A Theory on Egypt...

[HydrogenBond]

Instead of using the assumption of other advanced civilizations to explain how relatively simple folk could achieve such results, an alternate explanation is the brain is more than the conscious mind. Their conscious mind fit their times but the unconscious mind exerted at a more advanced state of mind than the capabilities in their conscious mind. They were able to tap into these higher processing areas of the brain that are traditionally unconscious. They projected this affect into their gods with them thinking this knowledge was from the gods.

For example, invention is not a course you can take in school, or else everyone would be inventing. It requires a certain type of natural skill that allows unconscious processing and an interface to the conscious mind. The idea pops into the imagination with logic and action coming after. But there was no logic to record, which may be why it was not written in records. The ideas of higher civilizations or even UFO's helping also imply intelligence higher than the base level of their conscious minds. This is the unconscious mind.

To put it in perspective, simple walking is so easy a 1 year old child to go it with the conscious mind. But if we dig deeper that simple motion is very complex in terms of all the muscles and muscle fibers that that need to be controlled and coordinated. This is all processed at an unconscious level. Even computer simulations of walking and robots, with supercomputers, don't get it quite as smooth as natural. If we tried to do all this consciously the walking will look like an old fashion robot.

Picture if while you were walking, you were conscious of all these things going on in the background, so you can perceive say 20 multi-tasks at the same time. It is hard to describe but the gist could make programming walking much more efficient. It may go in a new direction that looks like an alien showed you. Nobody could teach you this but it would be a creative impulse to do the impossible for that time based on a conscious effort. We are more comfortable saying Atlantis or UFO's because the unconscious is a scary place and reminds you of psychosis, where you hear voices and see things that are not in reality, such as those funny pyramids things being assembled before they were.

[GAHD]

Originally Posted by alexander

2.
Agreed, gray granite is not harder then sand, problem is, you still can't polish it to the level it was polished to using sand, it's too course for he job, we are talking about surfaces that would take 1500 grit diamond polishing pads, i dont believe you can find sand anywhere near the right coarseness, and am not sure if you can make it...?

I need to polish stone...I use a piece of the same stone against it, and they polish each other chipping bits off and slowly crushing those bits into a fine powder between the two sliding slabs. By using 2 blocks of the same material the loading actually helps the final polish quite a bit. Keeping the slabs to a significant fraction of each other's size I can even polish to very fine accuracies, all of it taking just time and effort with repetitive motions.

Egyptian teeth are prime exaples of the effects of sand and stone wearing away at things. It's not magic, it's simple logic and material knowledge with a bit of effort and a lot of boredom.

They had no tv

they had no radio

there was a large populace with lots of time to spare in between caring for crops.

I'm not surprised in the slightest what a mass of bored people can do if given direction.

[alexander]

Gahd, if you are pondering that i haven't thought of that, i have, ofcourse what would be easier then just using one rock to polish the other side.

Here's the deal, a, surfaces i'm referring to are uneven, they not just flat on top, they are concaved, pwefectly cut, perfectly rounded or angled, and still polished to perfection, you are talking about perfect cuts between the two pieces that would be used, but you how, simply how, can you have a perfect cut between two pieces of stone that are over 3 by 4 yards in size, current egyptian scripture refers to no tools that could be used to make them. Another place where that logic gets quirky, is looking at unfinished sarcophagi, with concave surfaces, and lots of small grooves, very periodic, very similar, something you see after a large cutting wheel went through and cut the stone, very large, and here is where it falls apart, egyptians cataloged a lot of what they have, we have pictograms explaining the assembly of the pyramids, we have pictograms showing the making of blocks, and hauling them into place, we have pictographs of the mummification process, and making of the later pharaoh sarcophagi, but when it comes to stone working, outside of the much softer, sandstone, used in building the later structures, there is little describing their stone work. And i am more then willing to accept that they used hand tools and ingenuity and time, but some things totally throw me off...

here are some examples

gahd and i wont disagree, but what are the first thoughts when you look at these slabs of rock, here:

http://media.commercialappeal.com/mc.../6pyramid.jpeg
http://www.geocities.com/unforbidden...t_pavement.jpg
http://www.geology.enr.state.nc.us/0...jet%20slot.jpg
http://www.delange.org/Quarry/Mvc-013s.jpg
http://www.quarryscapes.no/images/Egypt_sites/fa4.jpg



i have finally found a historical reference to tools that can produce such cuts, namely china and around 1900bc, over 1000 years after the earliest possible time frame i am referencing to, but once again its not necessarily straight cuts that i question, it's the concaved ones with groves going across that puzzle me the most at the moment... i'll look if i can find some photos online, it's been long and i saw most of what i describe in nat geo videos, and such....

i will restate, i don't believe or try to propagate ideas that there was some more advanced civilization before egyptians, that they talked to atlantis people, that they were magicians, that they had access to higher technology, not at all believing any of that, but i'm simply pondering explanations...

[HydrogenBond]

In a physics forum I posted a topic the physics of the imagination. The human imagination is not confined to cause and affect or even the laws of probability. The example I used is, one can imagine themselves winning every lottery while flying in space without a machine. The mechanism of consciousness, which is not fully understood, can create output affects that are not under the laws of nature that we currently know. If we could hock up the brain and project this on a monitor we could record this affect.

For the ancient egyptians to make complex engineering like the pyramids, that could not depend on the rational laws of the time or probability. Even now it sort of defies reason, which is why we have this topic. But it falls in the realm of what is possible in the imagination. I said unconscious affects wired into this part of the brain.

The way to picture it is a bunch of religious zealots, who at one level are aware of the world around them but also compelled by the irrationality of their collective beliefs. Within this collective trance or delusion, their imagination is caught in a flux. The design and construction is happening to them via unconscious compulsion. Maybe they called it the gods acting through them and will power.

The artist in the trance creates a final result without planning or even be able to ever reproduce it again. This is hard for the modern mind to grasp who would like to project reason and logic before it was even invented by the Greeks. Their skill set was out of their expected time element. Their art is fairly low quality compared to this engineering feat and was more indicative of another time, which is not a problem in the imagination.

[alexander]

i didn't say they didn't have a drive, i simply said that from the looks of some of the evidence, i couldn't even really examine, never been to egypt, it looks as thought they had tools that can easily surpass the most advanced rock cutting tools of our day. So much of it just does not seem to make any sort of sense, from a perspective of someone who understands the difficulties in that kind of resource processing, someone who likes to think outside of the box that any guide out there would put you in, like the unfinished obelisk, they say men with round rocks were cutting into the rock to create what we see, but what we see is a perfectly cut obelisk, sharp edges, perfect faces, etc, being seeming cut out by a bunch of people with small round rocks, which, to my knowledge, would be so extremely hard to do, that it would be simpler to develop the technology to do this and then cut the faces, then sit there with round rocks and do this, without a slightest hint of a mistake, or a slightest imperfection on 3 of the 4 surfaces, it makes one wonder, was it really that ancients used techniques that were so-proposed by these people, or did we not find out how they did it, and we stick with what cave men did to make their spears...?

[HydrogenBond]

I can see them using 4 stone cutters professions in an assemble line. The first type of cutter specialized in rough cut to make the basic shape or size stone. These come from the quarry, rough, and are transported to site. The second cutter profession chiseled it into the final shape but would leave rough chisel marks. He didn't have to wait for the stone to reach the site but could work during transport if a fixed size was needed. The third specialty were the polishers who then knocked off the chisel edges. Finally you had the fine tuner who shape to fit. The polishers could also work in transit to get the face smooth, but the fitters were on site.

I have a friend who is a plasterer. He can eyeball a long wall and square it off with only his eye and trowel. So someone making an arc cut could just see the cut and chisel it out. The more you do it the faster it will become. With an assemble line, each step could use basic tools with a good eye to do their job. They may even engineered labor saving improvements, but like a sword, it was custom improvements, and not off the shelf.

If you have one person doing one of the assemble line steps he can get really good at it. The rough cutter would therefore make less and less work for the shaper, who them made less and less work for the polisher-fitter. Before long as fast as the stones arrived they are ready to install.

Transporting stones was another matter and may have also used an assemble line to help keep the labor force fresher. For example, line your guys the entire way from quarry to pyramid. Or at least over a long span of distance. The guys are changing out by staying in their area in the line. If the stones were spaced properly, the labor force will get to rest their arms and shake off the legs. The supply lines brought water and food in a constant stream countercurrent to the stones.

[Southtown]

Originally Posted by GAHD

...It's not magic, it's simple logic and material knowledge with a bit of effort and a lot of boredom.

They had no tv

they had no radio

there was a large populace with lots of time to spare in between caring for crops.

I'm not surprised in the slightest what a mass of bored people can do if given direction.

I think the motivation was more likely to have been provided by brutality rather than boredom.

[alexander]

south, i think you are mistaken about egyptians in the most fundementalest of ways, especially pyramid builders...

[Southtown]

Well, sorry. It just seems to me that someone who would have pyramids built for their own burial would be slightly skewed in their sense of self-importance. You could probably prove me wrong, though.

[alexander]

no that part is extremely correct, remeber pharaohs were considered gods, so yes, they thought godly of themselves. But the people who built pyramids were not scared into doing so, they were doing this willingly, because what better thing to do in your life then serve a God...