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

mcsweeneys.net

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

#181

Post by tremon »

pjc50 wrote: post #168
tremon wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

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

It's address (de)obfuscation via javascript, meant to prevent harvesting of spam targets via simple scraping. The HTML plain-text reads what I wrote, there's a javascript hook to replace the placeholders with actual e-mail addresses. But the amount of substance on that page did not merit a reload with javascript enabled.

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

#182

Post by pyuser583 »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #148
aqfamnzc wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Obelisk at the Vatican weighs in at 360 tons. And was moved from Egypt to Rome by the Romans around 40AD. And then moved to it's present location in the 1586. The Romans moved at least 8 Egyptian Obelisks to Rome and also commissioned a couple. The only thing really amazing about the pyramids is how many couple of ton blocks they carved out and transported. It's around 250 blocks a day for 25 years.

There’s one in London too.

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

#184

Post by buffer_overlord »

expedition32 wrote: post #18
snapcaster wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What reason do people have to believe the Moses story?

exactly.

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

#185

Post by NikolaNovak »

card_zero wrote: post #177
NikolaNovak wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have access to different data points today. But the way I read the original post is that human mind as such did not meaningful change. If you took a Roman or Egyptian embryo from 5k years ago and incubated it today, you'd have a modern human. The fact that many people back then had crazy ideas, is orthogonal to the biological argument at hand - and that's before we look at amount of people with crazy ideas today,…

Yes, but I don't know why we'd be talking about biology in the first place, unless everybody's going around assessing everybody else a biologically stupid or smart. (If so, where do they think the smart ones get their good ideas from, are those ideas supposed to be inborn? Or exuded from a strong and genetically healthy idea-gland?)

>>"assessing everybody else a biologically stupid or smart"

Again, welcome to reality, meet some racists. They make the majority of population :O

More seriously and in the spirit of HN: Because a lot of people, per the original post, assume ancient people were fundamentally, biologically, less intelligent. Couple of reasons:

1. We teach people about evolution and Neanderthals etc, but it's hard for most of us to grasp the time scales. People conflate "Egyptians 5 thousand years ago" and "australopithecus 5 million years ago".

2. As many many people do today, we also conflate circumstances with inherent - like we've seen several times in this very thread, because people 5k years ago they didn't have technology or knowledge of today, there's subconscious assumption they weren't fundamentally as intelligent as capable.

Original post had a simple and specific claim: Egyptians 5k years ago were biologically equivalent to humans today and their intelligence was just as high. Raise them in modern society and you'd get the same bell curve.

That claim alone is mind blowing to many.

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

#186

Post by NikolaNovak »

card_zero wrote: post #176
NikolaNovak wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's sarcastic, good one :) If genuine, I'm puzzled. In the current world we have a tremendous amount of people who hold various superstitious beliefs as well as spend tremendous amount of time on their genealogy. And nepotism never went away. I agree those are "bad ideas", but don't see how they differentiate us from people 5k years ago?

I guess I got downvoted for not supplying very persuasive examples. The point is, cleverness is having good ideas-about-ideas, and these have obviously improved over time, so people in the past were obviously not so clever. I could point at all the self-help books that promise to improve the way you think, or Wikipedias list of fallacies, but I don't those are great examples either. It's frustrating that I can't make…

Atheists range from 4-6% in USA, I think less than 1% in India, to a nice round 0 percent in many other countries where they'd basically be beaten up for this. I think word "tremendous" is appropriate when we are talking about 95+%

Outside of the "so mainstream and prevalent we don't even consider it" superstitions (which, remember, were all the historical ones we may dismiss now, thousand years later), we have horoscope and astrology, psychics, and people who think wearing same socks will help them on a winning streak, and everybody hesitant to talk about good or bad outcomes less they "jinx it". Maybe you're from Germany or Scandinavia and your daily experience is different?

But again, the thread started about biological differences and I will agree that there are little to none between ancient Egyptians and modern humans.

In terms of cultural values, sanctity of life, freedoms and poverty and lifestyle, I do think some things have improved. We can debate numbers as to how much.

Understand that as a Canadian, and not knowing where you're from, you unfortunately find me at a cynical time as we watch our southern neighbour work so very very hard to dismantle much of the progress we are discussing here very every effectively, so it's just difficult to put one's mind in historically optimistic mindset :-/

Romans had educated intellectuals who had some progressive and scientific ideas, and the less educated masses who had less progressive and educated ideas. This seems to describe today's world well. And we still LOVE to attack the "intellectual elite" for having progressive, scientific ideas.

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

#187

Post by hollerith »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #186
card_zero wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I got downvoted for not supplying very persuasive examples. The point is, cleverness is having good ideas-about-ideas, and these have obviously improved over time, so people in the past were obviously not so clever. I could point at all the self-help books that promise to improve the way you think, or Wikipedias list of fallacies, but I don't those are great examples either. It's frustrating that I can't make…

Atheists range from 4-6% in USA, I think less than 1% in India, to a nice round 0 percent in many other countries where they'd basically be beaten up for this. I think word "tremendous" is appropriate when we are talking about 95+% Outside of the "so mainstream and prevalent we don't even consider it" superstitions (which, remember, were all the historical ones we may dismiss now, thousand years later), we have horos…

>Atheists range from 4-6% in USA

Just because in polls only 4-6% will identity with "atheist" doesn't mean the rest are severely impaired by superstitious beliefs.

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

#188

Post by NikolaNovak »

hollerith wrote: post #187
NikolaNovak wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atheists range from 4-6% in USA, I think less than 1% in India, to a nice round 0 percent in many other countries where they'd basically be beaten up for this. I think word "tremendous" is appropriate when we are talking about 95+% Outside of the "so mainstream and prevalent we don't even consider it" superstitions (which, remember, were all the historical ones we may dismiss now, thousand years later), we have horos…

>Atheists range from 4-6% in USA Just because in polls only 4-6% will identity with "atheist" doesn't mean the rest are severely impaired by superstitious beliefs.

We can disagree on that. But I did list other common superstition forms to not get bogged on an emotionally charged item; everybody is used to their superstition, and nobody thinks it impairs them. Key point - Egyptians didn't either :)

I actually think "not impaired by superstitious beliefs" is somewhere between "less than 1%" and "zero", myself sadly included. For "severely" we have to set up some definitions and thresholds.

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

#189

Post by an0malous »

ianburrell wrote: post #117
an0malous wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

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 pyrami…

Like I said, the argument is that it would be very difficult, not that we couldn’t do it.

As an example, you could read about the efforts to move a 250 ton obelisk from Egypt to France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxor_Obelisks

It took $16M in 2020 dollars, a special boat built just for this transportation, and five years to complete the whole relocation process.

The mainstream argument is that ancient Egyptians were able to transport this same monument hundreds of miles from the quarry to Luxor with no wheels or cranes, just reed boats, sleds, and ropes. They did this hundreds or thousands of times, sometimes with granite blocks twice the size of this one.

> 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).

There are a lot of ways the ancient Egyptians could have done this more easily as well. They didn’t have to transport granite from a quarry hundreds of miles away, they could have used softer stones from nearby quarries. They didn’t have to carve things from single-piece blocks, they could have broken it up into many smaller blocks or even bricks. They did everything the harder way, with the oldest constructions being the most difficult and precise, suggesting that there’s a lot we still don’t understand about their motivations, abilities, or the timeline.

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

#190

Post by kulahan »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #111
kulahan wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

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...

Of course it’s an outrageous position. You’re ignoring the fact that there are pyramids on multiple continents and pretending someone is saying only the pyramids in Africa could’ve been built by aliens while the rest were not. It has absolutely nothing to do with racism. You people are so desperate to find evil, I swear. How annoying.
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