Exploring the mysteries of our past, civilizations, cataclysms, and what it all means for us today
New video podcast!
A video podcast exploring inside and out of the mighty 2nd pyramid at Giza, attributed to Khafre, and known as the Mountain of the West. I’m joined by Kyle and Russ (Brother’s of the Serpent) as well as Chuck from the excellent cfapps7865 channel.
11 thoughts on “New video podcast!”
Ben,
Have you read this paper? The Inventory Stele: More Fact than Fiction
Manu Seyfzadeh 2018 (I can email it to you if you can’t get a copy)
The sphinx and valley temple do predate Khufu, who discovered and restored them together with the granite statues. That’s why the granite of the valley temple is carefully fitted to the giant limestone blocks. Imagine how old the sphinx and original temple are (10,000 years?).
Ben,thanks for your efforts to reveal the truth.
Regaurding the tube drill argument,though they say this can be done with copper tubes and sand,where exactly are they getting these copper tubes,Lowes perhaps?Nobody has asked this question.Have any of these aledged tubes been found in the archeological record? You would even need some advanced level of production to make a copper tube straight enough to carry out this process.How was this done?
Also I would ask this question of the liquid polishing of the granite boxes.Has anyone analized this surface to see if a substance was used and how deep it goes or was it some form of liquid quartz ,as this would explain the lack of deterioration.
Hi Casey,
It seems the substance on the surface of the granite boxes has never been analysed to this day (see my comments in the wake of the latest video of Ben about the Serapeum .
Taking some small samples would does not represent a big deal : but getting the required authorizations is almost impossible, until further notice.
Let us hope that the official position will change in the near future.
Regards,
Pierre
Hi Ben,
Great work! I can’t help but notice that the blocks that make up the Sphinx temple seem to be cut from previously cemented-together blocks. Sure, the blocks are originally from the Sphinx enclosure, but perhaps they originally were made into the ancient wharf in front of the Sphinx, where they naturally cemented together. Later repurposed into the Sphinx temple. They could have been laid down to the granite base found 30 feet below the front of the Sphinx.
After I watched your videos on the advanced technology in Ancient Egypt, I contacted one of the authors of a book I was reading about that subject. My questions were: “How were these people able to carve such amazing vessels with the tools that have been found? How were they able to craft the perfectly 90 degree angles of the gigantic boxes in the Serapeum?” His answer:
“There is, I think, a simple answer to your question and it involves Mohs scratch hardness and quartz. Quartz with a Mohs hardness of 7 was the hardest material available to the ancient Egyptians. It is slightly harder than granite, andesite porphyry and other igneous and metamorphic rocks, and much harder than the sedimentary rocks like limestone and sandstone. The two most common forms of quartz used to drill, grind, smooth and engrave rocks were chert (a.k.a., flint) and silicified sandstone (i.e., quartz-cemented quartz sand grains). Stone-working using quartz tools was no doubt a slow process but, in the end, it was a highly effective one. As for the rectilinear, circular and other geometric forms taken by carved stones, if you look at them carefully you would see that they are not perfectly executed. They only have what could be called eye-ball accuracy. They are good enough to fool the eye but not modern measuring instruments.
This is a subject that I write about in my soon-to-be-finished book. There are, however, two other books that also address your question: D. Arnold. 1991. “Building in Egypt – Pharaonic Stone Masonry” and D. Stocks. 2003. “Experiments in Egyptian Archaeology – Stoneworking Technology in Ancient Egypt.”
It seems logical that if one could date the stones removed from the Sphinx enclosure that would give the original date of the Sphinx. That may not be possible yet. However, with new techniques for dating stone, it might be determined when the stones used in the Sphinx temple were last exposed to sunlight (on the stones under the granite facing). That would not give the original age of the quarrying but would give a point in time that could determine when that temple was originally built. If the temple is older than the Khafre reign, then it is apparent the Sphinx was not built by Khafre.
I thoroughly enjoyed your video on the Markam book. I am going to read it ! I have read Prescott and Bernal Diaz and am looking forward to a book based on native records.
It would be interesting to look for “dropped” stones along the old stretch of the Nile river, I guess they must have dropped stones from shipping them all the way from Aswan (and the other quarries) to the Giza plateu. If they dropped less than a 1% of the stones en route, it would still be thousands to tens of thousands of stones.
If found, these “dropped” stones could give clues about when and how they were quarried. They can also be compared with the actual stones used to build the pyramids, to validate or overturn the geopolymer theory.
If no stones are found along the way, it would beg the question – how were millions of quarried stones transported to Giza, without dropping them?
If geopolymers were indeed used to build the pyramids, they might have crushed stone in the quarry before shipping to Giza, it would perhaps be easier to manage moving large quantities of crushed stone that long way on the Nile.
Hey Ben,
I noticed that the king’s chamber has rectangular holes in the walls. One in the north and one in the south wall. Could these be shafts that go up into the pyramid, like the ones in the king’s and queen’s chamber in the pyramid of Khufu? Or are they just shallow holes?
Greetings,
Bertram
Those go to the outside of the pyramid. We know this because (I think it was Vyse) rolled a damn cannonball down one of them. The mystery is in where the shafts in the queens chamber.
I have a thought on the wavey ceilings in the caves. In traditional Saudi houses in Al Ula the roofs were made from palm tree trunks. This is what appears to have been copied in those ceilings.
Something else occurred to me. Is it possible that part of the internal starting structure of the pyramids is solid? – ie that a structure was cut from the rock like the rock cut churches in Lalibela, Ethiopia https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/18/gallery/ were and then the quarried stones were built up around this to create the pyramid on top. Obviously the Lalibela churches are on a much smaller scale but it seems to me that this would be a lot faster to construct if some of the structure was a rock hewn core.
Ben,
Have you read this paper? The Inventory Stele: More Fact than Fiction
Manu Seyfzadeh 2018 (I can email it to you if you can’t get a copy)
The sphinx and valley temple do predate Khufu, who discovered and restored them together with the granite statues. That’s why the granite of the valley temple is carefully fitted to the giant limestone blocks. Imagine how old the sphinx and original temple are (10,000 years?).
Paul de la Salle Swindon, UK
Ben,thanks for your efforts to reveal the truth.
Regaurding the tube drill argument,though they say this can be done with copper tubes and sand,where exactly are they getting these copper tubes,Lowes perhaps?Nobody has asked this question.Have any of these aledged tubes been found in the archeological record? You would even need some advanced level of production to make a copper tube straight enough to carry out this process.How was this done?
Also I would ask this question of the liquid polishing of the granite boxes.Has anyone analized this surface to see if a substance was used and how deep it goes or was it some form of liquid quartz ,as this would explain the lack of deterioration.
Hi Casey,
It seems the substance on the surface of the granite boxes has never been analysed to this day (see my comments in the wake of the latest video of Ben about the Serapeum .
Taking some small samples would does not represent a big deal : but getting the required authorizations is almost impossible, until further notice.
Let us hope that the official position will change in the near future.
Regards,
Pierre
RE: Sphinx Temple.
Hi Ben,
Great work! I can’t help but notice that the blocks that make up the Sphinx temple seem to be cut from previously cemented-together blocks. Sure, the blocks are originally from the Sphinx enclosure, but perhaps they originally were made into the ancient wharf in front of the Sphinx, where they naturally cemented together. Later repurposed into the Sphinx temple. They could have been laid down to the granite base found 30 feet below the front of the Sphinx.
After I watched your videos on the advanced technology in Ancient Egypt, I contacted one of the authors of a book I was reading about that subject. My questions were: “How were these people able to carve such amazing vessels with the tools that have been found? How were they able to craft the perfectly 90 degree angles of the gigantic boxes in the Serapeum?” His answer:
“There is, I think, a simple answer to your question and it involves Mohs scratch hardness and quartz. Quartz with a Mohs hardness of 7 was the hardest material available to the ancient Egyptians. It is slightly harder than granite, andesite porphyry and other igneous and metamorphic rocks, and much harder than the sedimentary rocks like limestone and sandstone. The two most common forms of quartz used to drill, grind, smooth and engrave rocks were chert (a.k.a., flint) and silicified sandstone (i.e., quartz-cemented quartz sand grains). Stone-working using quartz tools was no doubt a slow process but, in the end, it was a highly effective one. As for the rectilinear, circular and other geometric forms taken by carved stones, if you look at them carefully you would see that they are not perfectly executed. They only have what could be called eye-ball accuracy. They are good enough to fool the eye but not modern measuring instruments.
This is a subject that I write about in my soon-to-be-finished book. There are, however, two other books that also address your question: D. Arnold. 1991. “Building in Egypt – Pharaonic Stone Masonry” and D. Stocks. 2003. “Experiments in Egyptian Archaeology – Stoneworking Technology in Ancient Egypt.”
Ben,
It seems logical that if one could date the stones removed from the Sphinx enclosure that would give the original date of the Sphinx. That may not be possible yet. However, with new techniques for dating stone, it might be determined when the stones used in the Sphinx temple were last exposed to sunlight (on the stones under the granite facing). That would not give the original age of the quarrying but would give a point in time that could determine when that temple was originally built. If the temple is older than the Khafre reign, then it is apparent the Sphinx was not built by Khafre.
I thoroughly enjoyed your video on the Markam book. I am going to read it ! I have read Prescott and Bernal Diaz and am looking forward to a book based on native records.
Nan
It would be interesting to look for “dropped” stones along the old stretch of the Nile river, I guess they must have dropped stones from shipping them all the way from Aswan (and the other quarries) to the Giza plateu. If they dropped less than a 1% of the stones en route, it would still be thousands to tens of thousands of stones.
If found, these “dropped” stones could give clues about when and how they were quarried. They can also be compared with the actual stones used to build the pyramids, to validate or overturn the geopolymer theory.
If no stones are found along the way, it would beg the question – how were millions of quarried stones transported to Giza, without dropping them?
If geopolymers were indeed used to build the pyramids, they might have crushed stone in the quarry before shipping to Giza, it would perhaps be easier to manage moving large quantities of crushed stone that long way on the Nile.
Hey Ben,
I noticed that the king’s chamber has rectangular holes in the walls. One in the north and one in the south wall. Could these be shafts that go up into the pyramid, like the ones in the king’s and queen’s chamber in the pyramid of Khufu? Or are they just shallow holes?
Greetings,
Bertram
Those go to the outside of the pyramid. We know this because (I think it was Vyse) rolled a damn cannonball down one of them. The mystery is in where the shafts in the queens chamber.
I have a thought on the wavey ceilings in the caves. In traditional Saudi houses in Al Ula the roofs were made from palm tree trunks. This is what appears to have been copied in those ceilings.
Something else occurred to me. Is it possible that part of the internal starting structure of the pyramids is solid? – ie that a structure was cut from the rock like the rock cut churches in Lalibela, Ethiopia https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/18/gallery/ were and then the quarried stones were built up around this to create the pyramid on top. Obviously the Lalibela churches are on a much smaller scale but it seems to me that this would be a lot faster to construct if some of the structure was a rock hewn core.