A few interesting facts about the great pyramid of Cheops (1 Viewer)

[Max Leung]

You mean soup is inedible? But I really love Vietnamese sate beef noodle soup! And boiled wieners are good to, despite the side-effects.

While we're talking about the pyramids, I like the ice hotel that you can visit in Quebec (or was it some other country?). 2 stories tall I believe, several suites, with iceblocks for beds!

 

[Glenn Overholt]

Boy, is this one fun! Must be Friday.

A few points. If there were any documents regarding these, could have been moved to that library in Greece that was later destroyed by fire?

The funny part about 'Chariots of the Gods' is that if it was fiction, it would be listed in the 'fiction' section of the library, but it isn't. I'll leave it at that.

Glenn

 

[Jack Briggs]

Though I am very closely in agreement with Julie's aversion to sea "food" (oxymoron there), I do have to say one word: tuna. Now, that's a fish worth getting excited about from a culinary standpoint.

"Just a moment ... just a moment":

Also, Julie, I discovered that the 70mm screenings of the MGM production of the 1968 Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey (Keir Dullae, William Sylvester, Gary Lockwood, Douglas Rain) are occurring at the Cinerama Dome early next year. The screenings were pushed back because, among other things, of the recent 70mm screening of the same film at The Egyptian in Hollywood.

At The Egyptian! And I'm sure there's a link somewhere in all this with the pyramids and their mystical powers.

(Remember all that "pyramid power" crap from back in the 1970s?)

 

[Julie K]

The funny part about 'Chariots of the Gods' is that if it was fiction, it would be listed in the 'fiction' section of the library, but it isn't. I'll leave it at that.

The library will place a book according the description of the publisher. The publishers of von Daniken's books are hardly going to list it as fiction when they know that a non-fiction listing will get them tons more money from a gullible public.
As I understand it, von Daniken's basic themes are:
ancient aliens visited earth long before humans evolved
these aliens may have taken part in creating mankind
they left behind great stone cities and monuments
humans worshiped these aliens as gods
the memories of their visits are present in mythology
Right?
Well, as it happens those themes did not originate with von Daniken. While I have no proof if he ever read the original fiction with these themes, the parallels are astounding. Ancient abandoned cities were a big thing in late 19th century, but the concept of aliens+ancient cities was not in the cultural mindset until an obscure writer for the pulp magazines in the 1920s and 1930s began writing stories with those very themes. At least he, though, was honest enough to not pass the stories off as anything but fiction, even when asked by various gullible readers if it was really true. Oh, he was also a heck of a lot better writer than von Daniken too.

 

[Jack Briggs]

You're referring to the old "Shaver Mysteries" that appeared in the now-defunct Amazing Stories magazine. Then there was Raymond Palmer and his flying-saucer obsessions.

Julie, von Daniken posited that the "gods" arrived in their "chariots" and helped the ancients in the struggles with such things as civilization, architecture, and art. It's the modern-day little "gods" who are more obsessed with our reproductive prowess. Each era gets the extraterrestrial "gods" it needs, I suppose.

 

[Julie K]

Jack,
I wasn't thinking about Palmer, actually. When did he write, though? I recently read an interesting little essay that put forth a certain other obscure pulp writer as the originator of these themes. (But his use was strictly as fiction and, to be fair, his alien beings certainly did not have humanities best interests in mind.) I think it would be kind of funny if it were the case.

(BTW, I can't stand tuna. I can choke down a trout if I have to, but I suppose I could also swallow small rocks if politeness dictated such actions.)

 

[Jack Briggs]

Well, Richard Shaver (aka, the "Shaver Mystery"). And then there was Charles Forte. Perhaps one of those two?

 

[Julie K]

No, not Shaver nor Forte. This guy was more obscure and had a name that would have been perfect for writing romance novels. Maybe I can remember the name after the decongestants have all left my system. This just all sounds like a bunch of weird tales, so maybe I should just forget it...

 

[Danny R]

The funny part about 'Chariots of the Gods' is that if it was fiction, it would be listed in the 'fiction' section of the library, but it isn't. I'll leave it at that.

Fiction is usually described as a story designed to be entertaining. Everything else goes into non-fiction. Non-fiction isn't synonymous to fact, and just because someone convinced a publisher to sell your book doesn't make it true either.

 

[JayV]

If there were any documents regarding these, could have been moved to that library in Greece that was later destroyed by fire?

I seem to recall learning that Egyptians wrote on papyrus and that we do not have their writings because of a short shelf life of papyrus.
Something else that is interesting:
I did not understand calculus very well back in school. Plus, it's a little mysterious.
Therefore it is very probable that calculus is the remnant of ancient alien civilization.
I suspect they gave calculus to earthlings in order to 1) calculate the area of those complicated UFO landing sites Julie described and 2) plague me thousands of years later.
Well, I'm off to construct a tinfoil hat to block alien thought control waves.
-j

 

[Keith Gereghty]

I saw a show on tv about 2 years ago..."Mysteries of the Pyramid" or something like that...kind of boring like the National Geographic special on a couple of weeks ago when they drilled a hole thru a blocked passage in the Great Pyramid and found another blocked passage...at the end of the first show I saw they went under the Sphinx to the "Tomb of Ra". The tomb was surrounded by 4 pylons and the tomb was under water! It looked right out of "Indiana Jones". The guy on tv said there were a few caves leading from the tomb that had not been explored yet. It made me situp and go :what the...!". It was on for just a few minutes and I have never heard anything else about it. Did anyone else see that on tv?

 

[Grant B]

I believe you are talking about the Library at Alexandria which was destroyed by earthquake/ fire. BTW Alexandria is in Egypt.
Cayce suposedly made a prediction that there is a library under the Great pyramid storing all the knowledge of the ancient world. He also dated it much older than was thought at the time.

 

[Keith Gereghty]

Oooops, it was not the Tomb of Ra but the Tomb of Osiris. I know a little about Cayce, but not much else. I thought the whole thing was a little strange because to me the last 10 minutes of the show were the most interesting. I wish I could describe the tomb chamber better. I just did a search at Yahoo! and found this:
http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/s...ris000216.html[/url]
Check it out. Don't know about some of the new age stuff on the last website. But it is weird. And that makes me happyhttp://ralphv.www3.50megs.com/egypt/tomb.html

 

[Matt Whealton]

I seem to recall learning that Egyptians wrote on papyrus and that we do not have their writings because of a short shelf life of papyrus.

But we do have some, at least.
This is from Papyrus Prisse, a Middle Kingdom copy of a 6th dynasty text called "The Instruction of Ptahhotep". The egyptians were building lots of pyramids in dynasties 5 and 6. It frustrates me too how gullible people are, especially when there is so much out there to learn about the egyptian civilization that is real and verifiable, at least to some level of scholarly confidence.

Even so, this little quote makes a very good point about what we think we know, and what we may not.


m aA ib=k xr rx=k
m mH ib=k Hr-ntt tw m rx
nDnD rk Hna xm mi rx
n in.tw Dr.w Hm.t
nn Hm.ww apr Ax.w=f
dg.w md.t nfr.t r wAD
iw gm.t(w)=s m-a Hm.wt Hr bn.wt

"Do not be arrogant about your knowledge,
Nor trust that you are one who knows.
Take counsel with the ignorant as with the knowing.
For the limits of skill are not reached,
And no artisan who is equipped with perfection.
Beautiful discourse is rarer than Green Stone [emeralds??],
Yet it can be found among the servant girls at the grindstones"

 

[Matt Whealton]

If anyone would like to see the hieroglyphs for my last post, look here:
http://www.members.aol.com/mwhealton/pthp3.htm
The glyphs corresponding to what I wrote are the first 5 lines.
If you are interested in the egyptian language, an excellent web resource is the Ancient Egyptian Language List:
http://www.rostau.org.uk/AEgyptian-L/
Have fun!

 

[Max Leung]

The sushi form of tuna is heavenly. It's like butter when prepared properly. It tastes so much better than any form of cooked tuna (steamed, baked, fried, or canned).

Egyptian history is really quite fascinating. Too bad they broke the human universal taboo ("incest is best", "keep it in the family", etc) and messed themselves up! Still, the dynasties lasted for many many centuries. Quite a feat!

 

[JayV]

Matt, thanks for the links. That's a neat typeface that some guy made.
Where was this found? The blurb on the site seems to say the Instruction is a copy -- does this mean that the Papyrus Prisse is passing on the Instructions written by an earlier generation?
-j

 

[Matt Whealton]

Jay:
Yes, exactly.
Texts the egyptians considered 'classics' were copied by later generations, sometimes as teaching tools for young scribes (so there are all kinds of errors). We try to get back to the 'original' by piecing it back from the various copies. Papyrus Prisse is the most complete version of Ptahhotep, but there is at least one other version extant. In a couple of places on my glyph pages, I used the variant as shown in Sethe's Lesestuecke. Sorry for the lack of clarity on that, but I last dealt seriously with the project about 4 years ago, so the details escape me now. Also, at that time Winglyph did not support me including the variant sections as footnotes.

The paprus is named after Emile Prisse d'Avennes, who discovered it at Thebes, probably around 1839-1843. It dates to the 11th Dynasty and contains two texts, one each from the 3rd and 6th Dynasties.

And just as an aside, the papyrus itself is written in hieratic, a cursive form of hieroglyphic used for literary and administrative texts from the Old Kingdom up to the Late Period. If I can locate my old scans of the text I might post that to the web page too.

Tieing back to the subject of this thread, there are hieratic texts in the Great Pyramid, in the "Hidden Chambers" (actually gaps between stress relieving pitched roofs). The texts are quite short, but include the king's name and a date.

Later pyramids of the 5th and 6th Dynasties contain long texts called the Pyramid Texts, ancestors of the Book of the Dead. The earliest, the pyramid of Unas, has texts all over the walls, carved into the almost alabaster limestone and painted or color-filled with blue. Beautiful. If you can get to Egypt, see it.