Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. It is
Speaker 1: once more Saturday, so it is once more time to
Speaker 1: go into the vault. This is going to be the
Speaker 1: episode Dindara Lights and Ancient Egyptians Pseudohistory. This one originally
Speaker 1: published eight seventeen, twenty twenty three. This was the third
Speaker 1: part in our look at how low resolution images have
Speaker 1: provoked paranormal and fringe explanations over time, despite convincing an
Speaker 1: even conclusive expert analysis. And this is once more a
Speaker 1: good excuse to dive into ancient Egyptian concepts. So without
Speaker 1: further ado, here we go.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert.
Speaker 3: Lamb and I am Joe McCormick. In the past to
Speaker 3: episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, we've been talking
Speaker 3: about a couple of famous, supposedly anomalous underwater images, weird,
Speaker 3: spooky looking photographs and images produced by sonar of objects
Speaker 3: on the ocean floor, which to observers with the right predisposition,
Speaker 3: seemed like compelling evidence of alien visitation of Earth, or
Speaker 3: ancient technology of lost civilizations, or something else. In that
Speaker 3: narrative space, and in a way, I think it's kind
Speaker 3: of telling that you look at an object and say, well,
Speaker 3: this could be aliens, or it could be atlantis. It's
Speaker 3: one of the two or both.
Speaker 1: You can have both sometimes, yeah, I.
Speaker 3: Guess you could. But anyway, explanation referring to explanations that
Speaker 3: are big, exciting, mind rending explanations that would change everything
Speaker 3: we think we know about the world and about the
Speaker 3: history of life on Earth. Today's episode is not a
Speaker 3: strict like Part three or anything, but we are going
Speaker 3: to be continuing the theme, so I thought it would
Speaker 3: be good to start off with a recap of what
Speaker 3: we've talked about in the last couple of episodes, though
Speaker 3: today we're going to be taking it in a different direction.
Speaker 3: So what's the theme. Well, to start with, I'll do
Speaker 3: a brief review of the things we talked about in
Speaker 3: the last two episodes. One object was something that was
Speaker 3: photographed in the nineteen sixties and known in the UFO
Speaker 3: literature as the Eltanan antenna. It looks to the untrained
Speaker 3: observer like some kind of antenna, some kind of receiver,
Speaker 3: you know. They called it, I think a microwave, aerial
Speaker 3: or something in some of the early articles on it,
Speaker 3: but actually once people with the right background of marine
Speaker 3: biology knowledge looked at this photo, they identified it with
Speaker 3: near certainty as a species of carnivorous sponge that lives
Speaker 3: on the bottom of the ocean. The other object that
Speaker 3: we talked about in the second of those two episodes
Speaker 3: was captured on fuzzy sonar images by treasure hunters and
Speaker 3: salvage divers in two thousand and eleven, and it has
Speaker 3: been referred to in the media as the Baltic Sea
Speaker 3: anomaly because it was supposedly somewhere on the floor of
Speaker 3: the Northern Baltic Sea, and hidden knowledge enthusiasts called it
Speaker 3: everything from a crashed flying saucer to a monument built
Speaker 3: by the civilization of Atlantis, and in this case a
Speaker 3: positive idea is slightly more difficult than it is in
Speaker 3: the case of the Eltanan antenna, which is almost definitely
Speaker 3: the sponge. But numerous experts have commented that this is
Speaker 3: most likely just an interesting looking geologic formation, in other words,
Speaker 3: a big mass of rock that may be a result
Speaker 3: of the freezing and thawing of glaciers, but ultimately we
Speaker 3: don't know for sure, and so it's kind of interesting
Speaker 3: that in both cases, the story goes that someone captured
Speaker 3: a fuzzy or low resolution image of something that looked
Speaker 3: weird and to some extent looked intuitively unnatural or out
Speaker 3: of place. That image was then published to a lay
Speaker 3: audience that had no background knowledge to help them understand
Speaker 3: what they were looking at, and then some observers concluded
Speaker 3: that since the object looked unusual, unnatural, or out of place,
Speaker 3: it must be a piece of anomalist technology deposited by
Speaker 3: aliens or time travelers, or a past human civilization about
Speaker 3: which all knowledge has been erased. However, in both cases,
Speaker 3: the more information entered into the picture, the more it
Speaker 3: seemed like these anomalies were probably just weird looking natural
Speaker 3: phenomena like animals or rocks. And so, while it's always
Speaker 3: important to keep an open mind, you want to keep
Speaker 3: your mind open to good evidence if it were to
Speaker 3: emerge of big and worldview changing discoveries, it is at
Speaker 3: the same time important not to let emotional excitement guide
Speaker 3: your reasoning. And one reason to be skeptical about putting
Speaker 3: something that looks weird and out of place into the
Speaker 3: aliens or atlantis column is that If you've if all
Speaker 3: of these kinds of stories long enough, you really start
Speaker 3: to see a trend. And that trend is the more
Speaker 3: information we have to inform our judgment, the less it
Speaker 3: seems like aliens. So the cases where a piece of evidence,
Speaker 3: like a photograph or a video, remains unexplainable and thus
Speaker 3: still possibly aliens, those tend to be the cases where
Speaker 3: there are notable deficits of information, and these could be
Speaker 3: deficits within the evidence itself, like the picture or the
Speaker 3: video is very grainy and low resolution, so it's hard
Speaker 3: to tell exactly what you're looking at, and you kind
Speaker 3: of just have to shrug and say, I don't know,
Speaker 3: it looks weird, hard to say what it is. Or
Speaker 3: the information deficit could be in the person or community
Speaker 3: that is assessing the evidence. It could be in us.
Speaker 3: For example, most of us have a lack of background
Speaker 3: knowledge about what sponges on the ocean floor look like,
Speaker 3: or about what kinds of patterns can be found in
Speaker 3: natural rock formations, and so information deficits kind of keep
Speaker 3: the mystery alive. Meanwhile, the converse also seems true. The
Speaker 3: more information there is, the more likely it becomes that
Speaker 3: the object gets pinned down to an explanation from within
Speaker 3: the range of known causes. So you get a higher
Speaker 3: resolution video, or you get new videos of the same thing,
Speaker 3: maybe an additional angle, better light conditions, more experience or
Speaker 3: background knowledge with which to judge the video or photo,
Speaker 3: and oh, okay, in these cases it's a milar balloon
Speaker 3: or oh I see that's a star, or that's an airplane.
Speaker 3: Rob Actually, another excellent example that you brought up in
Speaker 3: the last episode was the so called face on Mars.
Speaker 3: You know, this was it's a wonderful photo, Like I
Speaker 3: love the face on Mars, but this was done in
Speaker 3: by higher resolution photography.
Speaker 1: Done in to a certain extent. But like some of
Speaker 1: these other images, the face of Mars still remains this
Speaker 1: image that's kind of an article of faith to sign,
Speaker 1: you know, or at least this kind of totem of
Speaker 1: the paranormal and the potentially cosmic. And I guess it
Speaker 1: is still certainly a testament to our ability to see
Speaker 1: ourselves in anything well exactly.
Speaker 3: And I wouldn't wish, by the way, that we could
Speaker 3: not read beauty and meaning into I don't know, things
Speaker 3: that might on their own merits not necessarily shout out
Speaker 3: to be meaningful, like a rock doesn't necessarily say that
Speaker 3: it has meaning, but you can see faces in it,
Speaker 3: and it can make you feel all kinds of things.
Speaker 3: This is like the basis of all art. Yeah, But
Speaker 3: when it comes to looking for explanations of things in
Speaker 3: the world, this pattern just pops up again and again
Speaker 3: and again. If the picture stays fuzzy, it still might
Speaker 3: be aliens, or it still might be atlantis. But if
Speaker 3: you're able to sharpen the focus or to have more
Speaker 3: background knowledge when you're assessing it, it's almost definitely not aliens,
Speaker 3: then that's when you realize it's a balloon. And this
Speaker 3: doesn't mean we will never discover good evidence of alien
Speaker 3: visitation of Earth or anything, or of you know, maybe
Speaker 3: some big discovery about something previously unknown about the ancient world.
Speaker 3: That's always possible. But I think if you follow these stories,
Speaker 3: it's sort of impossible not to notice the trend, and
Speaker 3: awareness of the trend should put us on guard when
Speaker 3: new pieces of evidence bubble up from the low information
Speaker 3: or low resolution zone. So today we wanted to look
Speaker 3: at some similar trends, not in underwater imagery, but in
Speaker 3: imagery related to another domain that can often appear in
Speaker 3: degraded or low resolution form and be kind of put
Speaker 3: cold in front of people who don't have contextual background
Speaker 3: knowledge to understand what we're looking at, and this is
Speaker 3: artifacts from ancient history.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think examples like this can be at times
Speaker 1: a little harder for us to wrap our heads around,
Speaker 1: especially if we are more we're inclined to sort of
Speaker 1: rally behind an outside idea about what we're looking at,
Speaker 1: because in some of these other examples of anomalist data,
Speaker 1: anomalist photography, et cetera, there's there's often maybe a sense
Speaker 1: of kind of like a a rabbit duck illusion scenario,
Speaker 1: you know, or or one of these, you know, one
Speaker 1: of these optical illusions where someone shows it to you
Speaker 1: and they say, hey, do you see a duck or
Speaker 1: a rabbit? And you say, well, I see a rabbit.
Speaker 1: I don't see a duck at all. And then someone says, well, look,
Speaker 1: i'll show you, and you show show them the parts
Speaker 1: of the duck and they're like, okay, now I can
Speaker 1: see it both ways. It can maybe be a little
Speaker 1: bit harder if in order to truly see it both ways,
Speaker 1: you have to say, understand ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. So like
Speaker 1: one of the examples I'm gonna I'm gonna touch on
Speaker 1: here is one where we absolutely know what it is,
Speaker 1: and we absolutely know what it's not. And yet even
Speaker 1: you know, reading the explanation, you know, hearing from experts,
Speaker 1: you know, it can still be difficult. It's difficult for
Speaker 1: me to see exactly what we're talking about there, and
Speaker 1: it's actually easier for me to sort of lean in
Speaker 1: to the ridiculous explanation for what appears to be in
Speaker 1: front of us. So we'll get to this in a second,
Speaker 1: but first I just want to talk in general about
Speaker 1: the overarching theme of Egyptomania. Now, Egyptomania is more often
Speaker 1: used to refer specifically to nineteenth century European fascination with
Speaker 1: all things Egypt during Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, but it can
Speaker 1: also generally be leveled at various points in time when
Speaker 1: various cultures have pursued an interest in ancient Egyptian civilization
Speaker 1: and culture. And of course this general interest is irresistible
Speaker 1: because we've touched on many times in the show. I'm
Speaker 1: ancient Egyptian civilization, ancient Egyptian culture, and mythology. These are fascinating.
Speaker 3: Topics, absolutely, yeah, a beautiful entrancing and not just to
Speaker 3: people in the mind. I mean, something I've read before
Speaker 3: is that people in the world that still appears as
Speaker 3: the ancient world to us looked back to the even
Speaker 3: more ancient Egyptian civilization and they were fascinated by it.
Speaker 3: There were ancient Greco Romans who had a kind of Egyptomania.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, I think we've we've mentioned the sort of
Speaker 1: mind blowing fact before. You know that the ancient Romans
Speaker 1: were greatly intrigued by ancient Egypt, which was already as
Speaker 1: ancient to them as the Romans are to us.
Speaker 3: Right, So at the time of Caesar Augustus, ancient Egyptian
Speaker 3: civilization was thousands of years old.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. And of course we've touched before on the
Speaker 1: ancient wonders of the world. You know, the Pyramids, the
Speaker 1: Great Pyramids were certainly on that list, and those still
Speaker 1: remain some of the most enigmatic man made structures on
Speaker 1: the planet, and we still don't know everything there is
Speaker 1: to know about them. So Egyptology remains a living field
Speaker 1: of study.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 1: I was looking at a really really good book about
Speaker 1: this that I highly recommend. It's from Ronald H. Fritz,
Speaker 1: titled Egyptomania, and in the book, the author discusses various
Speaker 1: forms of Egyptomania over the ages, from the ancient Hebrews,
Speaker 1: from Greeks and Romans to European models. There's a whole
Speaker 1: section on like fiction and gets into movies. He also
Speaker 1: has a great chapter on Afrocentrist movements that engage in Egyptomania,
Speaker 1: and he drives home that just many different peoples across
Speaker 1: different times have attempted to imagine and even remake the
Speaker 1: ancient Egyptians in their own image to enhance their own worldview,
Speaker 1: their own interests, their own ideology, etc. And the energy
Speaker 1: of this exercise ranges from just merely attempting to understand
Speaker 1: a fascinating time in people. I mean, that's one of
Speaker 1: our main tools is to think about even people from
Speaker 1: the distant past in different lands, to try and imagine
Speaker 1: what it would be like to be them. But on
Speaker 1: the other end of the spectrum you get into just
Speaker 1: outright pseudohistory, pseudoscience, and just everything else you might expect
Speaker 1: to encounter on the fringes.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, there's an interesting duality that comes from trying
Speaker 3: to see yourself and imagine people like you and other
Speaker 3: times and other civilizations, because of course, there probably is
Speaker 3: something that all people at all times kind of have
Speaker 3: in common. There is a common human experience, and you
Speaker 3: can try to imagine what it would have been like
Speaker 3: to live in ancient Egypt. But there's a possibility that
Speaker 3: in doing so, you kind of lull yourself into the
Speaker 3: false belief that you can say, look at ancient Egyptian
Speaker 3: art or look at ancient Egyptian artifacts and just intuitively
Speaker 3: identify what you're looking at, when in fact, you would
Speaker 3: probably need some very specific cultural knowledge to understand what
Speaker 3: you're looking at.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and a lot of this imagery getting right into
Speaker 1: what we're talking about here is the kind of stuff
Speaker 1: that can be mysterious enough, that can seem cryptic enough
Speaker 1: to folks who don't know what they're looking at that
Speaker 1: you can apply other ideas, modern ideas to them. You know,
Speaker 1: like you just read a book about UFOs, Well, go
Speaker 1: look at these these images without any context, and you
Speaker 1: may see UFO related ideas there. Read a book about
Speaker 1: the bicameral mind and start looking at at some of
Speaker 1: these images, Well, you might have some alarming ideas and
Speaker 1: some interesting interpretations of what you see as well.
Speaker 3: Right, we read the world through the lenses that are
Speaker 3: available to us, and very often the lenses that are
Speaker 3: available to us sort of, what's the top lens on
Speaker 3: the stack is whatever you've recently been thinking about.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and not to say that, you know, fresh eyes
Speaker 1: and fresh perspectives are not potentially important in reevaluating what
Speaker 1: we know and what we think we know. But oftentimes
Speaker 1: when there is a particular preconceived notion in mind, you're
Speaker 1: not necessarily checking back in with the experts to see
Speaker 1: if this radical new theory matches up with the old
Speaker 1: school interpretation. Certainly when we get into fringe ideas. So anyway,
Speaker 1: there's a long history of Gyptomania in Western magic and
Speaker 1: occultism continues to play into modern ideas of magic and ocultism,
Speaker 1: but also modern branches of fringe ideas concerning UFOs, ancient
Speaker 1: alien discourse, which of course we've discussed on the show
Speaker 1: in the past, and other paranormal concepts and Yeah, so
Speaker 1: it's no surprise that various examples of iconography, archaeological remnants,
Speaker 1: and so forth that are not located on the bottom
Speaker 1: of the sea still end up speaking to us across
Speaker 1: time and culture in a way that too inexpert eyes
Speaker 1: or eyes seeking only confirmation of the paranormal examples of
Speaker 1: ancient technology and so forth. You know they're going to
Speaker 1: see that in these images. So in just a few
Speaker 1: minutes we'll get to a couple I think of interesting
Speaker 1: samples of this. But going back to the book Egyptomania,
Speaker 1: Fritz points out that there are other not necessarily alien
Speaker 1: fringe ideas that pre exists UFO fascination that already insisted
Speaker 1: that ancient Egypt was, for instance, much older than mainstream
Speaker 1: historians believe today. Some of these push back to like
Speaker 1: ten thousand BC or earlier, as opposed to the accepted
Speaker 1: view that the Archaic Age stretches five thousand to three
Speaker 1: thousand BC, with the Old Kingdom coming in at around
Speaker 1: three thousand BC. And then you have a number of
Speaker 1: fringe ideas that don't again don't concern aliens or anything
Speaker 1: like that, but they get into this idea that like,
Speaker 1: surely there is some ancient advanced civilization at the heart
Speaker 1: of all of this, And so Fritz discusses a few
Speaker 1: of these. There's this idea one ideas that the ancient
Speaker 1: ancient Egyptian civilization extends from civilization X or the Ice
Speaker 1: Age super civil.
Speaker 3: Oh, there are similar analogs to this that are still
Speaker 3: kicking around today.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And of course a big, big one is Atlantis,
Speaker 1: the idea that that like refugees from sunken Atlantis founded
Speaker 1: ancient Egypt that sort of thing. And then you also
Speaker 1: have the ancient alien discourse coming in ancient alien aliens
Speaker 1: teaching the ancient Egyptians how to do things, or ancient
Speaker 1: aliens interbreeding with the ancient Egyptians, supercharging human DNA, and
Speaker 1: basically anything else you want to happen. I don't know.
Speaker 3: I feel like a lot of alien discourses like wrong
Speaker 3: but fun. But like the alien supercharging DNA thing goes
Speaker 3: is not wrong and fun, it's like wrong and gross.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you get it. You, I mean so much of this.
Speaker 1: It can these ideas they can start in a place
Speaker 1: that feels just fun and escapist, but you follow them
Speaker 1: long enough, they can get into perhaps creepier territory. But
Speaker 1: there is still a lot of variety here to choose from.
Speaker 1: And Fritz writes the following quote, the outpouring and accumulation
Speaker 1: of the many theories that alternative historians advanced about ancient
Speaker 1: Egypt could be considered a cornucopia. But since so many
Speaker 1: of the theories clash with and contradict each other, a
Speaker 1: better description might be a cacophony. And I think we
Speaker 1: saw this in some of the discussion of our previous
Speaker 1: underwater examples as well, you know what is the anomaly? Well,
Speaker 1: there's never like this single paranormal explanation, but a whole
Speaker 1: host of them. Certainly the deeper you go into a
Speaker 1: theme like, Okay, it's an antenna, but is that is
Speaker 1: it the secret world government that built it, or is
Speaker 1: it the ancient lass civilization that built it? Or is
Speaker 1: it current UFO, current alien visitors that built it. And
Speaker 1: within a given person's body of work, they might have
Speaker 1: a specific idea, but it's going to be different from
Speaker 1: the next book on the shelf.
Speaker 3: Or as we mentioned directly earlier, if you look at
Speaker 3: an object on the ocean floor and you think, well,
Speaker 3: this could be a UFO, or it could be a
Speaker 3: temple built by the people of Atlantis, or it could
Speaker 3: be an Nazi bunker. In that case, like could it
Speaker 3: really possibly even suggest any of those like that? Those
Speaker 3: are so different. It sounds like you're just kind of
Speaker 3: like reaching around for whatever, not like saying, oh, it
Speaker 3: really has attributes that would make us conclude it is x.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. Now. The Atlantis connection to ancient Egypt goes
Speaker 1: way back. Apparently goes back to the writings of Plato
Speaker 1: concerning the idea that the ancient Egyptians coexisted with Atlantis
Speaker 1: nine thousand years earlier. Fritz writes that while Plato was
Speaker 1: likely stating all this purely to make a philosophical point,
Speaker 1: the idea that Egypt was already a nine thousand year
Speaker 1: old civilization was probably what contemporary Greeks believed in the
Speaker 1: fourth and fifth centuries BCE, and to be clear, other
Speaker 1: civilizations of the day were cited with bloated timelines as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah. One big difference between like an ancient Greek historian
Speaker 3: and a modern historian is that modern historians have a
Speaker 3: wealth of physical scienceientific evidence that they can draw on
Speaker 3: to help inform, you know, how they should process the
Speaker 3: received stories told about the past. You know, you can,
Speaker 3: like you can do digs, and you can do radiometric dating,
Speaker 3: and you can do all kinds of things that give
Speaker 3: you physical clues to help you either confirm or disconfirm
Speaker 3: things that have been written down about what happened in
Speaker 3: the past.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. Now, of course, one of the things about Atlantis
Speaker 1: is that the concept never completely goes away, certainly in
Speaker 1: the West, but it comes and it goes. It's heightened
Speaker 1: by the discovery of an inhabited America's and then again
Speaker 1: in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with modern pseudohistory of
Speaker 1: Egypt and Atlantis emerging largely from the writings apparently of
Speaker 1: American politician Ignacious Donnelley in eighteen eighty two. Donnelly, if
Speaker 1: you're not familiar with him, represented Minnesota and the US
Speaker 1: House of Representatives from eighteen sixty three through eighteen sixty nine.
Speaker 1: He pushed a number of ideas concerning pseudoscience and pseudo history.
Speaker 1: So yeah, definitely one of the many characters that Fritz
Speaker 1: writes about in this section.
Speaker 3: Oh boy, Now.
Speaker 1: Another figure that Fritz touches on here and credits largely
Speaker 1: with this sort of modern idea that Egypt had advanced technology.
Speaker 1: Ancient Egypt had advanced technology. This goes back to the
Speaker 1: psychic readings of when Edgar Casey, who lived eighteen seventy
Speaker 1: seven through nineteen forty five, a self professed clairvoyant who
Speaker 1: carried out quote unquote life readings for people and revealed
Speaker 1: their past lives in ancient Atlantis, as well as the
Speaker 1: advanced technology that the Atlanteans supposedly had, such as advanced
Speaker 1: crystal laser weapons that they ultimately used to destroy Atlantis,
Speaker 1: with the survivors fleeing to Egypt.
Speaker 3: Crystal laser weapons.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, it sounds remarkably like that old Atari
Speaker 1: twenty six hundred game Atlantis. I don't know if anyone
Speaker 1: out there actually played this, but I remember as a
Speaker 1: kid seeing the commercials for it online and it was
Speaker 1: kind of a scary commercial with a whole narrative structure
Speaker 1: going on how to do with that. I believe memory
Speaker 1: serves an ongoing war between the Gorgons and the people
Speaker 1: of Atlantis, and it was a great commercial. Look it
Speaker 1: up if you haven't seen.
Speaker 3: It, you know. I kind of can't help but think
Speaker 3: though all these ideas about ancient Egypt having advanced technology.
Speaker 3: In a way, they did have advanced technology, but they
Speaker 3: had advanced technology for the time in which they lived.
Speaker 3: Like you do not have to turn to bad standards
Speaker 3: of evidence. For examples of amazing technological achievements. In ancient Egypt,
Speaker 3: they built the Pyramids, among you million tons of other things.
Speaker 3: That was not ancient aliens. That was extremely smart and
Speaker 3: industrious people creating amazing technological achievements with a very limited
Speaker 3: set of tools compared to what's available to people today.
Speaker 3: That is an amazing technological feat. It was just an
Speaker 3: amazing technological feat for the time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean that's one of the tragedies
Speaker 1: about all of this is like when you when you
Speaker 1: get wrapped up in say ancient alien discourse, you end
Speaker 1: up reducing the importance of of of what people were
Speaker 1: actually doing if you just attribute it to the gifts
Speaker 1: of the gods, the gifts of the alien visitors and
Speaker 1: so forth. Now, I want to stress that in this chapter,
Speaker 1: Fritz touches on a number of different names, and I'm
Speaker 1: not going to get into everybody here, but you know
Speaker 1: it's there. There are various writers and occasional outright con
Speaker 1: men that are engaged in the sort of work, and
Speaker 1: their work kind of feeds off each other. One of
Speaker 1: the big ones, one of the big names, certainly an
Speaker 1: ancient alien discourse is the work of Eric von Donakin,
Speaker 1: who we've talked about on the show before because he
Speaker 1: was the author of Chariots of the Gods in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty eight. I say it that way because the title
Speaker 1: does have a question mark at the end. Always pronounce
Speaker 1: the question mark.
Speaker 3: Like he's like kind of getting you with the elbow
Speaker 3: and winking while he says yeah.
Speaker 1: I think we mentioned we went in and discussed this
Speaker 1: idea at length and the various criticisms to it. But
Speaker 1: even this idea like it was influenced by the writings
Speaker 1: of HP Lovecraft and other weird writers of the early
Speaker 1: twentieth century. Lovecraft and his contemporaries, by the way, also
Speaker 1: wrote about tales related to Egyptian motifs and Egyptian oriented
Speaker 1: occultism and so forth, so you have a lot of
Speaker 1: these sources feeding into each other.
Speaker 3: It's been years since we did the Eric Vondanikin episode,
Speaker 3: But am I remembering something about how he had like
Speaker 3: created the Chariots of the Gods theme park? Is that?
Speaker 3: Am I losing my mind?
Speaker 1: No? No, there was Slash is a theme park. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure off the top of my head, what's going
Speaker 1: on with it? Right? Now, but like, that's how big
Speaker 1: this guy.
Speaker 3: I want to flat earth six flags.
Speaker 1: Now. Fritz points out, though that early ancient alien discourse folks,
Speaker 1: and even Vondnikin's original book don't actually reference Egypt all
Speaker 1: that much. So other individuals who kind of come in
Speaker 1: with the Egyptology alternative Egyptology view of everything, and that
Speaker 1: gets you know, sucked into the whole concept. He points
Speaker 1: out one particular author, I believe this is a book
Speaker 1: from nineteen eighty four from one zechariash Si Chen who
Speaker 1: lived nineteen twenty through twenty ten. This is apparently one
Speaker 1: of the only serious competitors to von Danakan because the
Speaker 1: Vondanakin's books generated a lot of discussion, and you know,
Speaker 1: they're pretty popular for the time period. So a lot
Speaker 1: of other authors came in to try and cash in
Speaker 1: on ancient alien discourse. But this particular individual, Sich seems
Speaker 1: to have been one of the more successful of those
Speaker 1: to come in and try and get cash in on
Speaker 1: everything here, and Fritz points out that he seems to
Speaker 1: have avoided a lot of the criticism that was reserved
Speaker 1: for von Dannakin. So Vontanagan got big enough to where
Speaker 1: like when people like Carl Sagan entered the chat, Vonda
Speaker 1: Anakin's ideas are the one are the ones that Carl
Speaker 1: Sagan is going to respond to. Carl Sagan doesn't have
Speaker 1: time to deal with everybody else in the genre.
Speaker 3: And to be clear, Carl Sagan was not saying that
Speaker 3: ancient aliens like were a viable explanation for the Pyramids
Speaker 3: or anything. He as I recall, entered the discourse to
Speaker 3: kind of say, well, if we're going to entertain this possibility,
Speaker 3: we should have some standards of evidence, right, Like we
Speaker 3: should lay out in advance what would we be looking
Speaker 3: for instead of just like looking at what's out there
Speaker 3: and saying like, eh, that could be aliens.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I thought Sagan has some great responses to it.
Speaker 1: They were not like one hundred percent shut it down,
Speaker 1: dismissive of it as a concept, but we're but also
Speaker 1: reiterated that there are high standards for this, and if
Speaker 1: you were looking for evidence, you would be looking for
Speaker 1: very specific sorts of evidence and so forth. But again,
Speaker 1: when Sagan's entering the conversation, when other critics are coming
Speaker 1: in and dealing with what von Donigan's written about, especially
Speaker 1: with that first book, they're not dealing with with the
Speaker 1: themed content. Individuals like Sitchin apparently are ones who were
Speaker 1: the ones to initially drag Egypt and ancient Egypt into
Speaker 1: the scenario, and perhaps a lot of that Fritz Rights
Speaker 1: seems to have maybe existed below the mainstream radar for
Speaker 1: a while, you know, being just a part of the
Speaker 1: stuff that is discussed in the fringe movements. And it's
Speaker 1: not until the nineteen nineties. He writes that we see
Speaker 1: quote the penetration of highly speculative theories about ancient Egypt
Speaker 1: into mainstream popular culture.
Speaker 3: I think maybe the designation as highly speculative is a
Speaker 3: good one, because sometimes I'm looking for the right blanket
Speaker 3: terminology to describe all these different types of explanations that
Speaker 3: we're talking about. They're not all necessarily like conspiracy theories.
Speaker 3: They don't all necessarily have exactly the same content, But
Speaker 3: what they do seem to have in common is that
Speaker 3: they are highly speculative, meaning they are elaborating a lot
Speaker 3: of explanatory narrative on on a very weak evidential basis.
Speaker 1: So to be clear here, what apparently is going on
Speaker 1: at this time leading into the nineteen nineties, according to
Speaker 1: the author here of Fritz is that under the surface
Speaker 1: of all this other talk about ancient aliens and so
Speaker 1: forth and other paranormal ideas, there's this kind of growing
Speaker 1: swell of alternative Egyptology, and then during the nineteen nineties
Speaker 1: it begins to bubble up into the mainstream discourse. And
Speaker 1: Fritz cite's two main reasons for this. One is the
Speaker 1: approaching millennium and various ideas concerning the new millennium that's
Speaker 1: about to be here. The second reason he brings up
Speaker 1: is that there are just a number of new archaeological
Speaker 1: discoveries that were taking place in Egypt that we're capturing
Speaker 1: mainstream attention and inadvertently fueling the nonsense that again was
Speaker 1: festering in the fringe.
Speaker 3: I see so like because for totally legitimate reasons, ancient
Speaker 3: Egypt might be popping up on the news, like you're
Speaker 3: seeing it on TV in ways that you probably didn't
Speaker 3: see it as much before. It's just sort of in
Speaker 3: the air, and it is one more thing you could
Speaker 3: attach highly speculative theories too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then you have other individuals that are writing
Speaker 1: more directly about it. It's popping up in the writings
Speaker 1: of Graham Hancock, for example, He also cites the X
Speaker 1: files as being popular, though you have more expertise for
Speaker 1: the X files. I don't know the X files ever
Speaker 1: actually had any ancient Egyptian themed content. I don't know
Speaker 1: if they ever went up against a mummy or anything.
Speaker 3: I recall very little about that except well, actually, now
Speaker 3: that I think about it, I think there may have
Speaker 3: been a mummy episode that is remembered as one of
Speaker 3: the worst episodes of the X Files ever. Unless that's
Speaker 3: hold on, got to look it up now. Oh no,
Speaker 3: I see why my memory was confused here. Yeah, one
Speaker 3: of the worst X Files episodes ever does concern a mummy.
Speaker 3: But it's not an Egyptian mummy. It's a South American mummy.
Speaker 1: Okay. Well, even if the X Files are not directly
Speaker 1: contributing to alternative egyptology discourse, you can, I guess, look
Speaker 1: at it as kind of like a sign that fringe
Speaker 1: ideas were entering into the mainstream, at the very least
Speaker 1: as entertainment. But then I guess sometimes entertainment has a
Speaker 1: way of bleeding over into other things.
Speaker 3: Don't drag the X files into this. The x files.
Speaker 3: The X files are pure and holy they didn't do
Speaker 3: anything wrong. That's a fictional show. It's okay.
Speaker 1: But I guess the bigger thing that's going on here
Speaker 1: that Fitz points out is that at the time academics
Speaker 1: had largely ignored these trends, like academics in egyptology and
Speaker 1: so forth, archaeologists and so forth. Yeah, they weren't venturing
Speaker 1: into arguments against ancient alien discourse folks and so forth.
Speaker 1: And that's sensible by and large because like, that's not
Speaker 1: what their work is, that's not what they have set
Speaker 1: out to do with their work and their careers to
Speaker 1: just respond to various highly speculative ideas about why things
Speaker 1: appear the way they are.
Speaker 3: Well, and it's often difficult to respond to highly speculative
Speaker 3: ideas from an informed point of view because a lot
Speaker 3: of times all you can just say is, like, there's
Speaker 3: no reason to think all that you know, Like, the
Speaker 3: claims of highly speculative theories are often not like the
Speaker 3: kinds of tight, specific focused claims about specific pieces of
Speaker 3: evidence that you can that you would be used to addressing,
Speaker 3: say in an academic archaeology journal or something like that.
Speaker 3: They're like these elaborations. They spend these wild narratives that
Speaker 3: are kind of too big to even know where to
Speaker 3: get a toe hole if you're trying to criticize them,
Speaker 3: other than to just kind of say, like, well that
Speaker 3: just sounds all made.
Speaker 1: Up, yeah, Fritz Wright's quote, Academics generally avoid dealing with
Speaker 1: alternative scholars. This attitude is justified by the excuse that
Speaker 1: debating alternative or fringe scholarship only gives it a false credibility.
Speaker 1: Some consider debating speculative scholars as a dialogue of the death,
Speaker 1: since the speculative ideas tend to be treated by their
Speaker 1: adherents in a manner of religious faith rather than scientific inquiry,
Speaker 1: while some academics just hold speculative ideas in contempt. Ignoring
Speaker 1: the alternative Egyptologists did not, however, serve the academic Egyptologists well.
Speaker 1: During the nineteen nineties, they found themselves marginalized in the
Speaker 1: popular mind and put on the defense. So the argument
Speaker 1: here is that perhaps they did wait too long to
Speaker 1: respond to a lot of these ideas that were welling
Speaker 1: up into the mainstream, and he points out that it
Speaker 1: was apparently wasn't until a pair of BBC Horizon documentary
Speaker 1: specials titled Atlantis uncovered in Atlantis. Reborn weighed in and
Speaker 1: offered a scathing rebuke of these ideas in the mainstream,
Speaker 1: and this wasn't until nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 3: You know, I feel like this mirror is a pattern
Speaker 3: that's still a problem with like highly speculative alternative ideas
Speaker 3: of all sorts today because usually people who have real
Speaker 3: expertise in the field are busy talking to each other
Speaker 3: and they're kind of in a contained conversation space. Meanwhile,
Speaker 3: people who are offering highly speculative ideas go straight to
Speaker 3: the media into a popular audience.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you can understand too why I mean, thinking
Speaker 1: that the pyramids were built by aliens? Does that necessarily
Speaker 1: pose like a real threat to you know, at what
Speaker 1: point do you do you actually make the call. It's like, Okay,
Speaker 1: enough is enough. We need to say something about this.
Speaker 1: We need to put together a documentary to dismiss this nonsense,
Speaker 1: because it seems like for a long stretch of the
Speaker 1: build up you can say like, well, this is dumb,
Speaker 1: or this doesn't really match up with any actual work,
Speaker 1: but that it's been conducted, any actual research or evidence,
Speaker 1: but it's not hurting anybody.
Speaker 3: You could say that and a lot of people do
Speaker 3: say that, But I don't know. Sometimes I wonder if
Speaker 3: these supposedly harmless I mean, probably they are somewhat harmless
Speaker 3: in themselves. Highly speculative theories or conspiracy theories sort of
Speaker 3: engender a pattern of thinking that can easily be used
Speaker 3: to foster incredibly destructive and dangerous ideas that are violent.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, I think I think at this point, certainly this
Speaker 1: day and age, I think most of us realize that
Speaker 1: like the realm of conspiracy thinking is not just a
Speaker 1: domain of like escapist ideas that are not hurting anybody.
Speaker 1: There are plenty of harmful ideologies that are woven throughout
Speaker 1: many of these branches of conspiracy thought.
Speaker 3: Then again, I mean, I want to be realistic and
Speaker 3: say I don't I don't know if you can really
Speaker 3: say that if we had done a better job of
Speaker 3: convincing people that aliens didn't build the pyramids, that they
Speaker 3: wouldn't end up thinking, you know, some kind of violent
Speaker 3: conspiracy theory. But you do have to wonder if just
Speaker 3: sort of like ignoring and letting it pass when people
Speaker 3: are engaging in conspiracy thinking and these other domains just
Speaker 3: sort of like, let's that style of thought fester.
Speaker 1: All right, well, let's look at the evidence, And by
Speaker 1: look at the evidence, I mean let's look at a
Speaker 1: couple of examples. We are not setting out to look
Speaker 1: at all the evidence or alleged evidence for ancient Egyptian
Speaker 1: advanced technology and chariots of the gods and so forth.
Speaker 1: They are just a couple of examples that I think
Speaker 1: match up with what we've been discussing about information data, images, etc.
Speaker 1: That can be perplexing and that can certainly lead to
Speaker 1: an interpretation that is again not based in expertise and
Speaker 1: not based in like a wider body of evidence, but
Speaker 1: are based in confirmation bias, and based in some sort
Speaker 1: of an alternative understanding of science and or history.
Speaker 3: Okay, what you got?
Speaker 1: So, did the ancient Egyptians have Apache helicopters?
Speaker 3: Gotta be yes?
Speaker 1: Surely, No, We're we're gonna move forward with the spoilering
Speaker 1: place that no, they did not. But there is an
Speaker 1: image that you will find, and you've probably seen online.
Speaker 1: You see some hieroglyphics, and there is an image or
Speaker 1: a character towards the top that, if we're being generous,
Speaker 1: kind of looks like a modern helicopter and next to
Speaker 1: it is something that I guess kind of looks like
Speaker 1: a space tank.
Speaker 3: I mean, while we're doing this, let's not go all
Speaker 3: out under the helicopter. There is an R two D
Speaker 3: two and I don't know what you're saying, is a
Speaker 3: tank that looks to me kind of like a MiG
Speaker 3: fighter jet.
Speaker 1: Okay, all right.
Speaker 3: We also got a get we have keeping up with
Speaker 3: the R two D two theme. We have of Luke
Speaker 3: Skywalker's land speeder.
Speaker 1: You see that one, Yeah, yeah, Yeah, that's that's what
Speaker 1: I was kind of seeing as a tank. It does
Speaker 1: look at the speeder as well. Yeah. And then of
Speaker 1: course we have a we have a bug of some
Speaker 1: sort as well. That's clearly a bug. But is it
Speaker 1: a giant bug?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 1: You know, your your theory may vary.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: One of the things about this image is a lot
Speaker 1: of the places where you see it, they're not going
Speaker 1: to be approaching it from a skeptical point of view. Uh,
Speaker 1: and actually finding like good sources on this where someone's
Speaker 1: just gonna come in and and tell you exactly what
Speaker 1: you're looking at, are actually a little harder to come across.
Speaker 1: And I think this is where you get into the
Speaker 1: the problem of like experts in ancient Egypt and hieroglyphics
Speaker 1: are not necessarily wasting their time weighing in on whether
Speaker 1: ancient hieroglyphics show as a helicopter.
Speaker 3: Right, So, I haven't checked, but I would guess that, like,
Speaker 3: is this hieroglyphic a helicopter is not like the subject
Speaker 3: of many Egyptology Journal articles.
Speaker 1: Right right. But I was able to find, you know,
Speaker 1: a few different sources that discuss it in a way
Speaker 1: that I could I could get behind the image in question.
Speaker 1: I've seen in a couple of places. It attributed to
Speaker 1: a nineteen eighty seven photo by an American who is
Speaker 1: visiting the Temple of Osiris in Abydos, Egypt. So it's
Speaker 1: a it's a real photo of a real object of
Speaker 1: real you know, etchings, and it's pretty clear, like there's
Speaker 1: it's one of these things where the photo quality and
Speaker 1: the reality of the thing that is photographed these are
Speaker 1: not in question. But it's this interpretation of what you're
Speaker 1: looking at that's where you see these enormous leaps taken
Speaker 1: where people are seeing bits of advanced technology. But fortunately
Speaker 1: there is a very straightforward explanation for what we see here.
Speaker 1: I found a couple of different discussions of this, but
Speaker 1: the one I'm going to lean on mostly is this
Speaker 1: was from an article that Asian historian Richard C. Carrier
Speaker 1: wrote about back in nineteen ninety nine for The Skeptical
Speaker 1: Inquirer in an article titled flash Fox News reports that
Speaker 1: Aliens may have built the Pyramids of Egypt. As the
Speaker 1: title suggests, this is about coverage at the time on
Speaker 1: Fox News. Again, this is nineteen ninety nine about alternative Egyptology,
Speaker 1: and the broadcast included images of the alleged helicopter and
Speaker 1: comparison images to modern Apache attack helicopters. So Carrier spoke
Speaker 1: to some Egyptologists for the article, and it seems to
Speaker 1: have seems to have been sort of new pseudohistory to
Speaker 1: some of them at the time. Again, this was daring
Speaker 1: that the very end of the nineteen nineties, so it
Speaker 1: seems like, you know, the subculture was bubbling up into
Speaker 1: the mainstream quite a bit. He writes the following to
Speaker 1: sum it all up, but what do the experts say
Speaker 1: about this helicopter glyph? This will serve as an example
Speaker 1: for all the rest. The helicopter, in fact, is the
Speaker 1: Avados palimpsest. A palimpsest is what is created when new
Speaker 1: writing is inscribed over old. In the case of papyri,
Speaker 1: old inc is scraped off, but in the case of inscriptions,
Speaker 1: plaster is added over the old inscription and a new
Speaker 1: inscription is made. The image described as a helicopter is
Speaker 1: well known to be the names of Rameses inscribed over
Speaker 1: the names of his father, something Rameses was known to
Speaker 1: do quite frequently. A little bit of damage from time
Speaker 1: and weathering has furthered the illusion of a helicopter. It
Speaker 1: basically comes down to this basic fact, though, that a
Speaker 1: previous image, a previous inscription, was plastered over and replaced
Speaker 1: with another one, and then when stuff starts wearing away,
Speaker 1: a sort of hybrid image emerges that doesn't mean anything,
Speaker 1: but that looks like something from our modern age, you know,
Speaker 1: I guess it would be like it'd be like if
Speaker 1: one billboard were plastered over another one, and then there's
Speaker 1: a fierce storm and it tears part of the billboard away,
Speaker 1: and then so you have a mix of the old
Speaker 1: billboard and the new billboard, and what you're left with
Speaker 1: is just kind of confusing. But maybe it looks like
Speaker 1: a monster. Maybe it looks like you know, what have you.
Speaker 1: And by the way that the topic of palms is fascinating,
Speaker 1: there's a much older episode of Stuck to blow your
Speaker 1: mind that goes into it. But yeah, you get into
Speaker 1: this whole realm of you know, erased books just under
Speaker 1: the surface of ancient tomes, and you know, sometimes they've
Speaker 1: been on earthed. Sometimes you have to use you know,
Speaker 1: modern technology to sort of see through the printed page
Speaker 1: and see what was originally there. And you see it
Speaker 1: in paintings and much more, and it can seem a
Speaker 1: bit foreign to us, given how just disposable paper is.
Speaker 1: And you know, you can rewrite files, you know, as
Speaker 1: many times as you want. You can just set around
Speaker 1: creating new documents and deleting them all day. But there
Speaker 1: was a time when in order to erase document and
Speaker 1: create new document, well that meant grabbing the plaster.
Speaker 3: Okay, So this strikes me as a case that is
Speaker 3: in the low information category you've been talking about in
Speaker 3: multiple ways. So the original image is somewhat altered or
Speaker 3: degraded in the way that it's been photographed like it
Speaker 3: might be hard, especially if you're not familiar with ancient
Speaker 3: Egyptian inscriptions to understand that what you're looking at is
Speaker 3: not even one single continuous drawing or piece of imagery,
Speaker 3: but is instead a couple of things sort of bleeding
Speaker 3: into each other. And then on top of that, there's
Speaker 3: the low information condition of us looking at it without
Speaker 3: being familiar with, say the way the name Rameses is
Speaker 3: depicted in hieroglyphics.
Speaker 1: Yes, Now, the second example we're going to look at
Speaker 1: here is also really fascinating, and this one is a
Speaker 1: lot in a way. In a way, this one is
Speaker 1: a lot more clear, but is also even more cryptic
Speaker 1: and even harder to really understand. And you'll see what
Speaker 1: I'm talking about as we roll into the discussion here.
Speaker 1: But this concerns the so called Dindara Lights or the
Speaker 1: Dindara Light. So these are a series of stone release
Speaker 1: in the hawt Or temple in Dindera, Egypt. Now you
Speaker 1: can look up images of this, and I've included one
Speaker 1: of the images here for you to look at, Joe,
Speaker 1: and they are quite captivating, and I mean, it's it's
Speaker 1: almost unfair to throw people at this with sort of
Speaker 1: alternative Egyptology in the back of their mind, because it's
Speaker 1: going to make you lean into perhaps seeing things again
Speaker 1: from not only a modern standboy point, which we can't
Speaker 1: help but do, but also from a standpoint of looking
Speaker 1: for some sort of crazy advanced technology in the past.
Speaker 1: So if you were looking at these just kind of
Speaker 1: out of context, but not with any specific expectations of
Speaker 1: the advanced technology, I think you might guess that we're
Speaker 1: looking at a couple of ancient Egyptian individuals who have
Speaker 1: giant eggplants, and those giant eggplants have giant snakes on them.
Speaker 1: Would this would of course be be incorrect. This is
Speaker 1: not exactly what we're looking at, but that's what it
Speaker 1: kind of looks like to me.
Speaker 3: I might have said, giant shields. I mean, they're holding
Speaker 3: some of what looks like a really large flat object
Speaker 3: on which a sort of slithering snake is depicted. But
Speaker 3: of course the strange thing is that out of the
Speaker 3: bottoms of the shields there is coming some sort of line, which, again,
Speaker 3: if you're playing into ancient technology thinking, you could say,
Speaker 3: is that a power cord? Is that some kind of cable?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, so there's this sense of plant to it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's definitely a snake. There's no doubt about this snake.
Speaker 1: But then there's this this large sort of bulb or
Speaker 1: or eggplant like shape to the thing. And so the
Speaker 1: the alternative, the highly speculative hypothesis here that that once
Speaker 1: he's reflected in some of this you know, ancient alien
Speaker 1: discourse and and and you know pseudohistories and pseudo scientific
Speaker 1: ideas concerning ancient e are that well, what they are
Speaker 1: holding here are filament light bulbs or representations of filament
Speaker 1: light bulbs.
Speaker 3: Okay, well, if you are familiar with incandescent light bulbs,
Speaker 3: you can absolutely see how somebody would make that comparison.
Speaker 3: There is the shield or the eggplant shape looks like
Speaker 3: it could be a you know, a transparent glass tube.
Speaker 3: The snake depicted on it looks like it could be
Speaker 3: maybe looks like it could be the filament inside the bulb.
Speaker 3: And then the sort of line there's like a sort
Speaker 3: of flower looking thing at the base of the bulb,
Speaker 3: and you could imagine that is the socket or not
Speaker 3: the socket, what would you call it, the you know,
Speaker 3: the metal part at the base of an incandescent light bulb.
Speaker 3: And then the line extending away from the bottom. You
Speaker 3: could say, okay, that looks like a power line. It
Speaker 3: looks like, you know, whatever the electricity is going in through.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So the radical idea here would be that the
Speaker 1: ancient Egyptians had mastery over electricity. They made light bulbs
Speaker 1: or I guess receive light bulbs from someone, They got
Speaker 1: a you know, a monthly delivery from the aliens or something,
Speaker 1: and they wired up their various buildings with electric lights
Speaker 1: of one sort or the other.
Speaker 3: The aliens gave them highly inefficient incandescent light bulbs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, or I mean, when you get into the
Speaker 1: various arguments, they also they draw comparisons to you know,
Speaker 1: sort of like early different variations of artificial lighting. So
Speaker 1: I don't know, the exact model may vary, but the idea, yeah,
Speaker 1: is that the ancient Egyptians had light bulbs. Now, actual
Speaker 1: experts who weigh in on this will we'll say, well, there,
Speaker 1: these are not light bulbs, obviously. What we're looking at
Speaker 1: is a symbolic motif. And another huge important fact here
Speaker 1: is that these are not illustrations or engravings that are
Speaker 1: occurring in isolation and out of context. Like, there's plenty
Speaker 1: of context, the most important being that this is a
Speaker 1: temple of Hator. This is a god of ancient Egypt
Speaker 1: who Geraldine Pinch in the book Egyptian Mythology describes as
Speaker 1: a golden goddess that aided in childbirth, the rebirth of
Speaker 1: the dead, and the renewal of the cosmos. She was
Speaker 1: seemingly a complex deity with both destructive and beneficial attributes,
Speaker 1: and she was commonly depicted as a beautiful woman with
Speaker 1: a red solar disc between a pair of cow horns. Now,
Speaker 1: she could be worshiped in a few different forms, but
Speaker 1: one of the main roles she has here is a mother,
Speaker 1: and she is the mother of Horace, Uniter of the
Speaker 1: Two Lands. Horace, of course, is a very important god
Speaker 1: in Egyptian mythology, the celestial falcon and the god of kings.
Speaker 1: So here Horace is Harsmatus Uniter of the two Lands,
Speaker 1: and apparently in these images we're seeing representation of him
Speaker 1: in the primeval form of a serpent. In rebirth, he
Speaker 1: is depicted emerging in the form of this serpent from
Speaker 1: the lotus flower, which is in turn inside a boat,
Speaker 1: lining up with the concept of the solar god rays
Speaker 1: solar barge.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, this is starting to make sense.
Speaker 1: Yes, Yeah, so like emerging from the lotus flower is
Speaker 1: the serpent that is horse. Now you're probably wondering, what
Speaker 1: about that light bulb, what about that eggplant? Well, this
Speaker 1: is thought to be and I hope I'm pronouncing this
Speaker 1: right a hen that's h n. And it may represent
Speaker 1: the womb of the sky goddess nut or note. And
Speaker 1: this is a goddess that was associated with the fig
Speaker 1: tree and also with cosmic motherhood. The image in question
Speaker 1: also entails the symbolism of the jed pillar with added
Speaker 1: arms coming out. So this is I mean, to my
Speaker 1: eyes like, this is way weirder. This is the far
Speaker 1: weirder helmet is this strange pillar looking thing that's sort
Speaker 1: of holding up one of the eggplant shapes and has
Speaker 1: arms coming out like some sort of like are psychedelic muppet.
Speaker 1: But this is also grounded in ancient Egyptian symbolism. You know,
Speaker 1: it's about stability and you know, and holding up the
Speaker 1: cosmos and so forth.
Speaker 3: You could argue that this looks like a baseball bat
Speaker 3: with several rings around it, and it has arms, it
Speaker 3: has two arms, and it's pushing on the so called
Speaker 3: light bulb.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so in the same way, that if we look
Speaker 1: at hieroglyphics, we're looking at at language that we have
Speaker 1: no frame of reference for. It's similar with with the
Speaker 1: icons that we're seeing represented here. We have no unless
Speaker 1: we are trained in it. We have no frame of
Speaker 1: context for what these symbols are and what they represent.
Speaker 1: And all you can ultimately do is sort of like
Speaker 1: try and take them at I guess, sort of base level,
Speaker 1: and then you can potentially lean into these elaborate explanations
Speaker 1: for what you're seeing, and you know, you can imagine
Speaker 1: the what would occur if you were to take any
Speaker 1: form of highly some art from the modern world and
Speaker 1: try and understand what you're looking at. So anyway, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's speaking of visual language that we probably are not
Speaker 1: going to pick up on in the modern age again
Speaker 1: unless we have the expertise and we've you know, we
Speaker 1: are an egyptologist, et cetera, or it's been explained to us.
Speaker 1: Because at the end of the day, what we're likely
Speaker 1: looking at here is some representation of the rise of
Speaker 1: the sun and its journey through the night, though delivered
Speaker 1: through religious ideas and symbolism of the time, and also
Speaker 1: the specific theology of this particular deity.
Speaker 3: Right, and it looks like a light bulb to us
Speaker 3: rather than this ancient Egyptian artistic motif because we're used
Speaker 3: to seeing light bulbs, who were not used to seeing
Speaker 3: this artistic motif. And if you happen to be familiar
Speaker 3: with the right ancient Egyptian art you recognize it as Oh,
Speaker 3: it's one of those.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Now, I've looked at particular book by archaeologist and
Speaker 1: author Kenneth L. Fetter on this matter. The book is Frauds,
Speaker 1: Myths and Mysteries, Science and Pseudoscience and Archaeology, and he
Speaker 1: points out that these quote unquote lights a factor into
Speaker 1: Eric von Donican's nineteen ninety six book The Eyes of
Speaker 1: the Sphinx, in which Vondnican argues that the only rational
Speaker 1: way that the Egyptians, the ancient Egyptians could have worked
Speaker 1: in the dark confines of the Pyramids and other locations
Speaker 1: other structures without leaving telltale lamp black from burning lamps.
Speaker 1: The only possible way this could be the case is
Speaker 1: if they were using electric lights.
Speaker 3: Air tight.
Speaker 1: Now, Feeder points out that Egyptologists have a far less
Speaker 1: imaginative explanation backed up by actual evidence, and that is
Speaker 1: that the ancient Egyptians used linen soaked in oil or
Speaker 1: animal fat and twisted into wicks. These wicks would have
Speaker 1: burned quite brightly, and then with salt applied, this would
Speaker 1: produce less smoke, which would produce less lampblack and they
Speaker 1: would have yeah, they would have burned pretty brightly, bright
Speaker 1: enough to conduct their work, and they would also burn
Speaker 1: for a set amount of time that would apparently mark
Speaker 1: the length of an artisan where a worker's shift. And again,
Speaker 1: this is something we have context for, we have physical
Speaker 1: evidence for. It factors into our overall understanding of who
Speaker 1: the ancient Egyptians were and what their world was like.
Speaker 1: But if you go with a light bulb hypothesis, well
Speaker 1: you have no evidence because where are the examples of
Speaker 1: the other light bulbs, the spent bulbs, Where's evidence of
Speaker 1: the bulb production facilities, the power sources, the wiring, et cetera.
Speaker 1: I mean, it all just falls quickly apart. Instead, von
Speaker 1: Donikin apparently leaned on the thoroughly discredited hypothesis of the
Speaker 1: bagdad battery as proof.
Speaker 3: This is yet another artifact that has been interpreted by
Speaker 3: some as electrical technology in the ancient world, but probably
Speaker 3: was not.
Speaker 1: Right, and so the author here feter not von do Onic,
Speaker 1: and sums up quote because prehistoric pictorial depictions and even
Speaker 1: early written descriptions are sometimes indistinct or vague, and perhaps
Speaker 1: more important, because they are part of a different culture
Speaker 1: and have a context not immediately apparent to those who
Speaker 1: do not explore further. You can see or read anything
Speaker 1: you want into them, just as you can with ink blots.
Speaker 1: And so he refers to this elsewhere in the book
Speaker 1: as the ink block principle, which I think is a
Speaker 1: good way of thinking about evidence of this nature.
Speaker 3: Now, one way in which I would distinguish this example
Speaker 3: from many of the others is that this example does
Speaker 3: not seem as within the image itself as degraded in
Speaker 3: quality or vague to me, at least in the like
Speaker 3: the illustrations I see from books. It looks like, you know,
Speaker 3: we get a pretty clear picture of what the artwork,
Speaker 3: whether at least the outlines and the artwork we're supposed
Speaker 3: to be. But you're still, even though the picture is
Speaker 3: fairly sharp, in the low information zone, because you don't
Speaker 3: have the context, the background knowledge to place what you're
Speaker 3: looking at within its cultural milieu.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, we just don't have the symbolic language
Speaker 1: at our disposal to necessarily look at this and understand
Speaker 1: what's taking place. And again, I think this is this
Speaker 1: is not something that's that that is unique to ancient
Speaker 1: Egyptian religious imagery. I think you could apply this to
Speaker 1: to various other examples of even contemporary religious imagery, where
Speaker 1: if you if you don't know what you're looking at, you're, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're not going to understand the message of it, like
Speaker 1: what is being theologically relayed in this image, and you
Speaker 1: have to fall back on either just like again, a
Speaker 1: very literal interpretation of what you're looking at, or dragging
Speaker 1: in some sort of other belief system or some sort
Speaker 1: of other, you know, mode of understanding which may or
Speaker 1: may not involve aliens.
Speaker 3: Another thing that I'm struck is sort of the general
Speaker 3: principle of thinking behind the Eric Vondanakan argument that Okay,
Speaker 3: they're working in the dark inside the pyramid chambers, and
Speaker 3: they wouldn't have been able to see what they were
Speaker 3: working on without leaving lampblack unless they had light bulbs.
Speaker 3: That seems to be a general style of argument used
Speaker 3: by like ancient aliens people. I mean the same thing
Speaker 3: is said about the construction of the pyramids. More generally,
Speaker 3: it's like, I can't see how they could have done this,
Speaker 3: Therefore it must have been aliens with advanced technology. That
Speaker 3: is a really poor way to reason. Instead, you could
Speaker 3: start by saying, like, well, what if instead of invoking
Speaker 3: entities that would radically reshape our way of thinking about
Speaker 3: the world, and there is no independent evidence of what if?
Speaker 3: Instead of that, we think that maybe they figured out
Speaker 3: a solution that you haven't thought of or you don't
Speaker 3: have awareness of.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like I mean you would It would be understand
Speaker 1: if you didn't know about this whole adding salt to
Speaker 1: torches or lights as a way to decrease lampblack There's
Speaker 1: so many things like that in life that would have
Speaker 1: been a parent or known to individuals who depended on
Speaker 1: lamp technology or fire based illumination technology as opposed to
Speaker 1: the mode we're familiar with and the mode that we
Speaker 1: then potentially read into these ancient images.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would just say be careful about making the
Speaker 3: move of I can't understand how someone could have done
Speaker 3: X two. Therefore they must have relied upon powers that
Speaker 3: are extraordinary, and we have no other independent evidence.
Speaker 1: Of I'm reminded of various time travel movies that we've
Speaker 1: discussed or looked at on weird house cinema, where you
Speaker 1: have some sort of time traveler from the past going
Speaker 1: into the future and they are and they may not
Speaker 1: be time traveling, perhaps they're frozen, etc. You know. Well,
Speaker 1: a man out of time wakes up and they're trying
Speaker 1: to understand our advanced contemporary technology. They might look at
Speaker 1: a TV and they're like, they shrunk a person down
Speaker 1: and put him in a tiny box, and you know,
Speaker 1: and this is often played up for comedy, but it's
Speaker 1: not that different from the sort of you know, you
Speaker 1: know what you can consider ridiculous analysis of past technology
Speaker 1: where instead of you know, leaning on you know, the
Speaker 1: actual context of the thing and what they're capable of,
Speaker 1: you're going to this extreme model that you can't possibly
Speaker 1: explain with any degree of accuracy.
Speaker 3: That's an amazing analogy. Actually, we are the unfrozen caveman
Speaker 3: lawyer in reverse when we look at the ancient world.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: So he comes up and says, I am but a
Speaker 3: simple caveman. When I get into an airplane, I think,
Speaker 3: is this some giant bird? But we are doing the
Speaker 3: same thing. We look at an ancient inscription and say,
Speaker 3: when I look at an inscription of a bird, I think,
Speaker 3: is this an attack helicopter?
Speaker 1: Exactly? All right, Well, that's perfect. I think we have
Speaker 1: to leave it at that. I think that that puts
Speaker 1: a nice cap on it. But you know, were perfectly
Speaker 1: happy to continue talking about this particular topic or this
Speaker 1: sort of thing in general if nothing else in future
Speaker 1: listener Mail episode. So write in let us know what
Speaker 1: your thoughts are on egyptology, alternative egyptology and so forth,
Speaker 1: or just in general, if there are other examples of
Speaker 1: this sort of data, this sort of imagery, etc. That
Speaker 1: you know is difficult for the average modern viewer to
Speaker 1: understand and then lends itself well to some sort of
Speaker 1: paranormal or alternative or conspiracy explanation. Just a reminder that
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your minds Core episodes published on Tuesdays
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Speaker 1: We have listener Mail on Monday, short Form Artifactor, Monster
Speaker 1: Effect on Wednesdays, and on Fridays, we set aside most
Speaker 1: serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on
Speaker 1: Weird House Cinema.
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