If you're of the opinion that some of the granite objects from ancient Egypt, the biggest and
the best, the obelisks, the sarcophaguses, the statues, were made by an ancient civilization,
a lost civilization somewhere deep in pre-history, I still have questions for you because for me
it doesn't make much sense, it doesn't make much sense guys. I'm just being honest with you.
All of those claims they always revolve around lines on the rocks, which could be an important
piece of the puzzle, maybe, but that's just one piece of evidence isn't it? That's not
the full picture. It ignores the context that they're found in, the style of these objects,
what these objects represent and if these objects were made by a lost civilization
then it would raise a lot of questions about the style and the context of these objects. So
don't take this the wrong way, these are my sincerely asked questions.
That's bright.
It's nothing personal. This is just what i think about when I hear such a bold claim, and just so
we're clear, I don't believe that the lines on the rocks are significant evidence because time
and time again it's been shown that the technology available to the Egyptians could work granite and
as long as it was possible for them to do it then the only leap of imagination I need to take is
that the Egyptians were great crafts people, great artists, great masons. That's already so obvious
from everything else they left behind. So for me the lines on the rocks are just not convincing,
and they would raise all these questions about the context of these objects. So that's it these
are my sincerely asked questions, I don't think i'm better than anyone, smarter than anyone else,
I'm not an expert in nothing. If you want to take these questions and throw them in the bin.
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uh do that do that this is nothing personal these are just ideas that i'm questioning.
Question number one. If you concede that the Egyptians could work granite, then it seems
like we're just arguing about how much effort they're willing to put in. Like if you say they
couldn't make the obelisks, or the sarcophaguses, or the statues, but they could make little granite
things, seems kind of disrespectful to their abilities to just arbitrarily decide that the good
monuments from this culture were made by someone else but they could do the rubbish ones. It seems
like we're just arguing about how much effort they would be willing to put into these monuments.
I really wanted to find a specific example where we could really get an idea of the numbers that
the ancient Egyptians were willing to throw at a project like this. On the screen now should
be uh Medinet Habu, the mortuary temple of Ramses III. It was a palace and some other administrative
things too but his mortuary temple. According to this document we have called the 'Great
Harris Papyrus' ,and i'll put the source in the description, uh this is a document that describes
uh ramses the third's reign and it's written by his successor so that he can kind of get
an idea of where the men are and what the state of the government is, and one of the
things this papyrus details is the distribution of labour, where the men are working on various
projects. According to this papyrus, Ramses III assigned 62,000 men to build this temple.
Now we don't know what assigning a man meant to the ancient Egyptians. Was that 62,000 people
who were literally directly employed or does that temple now have the right to tax 62,000 houses? We
don't know. Either way i'm sure you agree that's a lot of resources dedicated to this one project.
If you consider the fact that many of these men would have been the heads of houses,
heads of extended households, we're potentially talking hundreds of thousands of people are caught
up in the construction and maintenance of this temple. A small city, massive amount of people.
So let's take this granite statue from there and run some super hypothetical
numbers. Obviously not all of those 62,000 people can be put to work making one
statue. So let's say just a thousand of them are, and Ramses's the third ruled for 31 years,
I believe. So let's give them, I don't know, 10% of that time, three years.
Could 1000 people over three years have produced this statue? I see absolutely no reason
to think that they couldn't, no reason whatsoever, and that is far less men and far less time
than that project had available to them. So when we consider the manpower that was
available to ancient Egyptians, you know, a country with a population of millions,
tens of thousands of people can be devoted to specific projects, and of course constructing
a mortuary temple for the pharaoh is a massive priority, I see no reason why they couldn't have
produced any of these granite statues. And if they could have produced these,
then they could have produced any other granite object as far as i'm concerned.
Question number two/three. We've got to talk about the writing. Often I see on the internet that the
assigning of a monument back in time to this lost civilization
is based on the fact that the writing that the Egyptians put on these monuments
is allegedly lesser in quality than the work that went into the monument itself.
First of all, I disagree,
and I hate the way that people, armchair experts, I know i'm an expert at absolutely nothing,
but also other armchair experts describe the writing so negatively, so poorly, crappy and such.
[Brien Foerster]"crappy nature of the hieroglyphics"
Man i hate that, man i hate that. As if they could produce anything even remotely similar. I hate it.
But second of all, uh the only writing on these monuments is Egyptian. So whatever your opinion
of the quality of it, it's literally infinitely better than the writing of any other civilization,
surely? Yeah, and you can't say the Egyptians just
polished the monuments clean to put their writing on it. If they had the ability to do that,
there's nothing to stop them producing them in the first place, surely right?
And, you know, I think of all the monuments we'd have found,
they'd have slipped up on one of them. If they're so crappy and bad at their jobs,
like Brien Foerster would say, such terrible craftsmen. Then surely they'd mess up on one
statue sooner or later and we'd see some atlantean writing? Yet we don't.
Thirdly, more importantly these are just cherry-picked examples.
We could find Egyptian monuments that had incredible hieroglyphics on them.
Deeply carved, perfectly symmetrical all the way up the monument. If we're assigning the
authorship of these monuments to a civilization based on the quality of the writing,
then according to that logic these had to have been made by Egyptians, right?
So let's discuss a specific example, uh on screen right now you should be looking
at the Lateran obelisk in Rome. The Romans liked to move obelisks around because they
are genuinely fantastic and impressive and beautiful. So the Lateran obelisk is 30 meters,
weighs 400 tons. Fantastic hieroglyphics on it, so it must be assigned to Egyptians therefore.
If they can move a 400 ton obelisk then there's no object that you could point to in ancient Egypt
and say they couldn't have done this, because clearly they made this one if we're judging it
on the writing and the quality of the writing, and this is absolutely bloody massive. So, they
definitely made that. Whatever your opinion of Egyptian writing, it is the only writing on them,
there's no atlantean writing, there's no writing from any other lost civilization. To catapult it
back in time based on the writing makes no sense because the only writing on it is Egyptian.
The funny thing about that Brien Foerster video where he calls the hieroglyphics crappy,
I hate that he said that by the way I don't know if I made that clear. I hate that he said that.
Is that he also states that the sarcophagus is unfinished.
[Brien Foerster] "and academics still insist that the box and the hieroglyphics
are contemporary with one another but the hieroglyphics are very poor, unfinished"
So he creates this civilization because he believes there's a mismatch
between the hieroglyphics and the workmanship put into the sarcophagus,
but the sarcophagus isn't even finished. This writing could have just been the initial outline
where they double checked exactly what they wanted to say
before they got down to some serious work, and then with the twists and turns of history
it just never got done. There's no need to invent another civilization, I don't get it.
Another question I have, how would you explain the fact that art changes
over time? Check that gift out.
Old kingdom art is not the same as middle kingdom art, it's not the same as new kingdom ar,t
it declines during intermediate periods, you know, the art's not the same during those times,
sometimes art changes dramatically. That progression through time
would not be obvious if these objects were inherited from
another civilization because presumably they would be found at random, right?
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Let me give you a couple of concrete examples. So, as far as i'm aware, could be wrong,
as far as i'm aware though, the largest statues the largest monuments are made by pharaohs
that have really long and powerful reigns, like Amenhotep the third. Ruled for 38 years,
produced huge granite objects. These ones at the British museum, just the head is bigger than a
person, these were absolutely massive, and it was produced by king with a long and successful reign.
Ramses the second, another famously powerful king, famously long reigned,
produced huge sculptures. One of the problems with kings that ruled for a short time
or were politically weak is that they didn't produce huge monuments, so we just know less
about them. If these monuments are being found at random, that's hard to explain. If
the Egyptians are inheriting these objects, in my opinion, that would be very difficult to explain.
Not only that but art can change dramatically when there's a political or religious revolution,
the best example being the Amarna period. In this period, the pharaoh Akhenaten gets it into
his head to change the religion of ancient Egypt and uh starts worshiping the Aten and now all the
iconography reflects that and they make really funky statues where Akhenaten is portrayed as
really curvy and people have elongated heads like this a quartz statue of a princess or Nefertiti,
we're not sure who it's assigned to, but they they're given elongating heads and all these
things it's really distinctive artistic style. How could we explain a sudden shift in artistic style
if these objects are being found? If they're being found at random, the Egyptians are just inheriting
them, wouldn't we see these objects placed uh throughout time, throughout the Pharonic period?
Not just in Amarna, not just for the reign of Akhenaten. What about the rare occasions when
a woman comes to the throne, like Hatshepsut, and now the pharaoh is portrayed as a woman,
naturally. They can't have just been finding statues of women at that particular time,
and if you say "oh well the Egyptians did make that statue but not other ones".
where's the line? That statue of Hatshepsut, it's it's greatc it's a great statuec the creator of
that could have made any other granite object you point at, just a matter of like time and effort.
Question number whatever, what are Egyptians doing at granite quarries? No one could deny
that they're working there, surely? You know, we have workman's villages, inscriptions, written
documents, the Egyptians are for sure working at granite quarries and quarries of other hard rocks.
What are they doing there if they can barely even work the stuff? Surely they would realize
that they're just wasting their time. They wouldn't be working on them generation after
generation. I really wanted to find a really cool and interesting example from the quarries
to illustrate the fact that real Egyptians are working on these things.
On the screen now you are looking at a joint funerary inscription of a father and son, a
team of artists. This is next to the granite quarries in Aswan. The father and son are called
Men and Bak. Men, the father, is on the right. He worked under Amenhotep III who built these
huge granite statues and he is praying to a large granite statue. Uh next to him is his son,
Bak, who worked for Amenhotep's son, Akhenaten, during that Amarna period.
He's praying to the Aten, to that sun disk that they suddenly started worshiping. What a perfect
snapshot in time. What a perfect illustration of the fact that there are real Egyptians behind
these monuments, real craftsmen, who are behind the huge monuments of Amenhotep, behind this new
artwork of the Amarna style. We literally have an inscription from a father-son duo
from a granite quarry where they're each praying to their the symbols of their respective pharaoh.
That's such fantastic contextual evidence that real Egyptians are working on these
objects and a beautiful moment in time. That's an absolutely stunning inscription,
beautiful moment in time, beautiful to think about their lives and their their achievements.
They're clearly proud of the fact that they work on these monuments for their pharaohs.
I really feel like I could ask these questions all day. Like wouldn't it be odd if the great pharaohs
of Egyptian civilization were not great builders but great finders? Wouldn't it be odd that this
statue of Ramses the great in between the two patron deities of Thebes, Mut and Amun, exists
not because Ramses wanted to display his power to the city of Thebes, but because he found it.
Makes no sense.
Wouldn't it be odd that the the symbols of ancient Egyptian religion were totally out of their
control, yet somehow they still managed to make a coherent religion out of all of these symbols.
Despite the fact that they have no control over what they show or what they represent.
It'd be so odd for a civilization to work that way. It'd be so odd that the sarcophaguses
that we find in tombs are not designed to be sarcophaguses but were designed to be
something else, and the Egyptians just found them and they just happened to find enough of
them for their tombs and fortunately the last civilization left no writing on them so they
were able to create incredibly elaborate writings and and statues to put on them, it makes no sense.
And if you say "well those are the ones the Egyptians did make" Well if they had
the ability to make all these things, massive sarcophaguses, 400 ton obelisk,s big statues of
their gods and their kings, then what couldn't they make? Why, why would we need to create
or invent another civilization for any of the other pieces of stonework? I just don't get it.
Uh what else am I going to say? But yeah basically, probably end the video there
because I've shown off all my hats now and i feel like the questions i've asked are good
and honest questions and so I'm just gonna let you all argue about it in the comments.
I'd like to thank all my patreons for all of this, they're not actually my patreons
i just found them and i repurposed them for my ends, so thanks for just being found patreons.
I appreciate it.
See ya!