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Okay, I'm going to stick mostly to ancient Egypt here, since it is my most favriote topic in the subject of history. However, I will wonder off into other topics of the acncient world as well.

Anyways, it seems to me that the people of the ancient world were a lot smarter than the people of today. Many people point immeadiantly to the Great Pyramids of Gaza in Egypt, just outside of Cairo. How could they have possibley been built without modern day technology to such heights? Well, that is one good question about the pyramids, and the one that seems to be the most common, but ones that are less common, that not so many people know about, are these:

1) There are passages in the pyramids themselves that line up perfectly with modern day star and constolation postitions, that weren't like that at the time that they were built. Coincidence? I don't think so.

2) There are pictures inside the pyramids that closely resembel astronauts, tanks, and space ships.

3) Oil burning lamps were found within the pyramids.

4) There was a type of green glass found in the pryamids. The only other place in the world where the same exact kind of glass was found was in the crater that was created when the they tested the (atom bomb or hydrogen bomb? Forgot now) in the nevada desert. How did the ancient people get heat THAT intense to create it?

5) Passages go very deep into the earth under the pyramids. How did they escavate (sp?) so deeply?

6) The Sphinx is perfectly lined up in the middle of two of the pyramids. Some say that a hall of records exsists under the sphinx, yet nobody has escavated down that fall in the tunnels and passages under the pyramids to find it yet. It will be very interesting to see what happens when they do.

7) Was there an actual curse of King Tutankhamun (aka King Tut)? All of the men who found and escavated his tomb died within weeks. His tomb was not concealed in any of the pyramids.

Were they helped by alien beings? Many say yes. I think that they may have been. But I also have other theories. It is said that history likes to repeat itself. Prehaps they lived in a time before a nuclear holocaust? And, here are some things that don't all apply to just Egypt (but some do):

1) Brain surgery was performed be people of the ancient world, and patients lived for as long as 20 years afterward. How could this have been done without all of todays technologies?

2) The ancient town of Alexandria (can't remember which one, there were so many of them) had a large library. It contained everything ever written to manuscript. In an attack on Alexandria, it was intentionally burned down to the ground, because people feared that technology was becoming too advanced. It scared them. Historians say that the burning of the library set back the world of science and technology advancment at least 100-200 years, if not more.

3) Here is one thing that really gets my curiosity: The Naztec lines. How could they have been created so long before air travel, and they can only be seen in full as actual shapes from airplanes. This is a very interesting topic of the subject as well. I wished that I learned more about them at school. I only know about them what I've seen on Discovery Channel, or TLC, or the History Channel.

4) The sunken pyramids of North America. How could they have been built under water? I forgot their exact location, some lake somewehre. There is, however, a logical but not certain explination to this: They were built before the lake formed.

5) The ancient lighthouse at Alexandria. (Again, I forgot which Alexandria it was, but I think that it was on the Atlantic Coast. I could be wrong).

6) The hanging gardens of Babylon.

7) StoneHenge, supposeldy used as an ancient calander, lines up with the sunrise/sunset of the (was it solstice or equinox? AHHHH! Can't remember!!!)

8) The statues of Easter Island

And theres much, much more. I just have to think of it all. Anyway, I'll get back to it and we'll just take it from here for now.

[ March 25, 2002: Message edited by: jgoo ]

Stonehenge lines up with the sun on Winter Solstice, I believe.

It's all just an evil plot by liberals......



(Just teasing....... easy now..........) :p

I did hear recently that archaeologists had unearthed a heretofore unknown maze of tunnels, extending at least 650 feet below the baseline of Cheops' pyramid (the "Great Pyramid"), deep into the desert floor. There were dozens of intertwining tunnels, mostly dead ends, and others simply turning back into themselves. At the end of the labyrinth, they found a small chamber hewn directly out of the bedrock. After they broke a large enough hole through a large stone blocking the entryway into the chamber, they crawled through and into the chamber. Inside, they found Hillary Clinton's billing records from the Rose Law Firm.

(...or, if you prefer, President Bush's college grades...it's just a joke, you know)

[ March 25, 2002: Message edited by: Dwain Lee ]

Stonehenge, Easter Island, Egyptian Pyramids, Larry, the Tri-Lateral Commission. What's it all about, Alfie? Maybe this guy can connect the dots:
http://www.stopabductions.com/


Just joking of course

There was a guy around about 25 years ago named Eric Von Danigen (sp?) who attributed a lot of this stuff to ancient astronauts. Of course, it was complete BS and full of the sorts of logical errors that gave us the Bermuda Triangle. e.g. if it isn't that then tell me what it is. Science requires you to prove your hypotheses, not require other people to prove them wrong. Proving that something is not so is a logical impossibility. You can only really prove that something is so. Until I see proof otherwise, I will continue to believe what the evidence supports. That these people did all of these things on their own. The evidence, of course, being that these things (pyramids, Easter Island statues, etc.) exist.

Okay, fine. Take my post as a joke. I was trying to start an intelligent conversation here.

OK. I'll take it seriously. Here's a good website for you that should provide hours of entertainment.

Art Bell

Hi, JGoo--

I'll take your post seriously. In both cases, the Alexandria (of both library and lighthouse fame) is Alexandria, Egypt, named after Alexander the Great.

I'm also fascinated by the ancient wonders. It started when I had to do a report on them for 5th or 6th grade social studies.

Not sure about the Nazca plains, etc. It's intriguing but I have a hard time making the leap to extraterrestrials. There is a great book that that Eric van Danken or whatever wrote. I am blanking completely on the name, but perhaps you've read it?

Nina

(My edit: just re-read your post and realized you were referring to Egypt all along, doh! I quickly zipped to the point where you mentioned you weren't sure which Alexandria and missed you meant which of the many Egyptian Alexandria "versions." Sorry!)

[ March 26, 2002: Message edited by: Nina ]

The reason for all the archaeologists dying after finding the tomb was simply pestilence. The tomb was filled with airborne disease. They all caught it of course when they went inside and breathed it in.

jgoo, sorry if you didn't like the joke, I knew you were serious. I didn't mean to veer your good thread off-topic at all.

Like you, I've wondered about a lot of these things. I don't think that the achievements of ancient civilizations were the result of any help from extrraterrestrials in the commonly used sense of the word.

I think that it's hard for us to imagine humans even a relatively short period of time ago as being as "smart" as we perceive ourselves to be. It's human nature to base our measure of intelligence only on the yardstick of our own few short years. Subconciously or otherwise, we imagine those people who survived without our particular technological advances as being "stupid," or unable to have possiby accomplished great things without some visit from smarter, alien life forms. But the truth is, these folks had the exact same-sized brains as us today. Their capacity to imagine, and reason, and solve problems was no less. They may not have developed certain distinct paths of knowledge to the point we have, but they still had, proportionally, the same amount of smart people that we encounter today. And if their brain power wasn't preoccupied with developing the next piece of killer software for their computers, they were certainly preoccupied with solving the great problems of their day.

As far as not knowing how they actually did some of those things, that's no particular mystery. The only knowledge retained by a society is the knowledge that the society still has a need for, or places value on. There being little need for pyramids these days, their construction has become a "lost art."

On a micro level of the same issue: today, because of its expense, a real stone building, or wall, is rather uncommon. And if you could afford it, you will have a great deal of trouble finding a skilled stonemason to actually do a good job building one. Truly good stonemasonry (even far less precise than the pyramids) is a skill that has almost disappeared during the last century. Still, I don't look at a well-done, interlocking, dry-set stone wall (I'm thinking of one in particular, built during the Great Depression) and marvel, "Gee, how did those simple people actually build this thing so well, without all of our current technology? They must have had help from an alien civilization who came here and taught them how to do it!" And yet, while it was common in 1930, I could search high and low and not find a crew with the skill and knowledge capable of making one as good as it today.

I know that doesn't anwer HOW the ancients pulled off some of their great wonders, and I'm in awe and as curious as you. But I am a lot less convinced now, at age 41, than I was at age 18, that they could have only been achieved with non-human assistance.

Is it Nazca? For some reason I had always seemed to think that it was Naztec. Guess I am wrong, because that does sound right. Anyway, the Nazca lines are a series of beautiful art constructed by stones and trenches in the ground, and only visible from a high vantage point. What I mean is that, you can only see what shapes they make from a high vantage point. Nobody knew of them until just after the invention of the airplane. While people were flying over the area, they just happened to look down and see the designs on the ground. They are monsterous in size. They are gigantic, which is why you need a high veiwing point to see them. A theory has come out for the construction. It is said by some that the ancient people knew how to make hot air balloons, to go up and check for accuracy. I'm not sure wheather or not to believe that, because it is only a theory and has never been prooven, but I'm not going to completely rule that out as a possible way for construction of the lines. Some of the designs include a person and a spider.

And, I have heard the name Art Bell before. I just can't remember where from. Thanks for the URL.

About the library burning:
It was not burnt by people because they feared technology was getting to advanced. Julius Ceaser inadvertantly burned the library. in an attack move he set ships on fire in the harbor near the library to destroy other ships. because of a rough wind, the ships on fire blew straight into harbor and towards the wooden docks that were there. the docks caught on fire, and spread to large proportions. the library was in the direct path.
I don't know where you got your sources but to me they seem fairly incorrect.

PianoMuse: Thanks for setting the record straight. I had heard differently. My grandmothers history lessons obviously have prooved wrong. The setback in the advancement of science and technology, however, was a direct result. But maybe, it wasn't as very far set back as I had heard. What do you think?

Ok my theory about the ancient times is:

YES!! of course early humans were visited by alien's.

I think that Aliens came to our planet around the time that Atlantis was around. How else could the technology been near ours or even higher 15,000 years ago???????

The aliens probably shared there technology with the people there, or some of the people of atlantis were aliens.

Anwayz maybe somehow everyone died in a big explosion, maybe they were testing nuclear weapons and they all killed them selves? Or the aliens killed the humans because they might have been bad with there new technology.
Or maybe they are conolizing(sp) under the thick sheets of ice in south pole and someday they will surprise us.

And I guess there is a link with the egypt people and aliens.

Also about the Naztec lines, i heard on TLC that under the lines there is water and the lines lead the path of water source or something. But personally i think they were runways or signs to the aliens to come back again.

It's natural to ponder about such things, however I don't conclude the alien intervention stuff. The works of Monet intrigue me - I can't fathom how anyone could produce this when my hands can only create splotches on canvas. T.S. Elliots "Old Possums' book of Practical Cats" intrigues me - how can anyone put words together like that. Space intrigues me - how can there conceivably be an infinite amount of space? If there isn't an infinite amount of space then what is the boundary and what is beyond the boundary? Time intrigues me - if I build the right vehicle I can launch myself into space and return when my children are grand parents and see how good a job they have done. If I can go forward, why then couldn't I go back in time, as forward is meaningless unless there is a reverse direction. I don't think aliens (or God) are responsible for any of this, even though my tiny brain can't understand how this works.

All these great pyramids and other ancient wonders are the work of our ancestors using the tools they had. We just don't understand what these tools were. Smithsonian magazine just did an article on how the great masters may have had help with their painting. Mirrors, and later lenses, were far enough along to provide reflections (or projected images) on canvas for an artist to use for scaling. There was a period when the art world seemed to produce an awful lot of left handed people; this also coincides with a period when mirror technology was far enough along to be used to project a reverse image on a canvas (thus right hands become left). This doesn't detract from the excellence of the painter ( I couldn't paint the mona lisa even if I had a projected image of her) it just explains how they got the scaling so perfect.

We are not confronted with such problems. In this day of desktop publishing can we really fathom what it took to fill the Library at Alexandria with books. The Bible has survived for a while. How was it written? Was it a one time write or did the author go back and re-edit a chapter when he was done? Were authors so good they verbalised it exactly as they wanted first time (unimaginable today with our document editors). As evidence I present all of the typos and missed words on message boards such as this. Do you remember how to use a slide rule, log tables, deal with a flooded carbuerator, crank start a car, prime a pump? We are losing these skills. 500 years from now mankind will scratch it's head and wonder how we calculated trajectories for the moon shots, not to mention how we got 3 people to the moon in a tin can, or 2 down onto the moon in a frame covered in gold foil.

Probably the only way to figure out how the Egyptians did some of this stuff is to take a civilisation and dump it out in the desert for a hundred years with the requirement that they build a pyramid or starve. Some bright spark will figure it out (he'll be the one with the "Will build pyramid for food" sign!).

Incidentally, the person I work for, a physicist, explains our origins in the shipwrecking of some other world (I won't use alien as that seems to connote silliness) species and that we are waiting to be rescued. The fact that our corner of space lies on some edy way out on a remote edge of the galaxy is the reason we haven't yet been found.

And yes, I do not believe we are alone (physically or spiritually). As Jodie Foster says at the end of Contact (Carl Sagan's words?) " if we're the only ones, it seems an awful waste of space".

There goes the whip......it's back to work I go........................

Reading JGOO's original post, I also think we can sometimes read too much into things. Has it ever been considered that Stonehenge was built to a simpler design. The fact that it can be used as a fairly complex calendar may have been lost on the ancients. They just lined it up with some stars in the sky on one of their sacred festivals. Pyramidal shapes may have been chosen for their ease of construction and nothing else (they couldn't figure how to hold up a flat roof on such a large structure). The fact that people have reported all these strange phenomenom associated with pyramids may just be us overcomplicating the issue.

Ok, so you don't buy that. Well consider what everyone read into one of the Beatles songs, or all the stuff that was considered a strange coincidence on Sept 11th. People love to find strange coincidences in things - The National Enquirer is full of them.

Think like an ancient Egyptian, you'll have more luck at figuring this stuff out. If not, try walking like one, it's more fun!

Jgoo... I didn't mean to imply that the Nazca lines don't exist, rather that I wasn't ready to make the leap from their existence to the fact that the must have been made by ETs. I agree, they are fascinating.

Nina

the alignment of the pyramids has always amazed me, but not the fact that they were erected so long ago. all it takes is thousands of slaves...and bam! pyramids! of course other pyramids were built before the most famous ones, it's not too hard to imagine that they learned a lot as they went and applied their new knowledge to structures that actually ended up standing. the pyramid that goes up at one angle then changes to a different angle was because they made it too steep to start with and it wouldn't hold itself up. they did ingenious things with supports in the middle to keep the walls from collapsing in on the rooms inside. i've seen a few documentaries about it.

iainhp has a good point too about people reading into things. when paul mcartny was supposed to be dead, people looked for messages all over in beatles songs and album covers for clues about it.

a lot of those facts jgoo seem to be from chain emails (one i got said dingos can't bark, but there they were on the nature program barking and growling at each other) or just outdated sources. is your grandma's history lesson recent, or from the 40's, 50's, or 60's? we've learned a lot since then.

it's kind of like the fox special which had all the proof that we didn't land on the moon. it was just nit picky things that sound sensational and get peoples attention, but can easily be disproven.