Ancient Aliens

[sojourner]

And one thing the megolithich structures have over modern stuff like sky scrappers are that they last......sky scrappers, bridges, etc need to be maintained and worked on....metal oxidizes, plastics disolve, glass is brittle (unless made in a perfect vaccum, than it would be better than steel).....the Pyramids, both in Egypt and South America and Mexico, they are still there and looking good.

But those megalithic structures are just lumps of stone. And do you somehow think if we constructed solid simple geometric shapes of stone today that they wouldn't last as long?

A parking garage is not a pyramid. Each one has it's own uses, upkeep, and construction.

What about all the ancient wonders that haven't survived? For every pyramid of Giza there are 5 that have withered away in the sands.Were the aliens contracted to build them doing shoddy work?

Science doesn't work like you think it does. Mainly because you haven't tried to actually apply scientific, critical thinking. Science doesn't just take things on faith and "seems to me" guesses like you apparently favor. It tests the validity of those ideas. The ideas that hold up to scrutiny get accepted. The ones that don't get dropped. People that cling to ideas that hve no scientific merit just reveal their own stupidity.

 

[Deckerd]

Science doesn't work like you think it does. Mainly because you haven't tried to actually apply scientific, critical thinking. Science doesn't just take things on faith and "seems to me" guesses like you apparently favor. It tests the validity of those ideas. The ideas that hold up to scrutiny get accepted. The ones that don't get dropped.

Well he hasn't been trained in any discipline as far as I can see. It's the same as "I haven't seen the film but I know it sucks". To dismiss the entire archeological discipline, never mind the achievement of the sciences, is too silly to even be risible.

 

[Gov Kodos]

But, training can lead to dogmatism and missing new possibilities for the safety of accepted practice and conventions. If Einstein had accepted the conventions of the past he'd been happy with what he'd learned in school and stayed an obscure patent clerk. Bring on the theories and race for the future.

 

[Deckerd]

But, training can lead to dogmatism and missing new possibilities for the safety of accepted practice and conventions.

But why are those damned archaeologists constantly revising their opinions about stuff? I've just been reading Ewan Campbell's theories on the fact that Dal Riada was not an influx of Irish to Scotland but a separate group who established the area independently. Sweeping away 2000 years of folklore, by just digging around in the dirt. Ridiculous.

 

[Gov Kodos]

But, training can lead to dogmatism and missing new possibilities for the safety of accepted practice and conventions.

But why are those damned archaeologists constantly revising their opinions about stuff? I've just been reading Ewan Campbell's theories on the fact that Dal Riada was not an influx of Irish to Scotland but a separate group who established the area independently. Sweeping away 2000 years of folklore, by just digging around in the dirt. Ridiculous.

Since no one wants to look into the Picts and their mysterious origins, Atlantis perhaps, why not throw out Dal Riada along with Arthur and pre-Anglo-Saxon Britain.

 

[Deckerd]

Arthur's real. There's loads of evidence.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Seems to me that the mainstream scientific community is as dogmatic as some religious communities....both of which thinking that we know it all, and that if someone else points out something, he or she is wrong, wrong, wrong...

The difference between scientists and clerics is that scientists spend millions of dollars and dozens of years researching the subject before they come to a conclusion, whereas clercis spend hundreds of dollars and dozens of years reinforcing conclusions that were made before they were ever born. "Dogma" is something you believe because you've been taught to believe it, which is not what scientists do.

I'd grant that paradigm shifts in science can shake up the conventional wisdom and sometimes a new theory comes along that blows everyone else's theories out of the water and forces everyone to look at the data again. That is a COMPLETELY different thing from "refusal to look at alternate possibilities." Science is about DATA, not speculation.

I mean look at the Sphinx, there's water erosion on the Sphinx, as well as it's enclosure, and the last time Eygpt had any sigificant rainfall was like 10,000 years

The water erosion on the Sphinx is consistent with the average rainfall in the Giza region over the past 6,000 years (which is noticeably less than it is today). More importantly, most of that erosion on the Sphinx is wind/dust erosion, not water erosion.

not to mention the fact that I see a black woman's face on it, as oppossed to Chephren.

I repeat: you do know Cephren was black, right?

And the verdict was the face of the Sphinx is not the same person as represented in the statue of the Pharoh Chephren.....he did not have the Sphinx done...

That's a dubious conclusion if I ever saw one, considering the people who sculpted the Sphinx were almost certainly not the same people who sculpted the statue.

And one thing the megolithich structures have over modern stuff like sky scrappers are that they last......sky scrappers, bridges, etc need to be maintained and worked on...

Or else they fall into disrepair and begin to show signs of decay and erosion over the millennia. Not totally unlike the pyramids, come to think of it.

OTOH, there's something to be said for the longevity of stone over metal. In which case, there's no doubt in my mind that 3000 years from now someone is going to propose an ancient aliens theory to explain the geopolitical dominance of the United States and use Mount Rushmore as proof of it (George Washington's eroded and cracked face on the mountain doesn't look anything like the statue in the ruins of the smithsonian).

Pyramids, both in Egypt and South America and Mexico, they are still there and looking good.

Having actually BEEN to Chichen Itza and seen the condition of those cities and the pyramids there, I can tell you "looking good" is not the way I would have put it. The people who discovered the city had to clear about a thousand years worth of brush from the ruins just to make it accessible, and in the intervening years both the ancient city and the pyramid have been subject to careful restoration to keep them from crumbling to the elements. The pyramids, too, are showing extreme signs of wear as the outermost stones have all decayed away and blown into dust (it was built with smooth sides originally, remember?).

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Science doesn't work like you think it does. Mainly because you haven't tried to actually apply scientific, critical thinking. Science doesn't just take things on faith and "seems to me" guesses like you apparently favor. It tests the validity of those ideas. The ideas that hold up to scrutiny get accepted. The ones that don't get dropped.

Well he hasn't been trained in any discipline as far as I can see. It's the same as "I haven't seen the film but I know it sucks". To dismiss the entire archeological discipline, never mind the achievement of the sciences, is too silly to even be risible.

That reminds me of a scene from the Boondocks.

Grandad: What do you have against Soul Plane? That movie was funny!
Huey: Funny like a lynching.
Grandad: You never even saw it!
Huey: I've never seen a lynching either, but I know they're not funny.

 

[BillJ]

...

Still waiting for the smallest piece of tangible evidence to back up your claims.

 

[TIN_MAN]

I repeat: you do know Cephren was black, right?

Curious, Is there scientific proof for this twice-repeated dogmatic statement?

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I repeat: you do know Cephren was black, right?

Curious, Is there scientific proof for this twice-repeated dogmatic statement?

Because Cephren -- better known by his actual name Khafra -- reigned some time during the 4th dynasty, between about 2400 and 2700 BC. Not only would this put it about 5000 years prior to significant Arab colonization of the region, it's also about a thousand years before Egypt had any significant cultural, economic or military exchanges with European or middle eastern cultures (e.g. the Macedonians, the Persians, the Ptolemics, etc). Their closest neighbors and primary trading partners were the Nubians and the Ethiopians and to a lesser extent the Sudanese. The reason Egypt is predominantly Arab NOW is because the Arabs spent a thousand years doing in Egypt what they've only recently begun doing in Sudan. Or, at the risk of oversimplification, they raped all the women and raised the children themselves (a similar thing happened in the Arab conquest of Spain). Prior to at least the Macedonian conquest -- if not slightly earlier -- the Nile Delta civilization wasn't genetically all that different from any other African nation; their CURRENT racial identity is a kind of genetic trailmix with contributions of everyone who ever conquered the place, and that's a VERY long list.

What are you asking for, though? A genetic study proving that Khafra was actually black? You might as well ask for scientific evidence that Caesar was white.

 

[Maurice]

The subject of the "race" of the ancient Egyptians remains debated a lot.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

The subject of the "race" of the ancient Egyptians remains debated a lot.

Only in the context of old Judeo-Christian views of race, extruded through three hundred years of hardcore eurocentrism. Two practices which 1) glossed over dozens of distinct sub-groups and language families in favor of the theory that Africans in general were part of a single, inferior race and 2) considered Arab culture to be at least redeemable, if only it could be sufficiently "civilized". The desire to imagine the ancient Egyptians as having ALWAYS been closely related to Arabs is taken as proof that semitic peoples have always been capable of wonderful things and could be so again with the right leadership; they couldn't have been black, of course, because if any of the negroid races were capable of anything like that, maybe they still ARE? The first point is now outmoded, since there is no coherent political reason to affirm the god-given subservient nature of black people. The second, however, soldiers on, having evolved from the need to "Christianize" the heathen Arabs into the 21st century imperative to "Spread freedom and democracy" in the Muslim lands (spreading freedom and democracy in Africa is on the bottom of most people's priority list because... well, it's Africa, who the hell cares?).

Let's be perfectly clear about this: to the extent that any distinct "race" of human beings could be identified at all, there are phenotypical traits associated with specific regions on the planet, sub-groups that have more in common with one another than they do with anyone else (or did, originally, before historical forces tossed the genetic salad that is human biodiversity). I'm not saying that Cephren was a Bantu-speaking Zulu warlord or something, I'm saying it's safe to assume that an individual living in Pre-conquest Egypt would probably have physical features similar to other ethic groups in the same contiguous region.

That I should even have to SAY this a bit silly. It's like someone asking me to prove that Qin Shi Huang wasn't a Mongolian.

ETA: of course, this IS an "Ancient Aliens" thread, so it's a lot more likely that someone's going to suggest that Shi Huang was an alien.

 

[TIN_MAN]

What are you asking for, though? A genetic study proving that Khafra was actually black? You might as well ask for scientific evidence that Caesar was white.

I take that as a no, you don't have any evidence to back up your dogmatic statement. But it would be nice to at least have a mummy to test, but then we don’t have "Ra Khaf's" mummy do we?

I'm saying it's safe to assume that an individual living in Pre-conquest Egypt would probably have physical features similar to other ethic groups in the same contiguous region.

It's never safe to assume, especially in regards to a discipline that wants to be taken seriously as scientific, as Egyptology does, or for that matter, by any individual who wants what they say to be taken seriously.

Anyhow, there's plenty of evidence that the ancient "Khemitians" were a mixed people from the very beginning, (i.e. all those mummies we do have, among other things) to "assume" that they must have been black is to trade the current political correctness for the old Eurocentric PC, both are equally suspect. And all this speculation still doesn't get us any closer to a "scientific" answer; it's all pretty much guesswork.

But more to the point, there is a diorite statue, said by Egyptologists to be of Khafra, but the provenance is suspect, (i.e. his name isn’t written on it) so there is no certainty on the matter, and FWIW, it looks Caucasoid.

Then there's the Sphinx, said by Egyptologists to be carved in the likeness of Khafra, but again, there’s no certainty in the matter, and as pointed out already, it does look Negroid, and so these two supposed likenesses of Khafra don't even look like each other, and are clearly different people.

Bottom line is; nobody knows what Khafra looked like or what his ancestry was.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

While Egypt had ties to Nubia, they also had ties to the Levant even before the New Kingdom (they also had ties to Yemen and Ethiopia, so things are all muddled). I've also heard a good argument that Upper Egypt was "Black" while Lower Egypt was "Middle Eastern." There's no real indication that Egyptians viewed race in a modern context.

I think it's quite possible that the Old Kingdom Egyptians were "black," but it also doesn't make a damned bit of difference so I don't think about it much.

 

[TIN_MAN]

I think it's quite possible that the Old Kingdom Egyptians were "black," but it also doesn't make a damned bit of difference so I don't think about it much.

Let's not go there. Don't make this an issue about racial prejudice, the point is whether newtype_alpha's opinion that "Khafra was black" -stated (twice) as if were a self evident fact for all the world to see- is indeed, a fact. It is not.

But your point about Lower Egypt is well taken, we're not talking central Africa, or for that matter, central Asia or central Europe here. Lower Egypt is one of many "border regions" around the world where people from many racial and ethnic groups have always mingled, and so one would expect a more diverse population than one would find in the more central continental areas.

So whether Qin Shi Huang was or wasn't a Mongolian is beside the point.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

Actually, I wasn't making it about racial prejudice. My point is that the Ancient Egyptians didn't seem to make a distinction so it apparently was a non-issue. This is different from Carthage, for example, who clearly distinguished themselves from the Numidians/Libyans/etc. who surrounded them.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

It's never safe to assume, especially in regards to a discipline that wants to be taken seriously as scientific, as Egyptology does

I'm not an Egyptologist, and neither are you. And you insisting on "scientific proof" that the monarch of an African nation would actually LOOK like an African means I am not really inclined to take you seriously either.

But more to the point, there is a diorite statue, said by Egyptologists to be of Khafra, but the provenance is suspect, (i.e. his name isn’t written on it) so there is no certainty on the matter

You're referring to this one, right?

it looks Caucasoid.

Not to me it doesn't. But I suppose "Where's your scientific proof" is logically equivalent to looking at a statue and saying "Er... looks caucusoid to me."

Regardless to the overall point: it's a question of basic facial features an individual in a particular region is likely to have. Egypt BECAME a mixed culture later in its history after extensive contact and intermixing with the Berbers and other Mediterranean/middle eastern powers. But Khafra's reign would have been in the old Kingdom, way too early for that, and like most of the population would have had facial features more similar to those found in the southern portion of the continent than the northern/eastern regions they had yet to have any long term contact with. Even the Berbers -- the closest thing there was to a Caucusoid race in North Africa at the time -- never made it as far as the Nile Delta before the New Kindgom.

And again, to even have to explain and defend this is almost asinine. We may not know what the first emperor of China looked like, but it's a foregone conclusion that he probably looked Chinese. The only reason -- and I do mean the ONLY reason -- this is not in dispute is because there's been no concerted effort to rewrite Chinese history to make it palatable to self-conscious westerners (Ergo, when artists do a rendering of Qin Shi Huang, they don't imagine that he looked like David Karadine.

 

[TIN_MAN]

I'm not an Egyptologist, and neither are you.

There you go assuming again. How do you know I'm not an Egyptologist?

And you insisting on "scientific proof" that the monarch of an African nation would actually LOOK like an African means I am not really inclined to take you seriously either.

You’re not following me, I'm not insisting on "scientific proof" that Khafra would actually LOOK African, I'm insisting that there is no scientific proof that he did. That you insist that he did is why I'm really inclined not to take your twice repeated dogmatic statement seriously, and neither should anyone else.

But I suppose "Where's your scientific proof" is logically equivalent to looking at a statue and saying "Er... looks caucusoid to me."

Again you’re assuming. I didn't say "Er... looks Caucasoid to me", I said "and FWIW, it looks Caucasoid", I was actually referring to others opinions that it does, not my own.

And I was in no way suggesting that this image represents "scientific proof" of any sort, just the opposite in fact, hence the "FWIW" that you conveniently ignored. Heck, personally, I doubt if it even is Khafra, but who knows? My point in mentioning it, and the sphinx likeness was (ironically) simply to show that uncertainty abounds in this sort of thing.

Regardless to the overall point: it's a question of basic facial features an individual in a particular region is likely to have. Egypt BECAME a mixed culture later in its history after extensive contact and intermixing with the Berbers and other Mediterranean/middle eastern powers. But Khafra's reign would have been in the old Kingdom, way too early for that, and like most of the population would have had facial features more similar to those found in the southern portion of the continent than the northern/eastern regions they had yet to have any long term contact with. Even the Berbers -- the closest thing there was to a Caucasoid race in North Africa at the time -- never made it as far as the Nile Delta before the New Kingdom.

Meh, If memory serves, there are life size painted wooden statues -representing Egyptians- dating from the old kingdom, that have glass (or crystal) corneas inserted in the eyes , which are blue in color, and also with light reddish-brown skin tone. So someone living as Egyptians in the old kingdom must have come -or gotten some of their genes from, some place besides central Africa.

And again, to even have to explain and defend this is almost asinine. We may not know what the first emperor of China looked like, but it's a foregone conclusion that he probably looked Chinese.

See previous reply. FWIW (there it is again, don't miss it this time ) there's actually evidence that other races were mingling in ancient China too, so who knows?

But since you consider it "asinine" to "explain and defend" why you present your personal opinions as self evident fact, there’s really no point in pursuing the subject, but it is another reason not to take your statements on the matter seriously.

The only reason -- and I do mean the ONLY reason -- this is not in dispute is because there's been no concerted effort to rewrite Chinese history to make it palatable to self-conscious westerners (Ergo, when artists do a rendering of Qin Shi Huang, they don't imagine that he looked like David Karadine.

Another of your oft-quoted opinions with little evidence to support it; this sounds like you’re advocating a "conspiracy theory"? How is this any different than the beliefs of others who say there is a government conspiracy to cover up alien contact, past and present? Both positions are equally unsupported by the facts.

Remember, your entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I'm not an Egyptologist, and neither are you.

There you go assuming again. How do you know I'm not an Egyptologist?

Because if you were, you would have contributed something constructive by now on the subject other than pedantic half-objections.

You’re not following me, I'm not insisting on "scientific proof" that Khafra would actually LOOK African, I'm insisting that there is no scientific proof that he did.

We don't even have scientific proof that he was HUMAN.

dogmatic statement

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Meh, If memory serves, there are life size painted wooden statues -representing Egyptians- dating from the old kingdom, that have glass (or crystal) corneas inserted in the eyes , which are blue in color, and also with light reddish-brown skin tone.

I take it you've never seen a black man with blue eyes before?

But since you consider it "asinine" to "explain and defend" why you present your personal opinions as self evident fact

Self evident fact is self evident fact. Nothing personal about it.

Another of your oft-quoted opinions with little evidence to support it; this sounds like you’re advocating a "conspiracy theory"? How is this any different than the beliefs of others who say there is a government conspiracy to cover up alien contact, past and present?

Because there is no evidence of the existence of aliens ever having visited Earth. There IS evidence of scientific racism having a profound influence on the way European archeologists approached (and in some cases, STILL approach) their analysis of ancient civilizations.

Or wait, don't tell me... you need scientific evidence of the existence of racism too?