliens could have planted those records tho

echelon_musk2• 1 month ago

Extraterrestrial parallel construction.

ceroxylon• 1 month ago

There are no photos of Merer, they were actually extraterrestrial /s

ahazred8ta2• 1 month ago

There are egyptian paintings showing colossal statues being dragged on sledges by crews of men with ropes. -- https://www.science.org/content/article/scienceshot-ancient-...

nonethewiser3• 1 month ago

But how do you haul 70ton granite blocks 350 above ground? And then turn the? No one really debates how they dragged statues across flat ground.

That doesn’t mean “aliens” but lets not pretend its a solved problem.

sscaryterry4• 1 month ago

I can sympathise and understand why people don't believe this is within human capabilities.

Look at how fractured the government and political systems of the west have become. Humans forget. We've forgotten how to build pyramids, we've forgotten the second world war and the lessons learned.

empath753• 1 month ago

We've forgotten how to build pyramids.

Luxor in Vegas is way more complicated than the egyptian pyramids were.

Hikikomori2• 1 month ago

The bass pro pyramid store was built by aliens.

boringg2• 1 month ago

Are you for real?

marshray7• 1 month ago

These are common false narratives pushed by "documentaries" on Netflix and cable television in the US.

sscaryterry4• 1 month ago

Christ, tongue-in-cheek?

qsort• 1 month ago

"The government sucks therefore aliens built the pyramids" has to be the line of thinking I sympathize the least with in the entire span of human opinions.

jrmg• 1 month ago

Modern construction firms would have no problem^ planning and building you a pyramid if you were willing to pay for it.

^ well, maybe some problems like any project, but they would overcome them.

FLHerne• 1 month ago

Sure, but no-one on Earth today is willing to pay for a pyramid - or anything like it - even with the convenience of modern construction.

I have a similar feeling looking at the great cathedrals.

These structures took up a huge proportion of the community's money, labour and talent, for decades on end. They're orders of magnitude bigger than any 'normal' building of the time or for centuries later. All with no prospect of any tangible return.

If we set out now to build the largest structure that the limits of our technology allow, designed almost purely as a work of art with little regard to any function, what would that look like? I don't know, no-one's done it for centuries.

The closest thing is the Eiffel Tower. It's a national icon, the wrought-iron equivalent of a pyramid - but it took two years to build, not twenty. What would an Eiffel Tower with 10x the resources look like? And that's more than a century ago.

It's not hard to believe that humans could build these things, but it's occasionally hard to believe that they chose to.

crazygringo2• 1 month ago

We've forgotten how to build pyramids

What exactly has led you to believe this...?

sscaryterry4• 1 month ago

Taking what I said literally :D

iamflimflam1• 1 month ago

Many medieval Britons believed that Roman ruins were built by giants.

crooked-v3• 1 month ago

The Luxor Las Vegas was built in 1993. It even had a replica tomb for a while.

gnoll_of_gozag2• 1 month ago

theres a huge pyramid right now in memphis tenessee??

john_strinlai• 1 month ago

one piece of "evidence" some conspiracy believers cite to prove aliens is, roughly: a bunch of places around the world independently all built similar pyramid-like structures (egypt, machu picchu, etc.). so it must be aliens.

the fact that the easiest way to pile up a bunch of big rocks without it crumbling down is to have a wide base and a narrow top is seemingly forgotten.

qup• 1 month ago

It strikes me that it also might be the best way to build a tall structure, for the ancients. It takes modern materials to build skinny and tall.

slg• 1 month ago

without it crumbling down

Which is an underappreciated part. They didn't only build pyramids, it's just pyramids had a much higher chance of actually surviving the millennia so it looks like early human civilizations were weirdly obsessed with pyramids. You never hear any theories about how aliens built the Colossus of Rhodes, but the pyramids get it because they're still around.

thewebguyd5• 1 month ago

If there was ever a candidate for alien intervention its the roman aqueducts, and like you said, I never see any conspiracies for that either. The romans figured out water filtration, built a massive underground network, figured out hydraulic pressure, and created concrete that can set underwater and resisted cracking.

Far more impressive than a pyramid IMO.

AdmiralAsshat2• 1 month ago

"I personally can't conceive of how one might built this, and I must be a million times smarter than people 4500 years ago, ergo people didn't build this." is how the Ancient Aliens theory always sounds to me.

alberth• 1 month ago

Ancient Aliens conflates two very different ideas.

The show’s core argument is that ancient civilizations were more advanced than we give them credit for. That may be true, but “more advanced” does not mean they had superior technology or help from aliens. It can simply mean they had technical knowledge, methods, or craftsmanship that we have since lost or forgotten.

Elon Musk has made a similar point about the US space program. We landed on the moon more than 50 years ago, but in some ways we now have to relearn how to do it (because we forgot how). That does not mean we had better technology in the 1960s, and it certainly does not mean aliens were involved. It means knowledge, systems, expertise, and institutional capability can fade over time. And that doesn't mean aliens were involved (as the tvshow would make you believe).

thewebguyd5• 1 month ago

It means knowledge, systems, expertise, and institutional capability can fade over time

This has also been happening since ancient times. Famously, how to make roman concrete was lost after the fall of the empire and Europe did not reinvent high quality concrete until much later in the 18th century. They also lost entire industrial-scale manufacturing pipelines for pottery and had a regression back to crude, hand-shaped pottery.

Turns out we humans have been dealing with the same human problems for hundreds of thousands of years.

dgellow2• 1 month ago

Have we actually forgotten how to land to the moon? That sounds very fishy, I’m pretty skeptical that’s not the case, that was done at a time where we had good records and still have access to them. And it’s close enough to current time that people who worked on it are still alive (not all of course). Coming from musk makes me believe that’s not true, he’s far from a reliable narrator

thewebguyd5• 1 month ago

There's a ton of people that, for some reason, just can't grok that humans have been largely behaviorally and biologically identical for the past 200k years.

The average ancient roman plebeian's life would not look dramatically different from ours today, minus technology of course. They worked a day job, ate at thermopoliums (basically fast food), lived in crowded apartment complexes with various forms of slum lords, deal with high rent prices, and roman graffiti is littered with complaints about politicians, sports teams, and the rising cost of living.

With the pyramids, we have the Wadi al-Jarf papyri, a detailed logistics logbook documenting the teams moving the stones for the great pyramids, along side payroll records much like any other spreadsheet you'll find on someone's corporate computer today.

We are not so different from our ancient ancestors at all.

comrade12342• 1 month ago

There are ideas that ancient human thinking was very different and primitive compared to modern. For example (and others): The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes (1976)

card_zero9• 1 month ago

Romans, huh? Many of them were slaves, they believed they could learn the future by looking at the patterns of birds in flight, a Roman's bloodline was very important to the Roman's importance. You can take "behaviorally identical" too far, ideas got better over time, people in the past had bad ideas.

aqfamnzc• 1 month ago

A couple years ago I realized that I had somewhat subconsciously made the same assumption. The thing that snapped me out of it was my awe in watching Clickspring (YT) try to recreate the Antikythera Mechanism. That device's complexity and craftsmanship is proof to me that despite the lack of technology, there were some astonishingly smart and resourceful people living thousands of years ago.

ManuelKiessling• 1 month ago

It has always been my understanding that if talking about homo sapiens sapiens: then if you could „snatch“ a newborn from 200k years ago and raise it just like any other human baby today, there is nothing in terms of biology etc. that would stop said baby from becoming an engineer, astronaut, formula one race driver, lawyer, programmer, or CEO (or any other modern profession for that matter).

Never read up if that pet theory of mine has any merit, though.

pseudohadamard• 1 month ago

With the pyramids, we have the Wadi al-Jarf papyri

Yeah but that was planted by the aliens, who got the idea from God when she was planting all the dinosaur fossils in 4,004 BC.

consumer451• 1 month ago

There is even a controversial theory that individual human intelligence peaked around 3000 years ago.

Crabtree bases his argument on the fact that, for more than 99 percent of human evolutionary history, we have lived as hunter-gatherer communities, which has led to big-brained humans. Since the development of agriculture and cities, however, natural selection on our intellect has effectively stopped and mutations have accumulated in the critical intelligence genes.

https://wcuquad.com/101393/news/humans-are-no-longer-as-inte...

lqstuart• 1 month ago

I think the gap here variation. Yes, people living 50,000 years ago were likely quite similar to _some_ people alive today, just probably not very similar to the types of people who are able to peacefully sit around on the internet and read history books for pleasure, who would most likely ask that question.

Avshalom• 1 month ago

It's more specifically "I personally can't conceive of how one might built this, so non-white people definitely didn't build this"

AdmiralAsshat2• 1 month ago

My original comment was more along those lines, but then I did a quick Wiki refresher on Chariots of the Gods (possibly the origin of the popular "Ancient Aliens" push), and noted that the author included Stonehenge among his examples, so I changed course.

an0malous2• 1 month ago

This is a strawman argument, their real one is: "These megalithic structures would be tremendously difficult for anyone to build even today with all of our modern technology, and yet they did it hundreds of times before even inventing the wheel, in several places across the world."

ianburrell• 1 month ago

It is a weird argument because we totally could build a Great Pyramid replica. Ships and trains hauling stone and tower cranes plopping them into place. We are really good at moving things and lifting them. It would probably be the quarries that be the bottleneck.

If wanted it in concrete, would be faster. Or could do it in steel or steel/concrete with some interior space (Luxor in Las Vegas is size of smaller pyramid).

toast0• 1 month ago

Yeah, they probably didn't have to file for environmental review and eminent domain.

cassepipe2• 1 month ago

Wait until you hear about "I don't remember leaving my phone in the toilets" ergo "There must be alternative parallel timelines we regularly jump to and from"

krapp• 1 month ago

...and also CERN is to blame somehow.

nonethewiser3• 1 month ago

Its more like “We dont know how they built it so Im not going to assume they used a 2km long ramp.”

jmaw• 1 month ago

aggressively supervised

Is that what we're calling it now?

dmd• 1 month ago

that's the joke

geraneum2• 1 month ago

I think a lack of curiosity and capacity also play a role in some believing the conspiracies. The information is there. More accessible than ever, yet most out of reach for our brains addicted to instant gratification of doom scrolls and outrageous headlines that we’re blasted with by multibillion dollar attention optimization machines.

krisoft• 1 month ago

The information is there.

Well. Not really? Of course a lot of information is available but still there is a lot of open questions.

Just considering the Great Pyramid of Giza: was it built with an external or an internal ramp? What was the purpose of the so called “well shaft”? What was the purpose of the “grand gallery”? What about the “air shafts”? Is the restoration of the so called “great step” in the “grand gallery” historically accurate? What is going on with the “big void” and the “small void” seemingly indicated by the ScanPyramid data? How did those who dug the “robbers tunnel” know how deep the granite plugs are?

My point is that there are enough interesting questions even after one learns “all there is to know”. They are just not in the realm of “aliens?” but much more like “what order were the ramps removed?”

geraneum2• 1 month ago

Information is there to help steer people away from crazy conspiracy theories. The kind of information that help people even arrive at the questions you mentioned. That’s the whole point of my argument.

sporedro• 1 month ago

I feel like people believe whatever they want and the narrative changes to “can you 105% guarantee aliens didn’t build them?”

I mean even if you could people would still believe whatever they want… must be tiring for sure.

moralestapia• 1 month ago

Hopefully he gets replaced by AI and is relieved of his torment.

data-ottawa• 1 month ago

Related: Masonry Techniques of the Inca’s Master Builders

https://www.earthasweknowit.com/pages/inca_construction

This article was a fantastic read, and thoroughly debunks a lot of ancient alien style stuff.

rramadass• 1 month ago

Very informative article with excellent photographs.

You should post it to HN for greater visibility instead of being buried in the comments.

yongjik• 1 month ago

People dramatically underestimate what thousands of organized humans can accomplish when they are adequately fed, aggressively supervised, and denied alternative career paths.

Somehow I feel personally attacked.

prmph• 1 month ago

The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them..."

doublerabbit• 1 month ago

Egyptians were clever. They had rivers, water and advanced water-management technology.

The shaduf, which is a hand-operated lever with a bucket, to lift water from rivers and canals for irrigation.

The Nile River annually flooded which was monitored because it determined agricultural success.

As well, the Nile served as a transportation route. Huge stone blocks transported through and evidence suggests that canals and harbours were built near some pyramid complexes to help move materials closer to construction sites.

https://aeraweb.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/aeragram15_1-...

Clever people. Not as advanced as the Romans but they had technology and prospered for a long while.

nonethewiser3• 1 month ago

The question is how did these clever people build the pyramids. When you read about it you realize no one really knows. There are theories that have evolved over time but there isnt great evidence for any of it. Its largely people thinking about how it could have happened - not how it DID happen.

Of course that doesnt means aliens did it.

comrade12342• 1 month ago

If aliens built the pyramids they did a pretty shit job. You can see the evolution where they started building a pyramid and realized it would be too high so they changed the angle half-way up. If they had computers and geometry they probably would have gotten it right from the start.

pixel_popping• 1 month ago

We are literally about to build the next civilization and some still wonder if we can build the Pyramids while it's actually basic for today's technology, people are not on phase, it's scary to see that gap.

chadd• 1 month ago

The classic Mcsweeney's for the HN crowd is "E-mail Addresses That Would Be Really Annoying to Give Out Over the Phone"

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/e-mail-addresses-that-wo...

evtothedev• 1 month ago

I love that gmail was only 4 months old when this came out.

NikolaNovak7• 1 month ago

My father in law has email address that is about his small dog. He's Scottish and his dog growls a lot. So his address is weegrrrr.

Oh let me tell you the fun of spelling that one over the phone. He's also not the most patient man in the world either :-)

dafugg• 1 month ago

Tell him to be careful. The chinese government might try to re-educate his email address.

orthoxerox• 1 month ago

"The WiFi password is fourwordsalluppercase. One word, all lowercase."

tremon2• 1 month ago

lol, that's what I'd call a dense piece of text:

(header)

  [email protected]
  [email protected]
  [email protected]
  [email protected]
  [email protected]

(end article)

pjc502• 1 month ago

Is that being injected by an extension or something? It's perfectly readable to me.

mixxit• 1 month ago

i laughed at that for five straight minutes thank you

ddmf• 1 month ago

I was considering changing my name to Mark Withasea because I keep getting asked so many times "Is that Mark with a K, or a C?"

oniony• 1 month ago

During the dot-com boom I registered dotcodotuk.co.uk and set up dotcodotuk@dotcodotuk.co.uk. Strangely the novelty of this wore off very quickly.

pjc502• 1 month ago

Occasionally on here is user fanf with email address dot@dotat.at

speak_plainly• 1 month ago

I think people fall into two distinct camps here: the wildly exploratory, who chase everything from lost civilizations to aliens, and the hyper-rationalists, who refuse to budge from safe, conventional explanations. When it comes to Giza, It may be disingenuous to write all the banter off as either conspiracy or bona fide science. While we understand the general progression of pyramid-building in Egypt, the sheer scale and precision of Giza creates blind spots.

There are major gaps in all explanations provided and there are a huge array of interesting but unprovable theories. People fill those gaps with whatever is compelling, but really, none are good enough to prove anything definitively and that includes the academic explanations.

It's entirely possible that we may never have the definitive answer for how they were built or even exactly why, and will have to live with the mystery. But humans rarely will accept that conclusion and we would rather invent certainty than put up with open questions.

rfwhyte• 1 month ago

We do know pretty much exactly when they pyramids were built though, (+/- a couple hundred years, which in this context is "Exact" enough) as there have been numerous carbon datings of organic material found in the mortar between the stones of the pyramids, which all broadly line up with the other textual evidence (Mehrer texts, etc.) and contextual evidence (Dating of the work camps surrounding the pyramids) and there really isn't any great mystery in how they were built either, just a lack of specificity in terms of what exact method was used (ie. was it an internal or external ramp, were pulleys used, etc.)

zkmon• 1 month ago

Given that Giza pyramid took about 30 years, the internet and AI together took the same amount of time. So then AI is definitely a work of aliens from the far away galaxy.

khelavastr• 1 month ago

They used kite-sails with rollers, according to Caltech

stpedgwdgfhgdd• 1 month ago

“People dramatically underestimate what thousands of organized humans can accomplish when they are adequately fed, aggressively supervised, and denied alternative career paths.“

xdennis• 1 month ago

This feels deeply insulting considering humans also created taxation, organized warfare, and raisins.

Offtopic, but why do people hate raisins so much? No other dried fruit gets so much hate.

I would imagine it's something genetic like the reason why some people dislike coriander (which has been shown to be related to genetic sensitivity to aldehydes).

kulahan4• 1 month ago

The only other dried fruit I see people eat regularly is cranberries, and those really can’t be eaten fresh. I think it’s just that most people don’t like dried fruit and this is their only exposure. It’s definitely one of the most sickeningly sweet natural things you can eat that isn’t a sweetener in and of itself.

msm_• 1 month ago

Excuse me, fresh cranberries are delicious!

enneff• 1 month ago

I don’t understand why you wouldn’t like raisins? They’re pretty much just sugar.

glitcher• 1 month ago

For me it's cookies. Thinking I'm about to bite into a chocolate chip cookie only to be sorely disappointed!

Otherwise I like raisins, just fine on their own or in trail mix :)

austin-cheney• 1 month ago

Reminds me of my career explaining how to build simple webpages without using large abstraction libraries/frameworks for JavaScript.

bji9jhff• 1 month ago

I think the more likely explanation is racism. If the pyramids were in Europe, nobody would challenge their human origin but pyramids are in Africa Surely aliens are involved.

kulahan4• 1 month ago

This is such a weirdly misanthropic view of humanity. Why are people so desperate to find evil in this world when ignorance is not only nicer to believe, it’s insanely more accurate?

Like I get it, you’re depressed, but this doesn’t automatically make everyone everywhere that doesn’t believe some random facts “racist”.

AlotOfReading• 1 month ago

If we interpret the grandparent charitably, they're saying the centuries-long history of people suggesting Africans couldn't have built the pyramids to justify their own racial bias [0] also applies to modern people. It doesn't seem like an outrageous position, nor does it preclude ignorance being involved.

[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-white-southerners...

applfanboysbgon3• 1 month ago

This is provably incorrect. Stonehenge is the target of alien conspiracies as well.

gaiagraphia• 1 month ago

the article has a huge 'flash sale' and is selling shit. Not the best evidence to declare huge swathes of people racist. c If you search "extraterrestrial origins of Stonehenge" you'l find the same shit. 'Muh aliens' crowd are happy to attribute anything to aliens. The pyramids of bosnia? Nazca lines? Moai?

And why is it bad that people feel wonder at places literally called "wonders" and build stories around them? That's universal, not sinister. Egypt is steeped in religion, myth, and all kinds of craziness; most Egyptians don't hold a strictly secular, "logical" view of the world either, and no one calls them "racist" for it. From my time living in Cairo, people attributed most things to Israel and god, lol.

I also don't get tying a whole continent (an arbitrary construct) to a single race. There's no such thing as "the African race."

Weird comment. Hammers and nails, imo.

inglor_cz• 1 month ago

Maybe you are just really, really determined to find racism in everything? Your claim is wildly wrong; I live in Europe and there is no shortage of kookiness and crackpotry around all the megalithic structures that dot the landscape, down to having actual cults worship them.

This isn't recent either. When Tolkien put the lines about Orthanc and the Stone of Erech looking unearthly into the Lord of the Rings, he reflected on the early Medieval people and their superstitions regarding Roman ruins. "There once was a race of giants that built X" was a common idea, and fanciful medieval authors would invent all sorts of humanoids that weren't human and were responsible for various wonders or evils.

Burial mounds in Ireland (sídh) are linguistically associated with the "fair folk" (aos sí) until today.

jmclnx• 1 month ago

It would be interesting to know who by Country or Language who believes ETs built the pyramids.

Personally I expect US would be the leader. The reason is because over the last 50 years there have been lots of shows describing how and why Space Aliens built the pyramids. Some of these shows were well produced.

In the US, it seems we are at the point if a show is based on fantasy, it is believed as fact.

gnoll_of_gozag2• 1 month ago

id say theres more here on the balkans

rahidz• 1 month ago

McSweeney's uses AI to write now?

I was extremely suspicious, and pasted the text into Pangram, said 100% AI generated (and yes, I trust Pangram as they have extremely low rates of false positives).

inigyou4• 1 month ago

Pangram is wrong 49% of the time. Try it on your own writing or stuff from before 2021.

timnetworks• 1 month ago

https://www.war.gov/UFO/

effed34• 1 month ago

Really funny to read.

but refleting uppon: maybe "aliens" are another name for a kind of ignorance spreading around. basic science and history simply gone. Not so funny to think about.

stevage• 1 month ago

I don't think humans really invented raisins.

3dedb728-3f77• 1 month ago

Please someone explain why people today not making them anymore not make ancestors better than us.

Ancestors were great. I just want a plan of how to do it.

Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids

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