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Someone is trying to pull your leg.
Someone is trying to take you for a ride.
There’s nothing worse than the feeling you get when you think you’re being played.
It’s happened to all of us at one time or another.
Someone assures you that something is a fact, and they tell you they’ve done the research.
They know.
And so you believe them.
But then, things start to come out that make you wonder if you accepted their claims a
little too readily.
Well, that happens with ancient history too.
If you listen to some of the videos out there, you would think that it is mainstream history
that is doing all the lying, the professors and the academics.
That’s what they want you to think.
There are charlatans on the internet, here on YouTube, even on Netflix, who, in their
efforts to get attention and make some money, will try to take advantage of people’s lack
of knowledge about history to feed them lies.
We’re going to talk about some of the common ones in this video.
Maybe they will surprise you.
Hi, I’m David Miano.
I’m a scholar of ancient history, and a teacher by trade, and on this channel I will
do my best to give you the straight facts on what we know about the ancient past without
appealing to fanciful tales, science fiction, or conspiracies.
Yes, this video topic sounds a little spicy.
It sounds a bit confrontational.
But to be honest, I am making this video largely out of convenience.
You see, when I can find time, I try to respond to honest questions and objections in the
comments about things I say in my videos.
People will write, “Hey, did you know blah blah blah?”
And then I will write back, “No, in fact that is made up.
And here is the evidence otherwise.”
And then another commenter will say the same thing, and then I respond again.
Some of these claims get repeated many times.
So I am thinking maybe it would be easier if I just made a video, and then instead of
writing out an explanation every time, I can just refer them to the video.
So that’s what this video is for.
And let me clarify: I am not calling the people who write these claims in the comments liars.
No, they are people who have been lied to.
I am speaking about unscrupulous characters out there who are trying to sell books and
tours and videos to promote the idea that there was a lost advanced civilization that
once existed some 12,000 years ago prior to a great cataclysm, which some call Atlantis,
and that historians and archaeologists are trying to hide it or are too stupid to see
it.
In order to pull this off, these characters sometimes have to invent facts.
They have to fudge and fake.
And so I want to discuss with you some of the more common fabrications.
And hopefully this video will assist you in weeding out the fakers.
Many of the invented facts I want to discuss are claims about what archaeologists say or
believe.
Let’s look at a few common ones.
Archaeologists said a site like Gobekli Tepe was impossible.
This one has been said to me many times.
The reason why people say this is to show that if an archaeologist says something is
not possible, then don’t believe them, because they were wrong before.
And look, it is well known that archaeologists can and will be wrong.
That is how it is in all of the sciences.
The more that is discovered, the more our understanding changes.
But here’s the thing: archaeologists never said a site like Gobekli Tepe was impossible.
This is made up.
Archaeologists do not make pronouncements about what can or cannot be found.
They find out when they find out.
What archaeologists really said was that they were surprised to find what they did at Gobekli
Tepe.
That is a big difference.
Archaeologists say that granite was cut with copper chisels.
This is another one I have heard many times.
The reason for saying this one is to demonstrate that archaeologists are stupid and don’t
know anything about stonework.
It is to get people to scoff.
But the fact is, archaeologists have never said that granite was cut with copper chisels.
It is possible that this claim was arrived at through poor transmission.
Archaeologists have said that in Egypt, during the time of the Old Kingdom, limestone was
cut with copper chisels.
Limestone, as you may know, is easier to carve.
And archaeologists have surmised that basalt and granite were occasionally cut with wet
abrasive sand that was propelled by a copper saw (not chisels).
But the fact is, archaeologists have said that when granite was cut with chisels, the
chisels were made of stone.
Archaeologists only date stone artifacts by inscriptions.
It surprises me when I hear this one, but I do.
The reason for this one is to make the case that inscriptions are untrustworthy, and so
without them, the dating of an artifact is completely up in the air.
But there are numerous dating methods used by archaeologists for stone, and archaeologists
do not rely on only one method to arrive at a date.
I have outlined these methods in a video called “How Archaeologists Date Artifacts.”
I will leave a link to it below for you.
The archaeological record indicates a sudden appearance of high technology.
I hear this one regularly.
By “high technology” they mean megalithic structures.
The argument is that there is no indication of a gradual progress of technology leading
up to megaliths.
And this too is a lie.
In every place where people say this pattern can be found, we see the opposite.
We see a slow progress of technology.
We see it in Egypt, we see it in Mesopotamia, we see it everywhere.This is simply a made-up
fact.
The archaeological record indicates building technology devolved over time.
This is a related one, and the reason for it is to show that advanced civilization preceded
the historical civilizations we know about.
It is pointed out that superior building work is found underneath inferior building work
in ancient ruins.
At first glance at some sites, this might appear to be true.
But in many cases, the inferior work they point to is not ancient at all, but merely
a makeshift modern repair job to keep the structure together.
More importantly, when you go to tour these sites, you sometimes will not be aware of
the fact that there were remains found underneath the so-called superior work, and that these
remains were not as large or technologically advanced as what you see.
This is not to say that the archaeological record always shows forward progress.
No, of course, sometimes there is a decline in technology, caused by various factors.
But this claim is suggesting that technology devolution is always or most often the case,
and that simply is at odds with the evidence.
Archaeologists’ careers were destroyed for disagreeing with the consensus.
I hear this one frequently.
And the reason for saying it is to suggest that archaeologists are not inclined to state
their actual opinions for fear of reprisal.
But anyone who knows anything about academia knows that archaeologists and historians challenge
consensus views all the time.
Whenever I have asked for examples of archaeologists’ careers being destroyed, I always get ones
that do not hold up to scrutiny.
Examples are of scholars whose ideas were not accepted or were ridiculed.
People most often mention Jacques Cinq-Mars, who disagreed with the consensus view about
Clovis First, but he had a fine career.
He excavated at Bluefish Caves for 10 years, a good run for any archaeologist.
Someone mentioned Alexander Thom, but he had a full career too.
Yes, people will get criticized.
That happens all the time.
I think that’s a good thing.
It requires people with new ideas to make their arguments stronger.
Sometimes I will get examples of people who never had academic careers in the first place.
The only one that checked out, kind of, is the case of John Allegro.
He made some weird claims about early Christianity and hallucinogenic mushrooms, which got a
strong negative reaction from the Church, and from what I understand, he resigned or
maybe was asked to resign his position at Manchester University.
Such cases are extremely rare (I don't know of any in my country), and so Allegro is an
exception to the rule.
I do agree that a scholar can harm their own reputation by publishing outlandish ideas.
They may not be taken very seriously as a result.
But I know several such scholars who have done so and still hold their positions at
academic institutions, and they are not fired for it.
This idea that it is common for scholars to be ousted for disagreement is nonsense.
We couldn’t move that in modern times.
In an effort to show that people of the known ancient civilizations could not have made
certain structures, some will make the claim, and I hear it a lot, that even with our own
technology of today, we couldn’t move some of the stones in these ancient buildings.
And they will share images that suggest our own trucks or cranes could not do it.
But this is a lie as well.
My point here is not to say that moving heavy objects is easy, or that ancient people had
our technology.
I am simply drawing attention to the fact that this claim that we couldn’t move it
today is not true.
The Fairmount Hotel, which was moved two blocks in San Antonio in 1985, weighed 1,600 tons.
The Shubert Theater in Minneapolis, weighing 2,908 tons, was moved in 1999 on rubber-wheeled
dollies.
Weighing in at 4,830 tons, the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse near Buxton, North Carolina, was
moved in 1999.
The Fu Gang building in Wuzhou, China, weighing 15,140 tons, was moved in 2004.
In Baku, Azerbaijan in 2013, the House of Isa bey Hajinski was moved, and it weighed
19,841 tons.
Not pounds.
Tons.
The Taisun crane in Shandong province, China, is able to lift into the air 20,000 tons.
But the current world record for the heaviest single structure moved on land is a portion
of the North Rankin B Platform, which weighed 23,178 tons (that’s 51.1 million pounds),
and in 2011 it was lifted to a height of 26.5 m (86.9 ft) at the shipyard of Hyundai Heavy
Industries in Ulsan, South Korea.
When people want to move something, they can find a way.
So the next time someone tries to feed you the line that “we couldn’t even move that
in modern times,” you know what to do with it.
I fully realize that the ancients did not have today’s technology.
But that’s a different argument.
And that reminds me of another related claim.
When it is said that ancient people might have moved heavy stones on wooden rollers,
logs, people will object and say, “Wood can’t hold that much weight.”
They’re usually talking about stones weighing 800 or more tons.
But the fact is, wood on average (every type of wood is different) has an MOR, modulus
of rupture value, of somewhere between 6,000 and 14,000 pounds per square inch.
That’s 3 to 7 tons per square inch.
Several logs will hold a large and heavy stone without any trouble.
We couldn’t make that in modern times.
This comment people make a lot.
And they do not mean that we today don’t know how to make something.
In many cases, we don’t know exactly how the ancients made it, because the art and
skills have been lost to time.
No, what they mean is that we today lack the technology to be able to make it.
In this case, I can’t go through every single monument and show that we do have adequate
technology to make each one, but neither can they go through each one and show you it can’t
be made.
They just say it, and then when you say “Sure, we could make it,” they reply, “Well,
make it then.”
And then if you demonstrate that it is possible to cut this stone or to polish this stone
or to do the math, they say, “Make a whole pyramid then.”
So, you see, this is a clear case of inventing a fact and then making it impractical for
anyone to demonstrate it to be false.
One of the more egregious deceptions is when people fake or fudge measurements to make
an object look more precise.
They will tell you measurements are precise to within microns to within fractions of a
millimeter.
And they do this to bolster their claim that the known ancient people couldn’t possibly
have made it, because their technology and skill were unable to achieve it.
But here is the thing: they make these claims without fully measuring the objects, without
measuring them with the proper tools or under the proper conditions in order to make such
a determination, or without measuring them properly.
In many cases, no measurements are taken at all, and they still make the claim.
In fact, I don’t know of a single object, even one, that has been measured reliably
to establish its accuracy to within microns.
Not one.
An example you will sometimes hear is that the stone sarcophagi of the Serapeum of Saqqara
were made to an impossibly high degree of precision, and yet not one sarcophagi has
been measured completely or properly to establish this.
And yet other people have measured these sarcophagi and have shown them without a doubt not to
be impossibly precise.
And in fact, many defects can be seen even by the naked eye.
And yet the lie gets repeated.
In another example, people have pointed to measurements made by Flinders Petrie of a
sarcophagus in the pyramid of Senusret II at El-Lahun.
Some of its sides he said are accurate to within 7 thousandths of an inch.
But he also talks about the many inaccuracies in the sarcophagus, and when you are looking
at it, you can see it is tilted.
This is not an impossible precise artifact.
Petrie even says that his measurements are not entirely reliable, and better measurements
need to be taken.
Or they will mention a supposedly impossibly flat wall in one of the Barabar caves, and
yet the people who took the measurement were using a roughness detector.
Or people will mention a stone vase with sides only 1 mm thick.
And yet such a vase does not exist.
To support these claims of impossible precision, numbers will be faked, fudged, or fabricated.
The only thing that can cut granite is diamond.
This lie is told by those who want you to doubt that the people of known ancient civilizations
could cut granite.
Funnily enough, that granite can be cut with other materials is so obvious and has been
demonstrated so many times that it is amazing that anyone could still be saying this.
And yet they do.
The Romans had a huge granite industry, and they had no trouble carving it with iron tools.
The Egyptians are the ones that probably taught them how to do it, and they had been carving
granite with stone tools and stone abrasives for over 2,000 years before that.
And again, this has been demonstrated many times.
The people of South Asia also had a thriving granite industry, and they were using iron.
The last lie I want to discuss, and the #1 lie on this list is: I’m just asking questions.
Now, of course, there is nothing wrong with asking questions.
Questions are essential in our growing in understanding.
They are the foundation of all historical inquiry.
But Atlantis proponents have been known to say this when evidence is presented to them
that contradicts their assertions.
“Hey, I am just asking questions.”
In fact, they are not simply asking questions.
They are making positive claims.
It is not just asking questions to say that a great continent-spanning civilization existed
during the last ice age and was then destroyed in a great cataclysm.
It is not just asking questions to say that the dynastic Egyptians could not possibly
have made this artifact.
These are assertions.
Assertions require support.
To say, “I am just asking questions,” is a tactic used to escape being pinned down,
and it is a lie.
Anyway, I hope you found these informative and this list helped you to know what lies
you have been told.
Again, just because you may have once believed any of these and repeated them, that doesn’t
make you the liar.
Trace the source back to find out where the claim originated, and then you will know who
was trying to fool you.
In many cases, it will be someone that knew that they were stretching the truth, and they
didn’t care, because telling you this served their agenda.
Thank you for watching.
You might like my little e-booklet, "Why Ancient History Matters."
It's designed to persuade people that the subject is important, even in the modern world.
You might also wish to use it to help spread the word, so feel free to share it with someone
you know.
It's free for anyone who wants it.
I've left a link in the description box below the video for you to grab a copy.
Catch you later.