atrahasis

Somebody good in archeology would help me out.
Have you read this book [Finger prints of the Gods]. Well i myself have not finished reading it but something very peculair about this book pulled me here. This guy[the author] tries to prove that there was a civilisation before ours, he goes on and tries to prove this using facts and hard evidence.
He/she says the technology used to build the pyramids of egypt was very advanced, Then why did't this technology advance to present time? Because if it did the technology around today would have been very advanced many time better than that old one. That means there was a break between that era and today era, Thats where i need help. When was this break and what caused it.
And is it true that there was a simutaneous use of high technology both in africa and in South America amoung the Maya?
Please help <img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" /> <img src="confused.gif" border="0">

Vorkosigan

Habari gani! Vipi, Bwana Isaiah. Unatoka Kenya upande gani?

If you go to <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org" target="_blank">www.talkorigins.org</a> they have an extensive set of websites on Fingerprints. The book is recycled nonsense that dates back to the 19th century. See Doug Weller's Cult Archaeology site at:

<a href="http://www.ramtops.demon.co.uk/" target="_blank">http://www.ramtops.demon.co.uk/</a>

for lists of links and explanations of why this stuff is so bad.

Vorkosigan

[ April 23, 2002: Message edited by: Vorkosigan ]</p>

Skepticwithachainsaw

Hmm, when people always go on about the "high technology" of an ancient civilisation I always interpret it as they simply cannot believe such a "primitive" people can be so clever. It's a form of "chronological snobbery", assuming that because people don't have the technology we have now, that they were innately thicker.

The Egyptian engineers were very likely just very inventive and cunning with the technology they possessed, they used "simple" mechanical principles to great effect, like rollers, pulleys and levers. They had an enormous man power in the form of Slaves (and whips&#8230 . Bear in mind that the Egyptians were already quite accomplished mathematicians.

For example I recently saw a fascinating programme on how it is thought they erected the monoliths, it involved building a large open topped "container" for the monolith which is then filled with sand. A ramp and pulley system is then set up so the Monolith is pulled to the top and it's bottom end is in the sand, the sand is then drained from the (very useful viscous nature&#8230 and the monolith is slowly brought upright. The Temporary container is then deconstructed leaving one very erect monolith. (*cough* )
It takes a lot of effort but it works (they tested it).

If you look at the progress of the Early Pyramids, there is a very blatant improvement of the techniques of Pyramid construction, the early are quite crude in comparison.

So when a "historian" (for the lack of a better word) says "They must have had advanced technology, I can't see how they did it…" a good reply would be "That’s because they were smarter than you".

Ted Hoffman

skeptikchainsaw
*cough**cough*
That was good

lpetrich

There have also been experiments with building stone monuments with Stone-Age or Bronze-Age technology, and doing so is apparently very feasible, though the bigger ones do require large amounts of time and labor. But even those factors were often readily available; think of all those peasants living on the shores of the Nile.

Does anyone know of any good discussion of such experiments?

Also, if they had had such advanced technology, then why didn't they give themselves away very well? Why not some flatbed trucks for hauling the stone? I'm sure that such a truck would be recognizable as not having been made with our technology, because it would likely be built with unit conventions different from ours. Also, using some atypical powerplant such as methanol fuel cells with electric motors for the axles would give it away.

The Lone Ranger

I'm always amazed when someone like this tries to insist that our ancestors were too stupid to figure out how to cut and stack rocks.

Cheers,

Michael

Marduk

"Does anyone know of any good discussion of such experiments?"

Yes, PBS has a whole series on ancient technology and recreating some of the megoliths, Stonehenge, Pyramids, Oblisks, Mayan temples, the 'Heads' on Easter Island etc. I got them from the PBS website NOVA I believe. Very cool to!
It is possible some knowledge of their skills and methods were lost when the Old Kingdom (The Pyramid builders) collapsed in 2000 BCE due to dramatic climatic changes, not to mention the destruction of the Library at Alexandria.
The Egyptians did NOT use slaves to build the Pyramids. They had a permanent crew of 5000 or so masons working full time and when the growing season was over people from the country came in to donate their time for the grunt work. It was more of a public works project, the workers were well fed & cared for. The remains of the work camps have been found as well as bakeries, fish & meat markets and medical facilities. They could set a broken bone or do a succesful amputation as well as in the 20th century, sans anesthetic I presume.
The Pyramids are much more than simple stacked stones. The thing is almost 500 feet tall and still has its shape after 4500 years, it was covered with limestone and was completly flat and smooth on all sides (till they tore it apart to build other stuff, some remains can still be seen towards the top)
There are chambers and shafts designed into it that required incredible precision to align all the way through the structure not to mention how tightly fit all the stones are. The Egyptian and Mayan temples were the things the PBS folks had the most trouble with, if you watch the shows you may wonder why the Pyramids are not still under constuction.
What people like Hancock and others like to overlook is that before the Pyramids at Giza were built, 3 others were tried first, 2 of which, the 'bent' pyramid and Zozer's pyramid are not so perfect. The third one, the 'red' pyramid at Saqarra, is the first before Giza that came out just right. Practice makes perfect I suppose.

Joe Nobody

I just read something slightly similar to this:

Earlier he reported that pygmies use roots and herbs of the forest to make medicines unknown to western doctors. They can dip their arrowheads in a deadly poision, using the extracts of 3-4 plants and they have even developed antidotes for these poisons! I think ethology (animal behavior) is their specialty though.

Joe Nobody

Ted Hoffman

I was supposed to actually tackle this subject "ancient technology" with marduck some time ago but I lacked time and even the conviction.
At one time I was a believer in the Interventionist Theory Antlantis etc. I still am a great fan of Alan Alford though Zechariah Sitchin has been proved to be wrong by astronomers who bothered like Tom Van Flandern(about Planet X or Marduck) - his poor grasp of astronomy was his undoing and doing his work in relative isolation thus conflicting with eg translations of the akkadian texts by other scholars.
However, I find it quite unsatisfactory to just say the info the ancients used was lost in some library. Mendelev had to start from scratch in coming up with the periodic table - how could so much scientific info have vanished to thin air?

When we look at Inca Stonemasonry we find the use of thermal disaggregation - a very highly technical and scientific way of cutting stones (we are talking granite here). Ultrasonic machining( a form of ultrasound technology) used for example in the sarcophagus in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid is not a technology that can just be buried in some ruins and lost completely and there is still lack of an adequate explanation about how the ancients went about their lives.
Alan Alford in Gods of the New Millenium builds a compeling case about the functional purpose of the pyramids (of course the Egyptologists claim that it was for burying the Pharaohs etc). The stonehenge was found to align with the seasons and could be used to check the seasons. These people seemed to have advanced knowledge of astronomy and technology. They used metals of very high melting points - up to 2000 Degrees and created alloys of "hard" metals (showing a good knowledge of chemistry) where are the melting furnaces they used?
Almost everything the ancients left behind in all civilizations, Andean, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Mesoamerica that has been found to be "advanced" has been attributed to agricultural and religious purposes.
How satisfactory is that? The pyramids Egyptian, Chinese etc can be seen from space, was it necessary to build such huge structures, was such a high precision necessary for the structures? Did they have to use those megaliths ate stonehenge? The Nacza lines, what were they for?

In summary, I find it inadequate to just dismiss the disbelief that the ancients had such advanced technology as a case of snobbery and superiority complex.
Nobody has come up with a plausible explanation about what happened - why was the technology not passed down to us?

Amen-Moses

I think someones got it arse backwards, it is mainstream Archeology that claims our ancestors were thick not Hancock et al.

Whenever someone tries to push back the start of "civilisation" by for example dating the Catal Hayuk or Jericho towns to 7 or 8 thousand BCE the cry goes up that we weren't technologically advanced enough back then, but try and suggest that maybe they were in fact advanced enough and the knowledge possibly did not survive and you get called a crank!

A perfect example was with those cities found off the western coast of India, a piece of wood found on top of the remains dates to 6000 BCE, indicating that the remains themselves predate that. What was the Archeologist response? To claim that the wood could have come from somewhere else because they just cannot accept that our ancestors were advanced enough to live in cities that long ago.

Amen-Moses