If you still believe this “official” version of History, you need not read any further. You’ll be disappointed.
In my July blog, we’ve recovered
a little perspective – a tiny bit of “historical sense.” Now we can proceed to
look into the facts of a project like the Great Pyramid (Khufu’s pyramid) and
see if we can disentangle it from the Cecil B. DeMille version of History.
Just the Facts,
Ma’am,
The sublime monument was build,
around 2,560 B.C. Last year it was older, but things “change,” finds are made,
new theories expounded, and the “chronoscope” is shrunk along with it (the idea
being that if the pyramids were build “nearer” to our time, it exalts us as
modern people). In my humble opinion, the Pyramids, and especially the Sphynx,
are far older. But who cares about what I think?
Egyptologists have been grappling
with “how” the pyramids were built since the 19th Century (well,
since Napoleon arrived in 1799). We’ll delve into that aspect of the project –
the engineering – at another time. When I was growing up, the story went
something like this: there were hundreds of thousands of slaves working year
round, for God knows how long, to construct the Great Pyramid. Thousands of
slaves died in the process. Today, Egyptologists have made progress in
excavating “workers’ villages” near Giza and other finds, and as a result, they’ve
modified the Hollywood version slightly.
Now they believe some 100,000 men
laboured several months out of the year, for 18-20 years, quarrying 2,300,000
blocks of stone averaging 2.3 metric tons (2.5 tons) a piece, and moving them
downriver from Swenet (Aswan) to Giza, approximately 675 kilometres (about 422
miles) to the north.
So far so good... The fact is
they were built during Akhet (the Season of Inundation), the four months out of
the year during which the Nile flooded and then receded – and they did it in 18
years! Depending on the size of the flood, the season would be extended or
reduced below the “official” four months. Why during Akhet? That was when the
land was “fallow” and it was impossible to do the real work at hand – farming –
i.e., feeding one’s brothers and sisters (what a concept!).
To get an idea of what building
these pyramids entailed, we have to consider not just time, but timing. The
major lifting was done during a seasonal “window,” which coincided with the
Inundation. The 2.3 million blocks raised up may not seem like much to us today,
because we believe we’ve gone to the moon… But 2.5 tons (2,300 kg.) is what two
large female hippopotami weigh. Or to keep things more modern, about what a
Honda Civic LX weighs.
When Do You Want It?
Yesterday?
It took the Ancient Egyptians
approximately 2,160 days to build the Great Pyramid (4 months x 18 years = 72
months of 30 days each). If they could have worked right through the year, they
would have finished the pyramid in less than six years. I’d like to see any
modern conglomerate of construction companies sign up to that project and still
come in on time and under budget!
I was just reading about the
Panama Canal expansion fiasco, wherein the international engineering and
construction consortium has gone way over budget with cost overruns and delays…
and thinking, what these people need is a couple of Ancient Egyptians to run
things for them!
Greed, bad financial partners,
poor labour relations, weather, malaria, all these things may be throwing a
monkey wrench into the Panama Canal expansion project, but that would never
happen to the Black People. Of course, our “business as usual” and our
“coincidences” would not be plaguing the ancients (not even the ten plagues
did). They simply made their offerings to the neteru, set the completion date,
got to work, and the whole thing got done.
How was it possible for the
Ancient Egyptians to finish such a huge project in a mere 2,160 days? Well,
that’s hard to say, but I believe it had a lot to do with their sacred science
and a dash of “attitude.” To the Black People nothing that was manifest on Top
of the Earth (in the material plane) was an accident. In other words, the
concept of “coincidence” was an alien one to them.
The number of days it took the
Ancient Egyptians to build the Great Pyramid is extremely significant from an
esoteric point-of-view also, because that is exactly the number of years it
takes for a solar age to transpire; i.e., for the sun to pass from one Zodiac
sign to the next in the precession of equinoxes (we’ll discuss this in more
detail in the near future). It’s also the length of time (on average) that a human
soul takes to reincarnate.
Hey, These Stone
Blocks are Heavy!
The next issue before us is: What
exactly did these hundreds of thousands of “extras” the Egyptologists believe
built the Great Pyramid (or any other monument, if you will), actually doing
there? Besides getting in the way of completing the job, I mean. What’s their excuse
for being there in the first place? Is it that Egyptologists are firm believers
in “strength in numbers,” or what?
Clearly, to finish within the
allotted time, the sandstone blocks – these 2.3 million Hondas (or 4.6 million
hippos) – were raised up at an astounding rate. Each day, 1,065 blocks were set
in place… Even if we were to take into account an unrealistic 12-hour working day
(I guarantee the Black People didn’t work that long – maybe 6 hours a day tops!),
they raised 89 blocks an hour! Approximately one every two minutes!
Phew! I get exhausted doing the
math… Think of what THEY went through to get the thing done! Maybe they gained
some “economies of scale” by building Khufu’s, Khafre’s, and Menkaure’s
pyramids all at the same time (father, son, and grandson)… But I doubt it.
Hollywood Casts the
Crew
I can hear Cecil B. DeMille croaking
through his megaphone on the set… “We need more extras!” Hundreds of thousands
of them in fact because first you needed to build “the ramp” the Egyptologists
imagine was completed before work was begun on the real thing. In other words,
a huge earth works project was built by moving millions of cubic metric tons of
dirt in what amounts to another pyramid before the pyramid was actually started.
Fine, first we need lots of folks
with picks, shovels, and baskets to move massive amounts of dirt up the hill.
For that we’ll need slaves. Being a Hollywood producer casting slaves is
cheaper for me because they only wear a loincloth and I don’t have to go over
budget with the costumes department. I save on make-up too. Being slaves, I
don’t have to feed them at the chow wagon either – at least, not much.
Finally, as a film director, I
want to be historically accurate, but I don’t want to waste money on doing any
research. I’ll just use the Bible as my source and that’ll also get me past the
censors and the fundamentalist zealots won’t be boycotting when I premier the
movie.
For a Hollywood epic, that’s all
fine and good, but the Great Pyramid is not fiction – it’s actually there!
Someone built it, and I put my money on the Ancient Egyptians being the
builders. And, they didn’t use anything to do that with but the most
rudimentary stone, wood, and copper tools. (I’m not one to denigrate the Black
People by casting them as slaves, or slaves of extra-terrestrials either! I
don’t think they had access to or used “sophisticated” technology of either an
earthly or alien nature). Naturally, one can’t discount their ace in the hole –
Heka! – as a contributing factor to their success. But that’s a whole other
story.
Less is More – An
Ancient Egyptian Virtue
In my experience building things
like houses and large buildings, I always found that the fewer people you actually
had at a job site, the faster the work would get done. Obviously,
Archaeologists and Egyptologists have never actually built anything... so these
subtleties of construction may be lost on them.
Many years later, when I worked
in the software industry the same fact was brought home to me again – the more
programmers you threw at a project the longer it would take to get done and to
boot, the more bugs the program/application would have. Yep, the mythical
“man-month” is a myth!
Unlike us modern knuckleheads,
who live in abstractions and in flighty things that are not real, the Ancient
Egyptians lived in the real world. They were nothing if not practical! Just
because they wore skirts doesn’t mean they were dumb! Does anyone seriously
believe they didn’t know that the more people you threw at a job the slower it
would go? Of course they did! They knew they would have to give instructions,
make everyone at the building site an “intelligent worker” – they had to
“communicate”!
They had quality control, for
chrissake! I challenge anyone to drill a hole in granite as straight as they
did (or as fast!) with stone tools. In fact, I challenge anyone with the most
modern equipment to do it! If we know anything, it’s because THEY knew it
before us!
History According to
Cecil B. DeMille
Now we have hundreds of thousands
of slaves crawling around the job site causing nothing but trouble. Heck, if
they were real slaves (i.e., people taken to the site against their will) they’d
be in constant revolt – sabotaging the building and the works at every turn! What
overseer (or project manager) needs that headache?
No one takes being a slave
sitting down (we have recent American and South African history to vouch for
that!). The singular exception to this fact of human nature seems to come from
the Bible itself (our only source material), wherein the Jewish slaves seemed
to be inexplicably quiescent and submissive under the whip (especially in light
of later Jewish revolts during the Roman period).
Personally, if I’d been a Jewish
slave at the site, climbing “the ramp,” once I got the top, I’d let go of the
rope. The ramp would have been chalk full of blocks and slave drivers (with a
block up the ramp every two minutes, it’d be busier than an airport tarmac during
rush hour!). Then I’d push the 2.5 ton block on its rollers back down – killing
everyone on that ramp. Thus I would set my people free – and that evil Pharaoh
would have to start his tomb all over again. Talk about the “domino theory”
that actually works... It’d be a cinch!
Wouldn’t you? After all, what
would be your real life-expectancy as a slave at the site? How any trips up
that ramp could you muster before you died of exhaustion, or worse? One, two,
maybe three? Hell, before I end up dead carrying those block up, I’d take as
many down with me as I could!
So how did these stupid, greedy,
egotistical Ancient Egyptians control all these smart, self-less, and industrious
slaves? This would have had to have been the ultimate in crowd control. Mind
you, on the Hollywood set we have more slaves than the number of Black People
who actually lived in their capital in Men-nefer (Memphis)...
Our response is the same as our
narrow “historical sense.” The Victorians asked themselves: How do we do it in
the Colonies? Send in the ships – bomb them, and then send in the troops –
that’s how! We still do it that way today, ergo, those skirt-wearing savages
must have done the same!
It’s true, with slaves you always
have to bring force and violence to bear. You always have to kill the ones you
believe are the “ringleaders” – those that stand up. Just like they did in
America and in South Africa, in China, Indochina and in India, in the Caribbean
and Latin America (no worries, this is the short list!).
What other answer is there? I’m
not going to break a sweat thinking about it... When you lack imagination and
you have reversed all the values, there’s no other game in town. Today violence
is the antidote to Freedom – it must have been that way always, right?
Deadly Force Is
Needed To Quell Slave Revolts
No doubt about it. You always
have to bring force and violence to bear on slaves (since they’re not going to
be willing participants in your theft of their labour).
Let’s assume, for argument’s sake
that the Egyptologists are right. One hundred thousand slaves is a lot of
slaves! That’s one heck of a plantation the Ancient Egyptians had going there.
A lot of mouths to feed, a lot of orders to be given (whips are notoriously
ineffective hearing aides) and presumably, these were Jewish slaves, so there
was also a “language barrier” to contend with. How did they get them to “pull”
on those ropes and climb “the ramp”? (Keep in mind, the Black People didn’t use
the wheel!) Was it just the persuasive power of the whips?
How many troops would you need to
keep the slaves in line? How many whips would you have to manufacture? It’s not
a trivial matter, since you couldn’t go to China (or to Amazon.com) to get a
boat load of cheap whips for the thousands of troops you’d need to “keep the
peace.” To begin with, you’d have to skin the oxen first! And, that would mean
less food to feed the troops over the length of the project... (Not a smart
move!)
But isn’t it just like “modern” academics
not to think things through? The Victorians certainly were the prototype of the
herd-animal of today – dumb, dull, dreadfully stupid and energetically wasteful
of human and natural resources. Seems to me, the Victorian Egyptologist were
just projecting their values onto the Egyptians (to use a Freudian term), and
these were not “nice” values. In other words, they just made the stuff up about
the slaves in Egypt – right off the top of their heads because England was a
slave society (and still is!). Britain was, in the 19th Century, the
“top of the pops” and therefore there was no alternative.
The Bible as the
Sole Source
Besides the Bible, what other source
is there for this slander and defamation of the Ancient Egyptians? Well, we
have Herodotus (484 B.C. – 425 B.C.), although his “Histories” were concerned
with the Greco-Persian Wars. I remember my Herodotus, he did say Egyptians had
slaves. But then again, there were slaves in Egypt since the Persian conquest
in 525 B.C., so it should not come as surprise to us.
Can’t say scholars aren’t
diligent. They also used Josephus (37 A.D. – 100 A.D.) as a source. He
certainly wrote about “slaves” in the “Classical Age” (about 2,600 years after
the pyramids were built). Josephus lived in the heyday of Roman slavery. Was he
about to deny a consummated fact? One of the Roman virtues? He had to kowtow to
his Roman masters – after all, he was a Jew – an enemy of Rome. As a defector
to the Roman side he had to watch what he said, as well as make history conform
to his masters’ racial profiling.
Hey, I’m not knocking it – it’s
hard to be impartial on a moving train! Everyone has to choose sides... I just
would take all these accounts with a grain of salt. To adjudicate slavery to
the Ancient Egyptians, especially in the Bronze Age, when the pyramids were
built, is a leap though.
I’d need to see some real proof
of slaves building anything to be convinced! In all of human history slaves
have never built any significant structure, much less one as complex as the
pyramids. Here again, the only source for slaves having built the pyramids is
the Bible (which is divine revelation and not to be confused with actual
historical events – at least not events in chronological order).
To me, it sounds like instead of
doing the heavy lifting the academics just used “prior source” and figured
they’d get by. Hey, if there was slavery back in 500 B.C., in 450 B.C., in 100
A.D., in 2015 A.D. – then, there was always slavery, right? They’ve gotten by
with this “fable” so far, not only that, they’ve hoodwinked the whole planet
with this malarkey. (And isn’t that exactly as the powers-that-be wish it, in
order to continue to justify slavery in modern times as something “natural” to
human nature?).
Greed, Violence, and
Slavery Are In Our DNA
One of the most pathetic arguments
coming from our overlords today is that slavery is part of our human nature. The
logic runs something like this: We all have our human failings – the ancients
just had more of them than we do. At least, that’s our excuse. With dull
thinking of this sort, is it any wonder they always come up with the WRONG
interpretation? To me, it sounds like “guilt” baggage... and not very credible
at that.
Well, what do we know? To keep
slavery going you have to have and use force – deadly force! It doesn’t take a
rocket scientist to figure that one out. The 19th and 20th
Century (not to mention this millennium too) has been nothing but bloody proof
of it.
The Colonies are still there, the
plantations/factories, the slavery, everything! We may not see the slaves in
their ghettos as the Victorian could have in the 19th Century – they
certainly had the sweatshops! We don’t “see” slavery on TV or in our quaint
suburban neighbourhoods because all these things have been “off-shored,” but
they’re still there (and in far greater numbers than at any time in History).
Back to the pyramids! There are
now one hundred thousand slaves that need to be punished on an ongoing basis –
24 x 7. Who’s going to do the dirty work? Storm troopers, of course! What else?
Elite, highly-trained, “Gestapo-like” Egyptian troops were used in their
thousands to keep the slave hordes under the whip. Of course, you still have to
arm, clothe, feed, organize, and command these goose-stepping morons. But
that’s just a detail... According to our modern way of thinking the laws of
Physics can be inverted to justify slavery. There were no famines or shortages
back then... no setbacks. The Ancient Egyptians could afford to mismanage and
misspend the harvests and the taxes they collected by throwing good “wealth”
out after bad to build a Police State just to build a stupid tomb. Just because
our slave drivers today need a Police State to stay in power doesn’t mean the
Ancient Egyptians needed one! (And, you’d have to have that Police State long
before you started to even dream of putting one stone on top of the other...)
Us and Them…
Psychologically we know ourselves
to be inferior, yet we still strive to see ourselves reflected in the “mirror”
of the Ancient Egyptians’ greatness... in their pyramids! We want to badly measure
up to our past. We want our modern, decadent Slave State (all Police States are
Slave States) to resemble theirs.
The Great Pyramid was built
during the times when there was surplus food (why waste that food on a Police
State?). There must have been a great deal of “surplus” at that time... To pull
it off, the Ancient Egyptians must have been phenomenally rich! On the whole, they
built the thing without starving anyone. They must have been way richer than we
are today.
Yet today, we don’t care about
starving our own, as long as a few at the top of the economic “pyramid” get
more than their fair share. We waste many times our GDP on armaments annually, because
our overlords need to keep us under the boot. Do they justify this believing
the Ancient Egyptians did the same? To arm themselves against their purported
slaves?
How many storm-troopers would you
need on the Giza plateau to maintain order? Ten, twenty, thirty thousand? How
many would you need to subjugate 100,000 men? (Ostensibly, these were young
men, stout and strong, since they were going to be pulling big blocks up the
ramp all day long until they died.). What ratio of guards to slaves would you
need?
No one knows, but it’s estimated
that in Roman times (when slavery was at its apogee) the slave population was
30-40% of the entire population of Italy (there were less slaves outside of
Italy!). One would have to figure out how many centurions they needed for every
slave in order to “keep control.” But even if we had a figure, it would be
misleading. We have to remember that the Romans used slaves for a quite
different set of activities, and mostly in household service and agricultural
production (exactly like in the Old South). As a result, the comparison would
not be very useful for our purposes (in Ancient Egypt we’re building the
pyramids, not planting cotton!).
One or Two Hundred Thousand Slaves at the Giza Site?
Or would you need more than a 2:1
ratio for replacements? And herein lies another conundrum – to replace the
dead, did they have another 100K slaves waiting on the side-lines? Where did
they keep them captive? Or did they wait until the next year to make a war and
capture a few more?
Keep in mind that you can’t kill
the slave to punish him – that's a direct and immediate economic loss... Our modern lack of management skills in
human resources always misses out on that fine point. As a slave owner, you don’t even have the
luxury of “firing” the slow-moving slave... Unless the Ancient Egyptians had
huge unemployment lines, it’d be hard to come by slaves at all. In fact, slaves
could only be procured through war... so you would need a war first in order to
get a new batch of “fresh” slaves (even if you bred them on purpose as slaves
from your existing stocks).
But war back then was an
expensive business, and if farmers died (the guys at the top of the pyramid)
you’d end up starving and your civilization wouldn’t last the year (much less
10,000 years!).
For argument’s sake, let’s assume
that you only need a third of the number of slaves for riot control – 30,000
troops to keep an entire “city” of 100,000 slaves in check. Now you have
130,000 mouths to feed just in the west bank. Plus the more than 100,000 people
that live across the Nile (the folks in Memphis). The Black People aren’t going
to starve during 18 years so that the guy at the bottom of the pyramid can have
his little “fling” with immortality, now are they? Who will feed them?
You got 230,000 people to clothe,
feed, shelter, give tools and materials to... It doesn’t add up. The “math”
simply doesn’t work. Every time you add a slave, you slow the project down (how
long of a delay can you afford? A month, a year – or more? With slaves, the
pyramids would have taken many more inundations to build than eighteen!
And again, what kind of quality
control would you have? A pyramid built by slaves would last about as long as a
pair of Nike shoes – stuff built by slaves just doesn’t cut it. There’s no craftsmanship
involved, no “pride” of work. It’s so obvious a three-year-old can tell it’s a
nonstarter.
Only slave owners could possibly
imagine such a thing! The Victorians thrived thanks to their Colonies, to their
slave trade (that’s where they made their margins – what happened to the slave
owner in the Colonies themselves, they didn’t give a gnat’s ass about). Why?
Because they could always pass “the cost of doing business,” the enormous
“losses” of their mismanagement were borne by those at the bottom of the
pyramid – the poor (just as the Corporate State does it to this day!). But the
Black People couldn’t afford to be so “laissez faire.” The gods wouldn’t let
them!
To be fair, the Victorians were
not half as bad as we are... They were certainly more “liberal” and the
majority were even “abolitionists.” They certainly didn’t use slaves to build
the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park in 1851, did they? Why would they assume the
Ancient Egyptians would?
Unfortunately, the fairy tale
doesn’t stand the smell test. There were no slaves building the pyramids.
Slavery was not practiced in Ancient Egypt at any time during its long history.
The conquest of Egypt by Cambyses II in 525 B.C., changed all that because it
turned some Egyptians into slaves. Historical events are a lot subtler than we
imagine. Even the Persians didn’t practice slavery as the Romans did. The
Persians introduced slavery as an institution into the Nile, yet, it was only
the nobles who could have and hold slaves, and these were usually war booty.
Once established, slavery grew, and by the time Alexander the Great conquered
the Two Lands in 332 B.C., slavery was perpetuated by his Greek generals during
the rest of the Ptolemaic period.
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