[MD] Food for Thought

[Dan Glover]

Hello everyone

>From: "ARLO J BENSINGER JR" <ajb102 at psu.edu>
>Reply-To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
>To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
>Subject: Re: [MD] Food for Thought
>Date: Thu, 21 Dec 2006 10:42:16 -0500
>
>
>[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]
Hi Arlo
I have on my bookshelves over a dozen books claiming the Pyramids were 
anything from: Astronomic observatories (The Great Pyramid: Man's Monument 
to Man) ... Places of cult worship (The Great Pyramid: Prophecy in Stone) 
.... Geometric structures constructed by a long-gone civilization (Great 
Pyramid Decoded) ... Even extraterrestrial-related theories (The Chariots of 
the Gods)... It's all good fun reading and very romantic but there's very 
little if any scientific rigor involved in the research on display in any of 
these books.

So I prefer to go along with the predominately held belief that the Pyramids 
were tombs. But I could be wrong.

>
>[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.

[Dan]
>From what I understand, Machu Picchu was built as a type of worship center 
rather than as a place to live. According to research, the "city" was 
abandoned about the time of the Conquistadors but it was never discovered by 
them. Otherwise it would most certainly have been looted.

>[Arlo]
> >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."

[Dan]
I think that's why Robert Pirsig says the intellectual level came to 
dominance in ancient Greece and not in Egypt or the Americas. It seems 
obvious that the builders of many of the Pyramids had a great deal of 
intellectual knowledge but theirs wasn't an intellectual culture. Otherwise, 
wouldn't they have left us some written records of how they did what they 
did?

>[Arlo]
>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)

[Dan]
Good stuff. I found this to be of interest too:

http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn10680

Thank you for your comments,

Dan