[MD] Food for Thought

[Case]

Dan, Arlo,

I defer to Arlo's expertise in megaliths but note that I said and meant
Astrology since modern astronomy is an intellectual pattern that evolved
from early patterns. As Arlo points out whatever the purpose of the pyramids
their construction seems to have involves some fairly technical knowledge of
the positions of celestial bodies. There is the suggestion that it had
something to do with the precession of the equinoxes and finding a specific
polar star.

With regard to Dan's comments on individuals today who have technical
knowledge without being able to read or write. Those individuals certainly
do have access to the shared culture preserved in writing, if not first hand
then second hand. I supposed this is the inverse of Granddad Uga who
invented all that cool technology and no one paid attention. Old cultures
did take their oral traditions very seriously and cross generational
transmission of stories and knowledge certainly did take place in prehistory
but what is significant is the immense expansion of shared memory afford by
the static rendering of knowledge into written form.

Case

-----Original Message-----
From: moq_discuss-bounces at moqtalk.org
[mailto:moq_discuss-bounces at moqtalk.org] On Behalf Of ARLO J BENSINGER JR
Sent: Thursday, December 21, 2006 10:42 AM
To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
Subject: Re: [MD] Food for Thought

[Dan]
I take it you mean astronomy [regarding the construction of the Pyramids, I
had
said "astrology". - Arlo].

[Arlo]
Yes, lexical slip on my part. "Astronomy".

[Dan]
Are you saying the Pyramids were used as observatories too?

[Arlo]
I don't think they were "tombs" at all, except perhaps incidentally. I,
personally, think they served primarily as "time markers", but likely served
other astronomical functions as well. Their builders seemed to have a
knowledge
of precession, which itself too is a mystery. Some I've read believe they
were
attempts to "recreate" bodies in the Duat (the Heavenly Nile) on earth
parallel
to our river Nile. As such, there placement recreates positioning of certain
stars on the ground as they would have appeared over the area in a certain
epoch. 

[Dan]
There are humans alive today with highly specialized intellectual knowledge
of
the world who are incapable of reading or writing a word. Where did they get
the knowledge they've obtained? And why couldn't the same be true thousands
of
years ago?

[Arlo]
If I understand correctly, my example would not be that "some people did not
know how to build" cars. But rather that as a society, a culture, we
"suddenly"
build a Ferrari, and then, as a culture, completely lose that knowledge over
a
(relatively) short time period. I'm sure that there was a rich oral
tradition
of passing knowledge, and I think a lot of myth is really encrypted
astronomy.

We see a lot of this knowledge-losing in history. The inhabitants of Macchu
Piccu could not even tell the Conquistadors _who_ built the city they lived
in,
let alone how it was built. Also in Peru is Sacsayhuaman. We now attribute
it
to the Inca, but why did no living Inca anywhere in the area claim that
"their
people built it"? All records show that every Incan talked to _denied_ that
the
Inca had built it, or said it is a mystery to their people.

>From (http://www.world-mysteries.com/mpl_9.htm), "Sacsayhuaman was
supposedly
completed around 1508. Depending on who you listen to, it took a crew of
20,000
to 30,000 men working for 60 years. Here is a mystery: The chronicler
Garcilaso
de la Vega was born around 1530, and raised in the shadow of these walls.
And
yet he seems not to have had a clue as to how Sacsayhuaman was built." It
supposedly took over TWENTY-THOUSAND people over SIXTY YEARS to build, but
in
less than 22 years after completion NO ONE could remember it being built???

De la Vega, just 22 years (supposedly) after this monumentous effort was
over
wrote, "But it is indeed beyond the power of imagination to understand now
these Indians, unacquainted with devices, engines, and implements, could
have
cut, dressed, raised, and lowered great rocks, more like lumps of hills than
building stones, and set them so exactly in their places. For this reason,
and
because the Indians were so familiar with demons, the work is attributed to
enchantment."

I can go with cultural loss over time, but this is a little much.

For some more archaeological intrigue, chech out Yonaguni (on Wikipedia at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yonaguni)


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