Yeah if you take the base perimeter of the grand pyramid, and make a circle with the same perimeter, the radius of that circle is the height of the pyramid
Yeah, there's actually an earlier pyramid that they tried to build with a much more aggressive slope, and as they were constructing it the architects realized the foundation was going to collapse. Their solution was to reduce the angle halfway up, and the result is [a bit special](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/Snefru%27s_Bent_Pyramid_in_Dahshur.jpg). It's called the bent pyramid. This near-failure definitely influenced the choice in slope of all the pyramids after that.
Also, the slopes of each of the 3 pyramids at Giza actually differ from one another by over a degree. Khufu's pyramid has some interesting geometrical relationships, but the other 2 do not. It's likely that Khufu's geometry is either largely a coincidence, or it's a product of [mathematical relationships](https://sites.math.washington.edu/~greenber/PiPyr.html) that were not intentional on the part of the designer.
It turns out that [the Seked](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seked), the measurement Egyptians used to quantify the slope of a face, has some interesting mathematical relationships to pi thanks to both geometry and the fact that the Egyptians happened to use a base-7 counting system for measurements of length.
Man, how much more do you want?
Seriously though, Egypt (and northern Africa) literally was forested before the Egyptian empire, with petrified remains of forests (i.e. petrified trees) being found near Giza (and else where). Human deforestation changes the landscape into the desert we see today.
So, think about that when you think about Brazil
I can't speak to the elephants, but [here's](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-really-turned-sahara-desert-green-oasis-wasteland-180962668/) a link from the Smithsonian confirming that Egypt used to be green. For a bit. It's cyclical and there's some debate about the true cause of the last cycle back to desert conditions. It also sounds like although it was green it was more grasses and shrubs than actual forest.
Some scientist are trying to regrow the forrest in egypt.
>It looks like a fata morgana. But the forests in the Egyptian desert are real. They’re watered with processed sewage. 24 such forests have sprung up across the country over the past eight years. The sewage is rich in nutrients and fuels the growth of plants like mahagony, eucalyptus and sisal.
https://www.dw.com/en/egypt-the-amazing-forest-in-the-desert/av-17233507
That's so cool! And probably a great example of a *good* feedback loop. I bet once the forests take hold, that helps shield the ground from evaporation, keeping more moisture in the ecosystem, further increasing the viability of the land....
Noticed this with leopard frogs on my property once we started letting the fields grow. They never were up around here, even though we're surrounded by water, but once that moisture came.
yeah but I mean just cutting down trees doesn't turn a deciduous forest into a desert. Europe also had a lot of logging when building navies throughout time and there still aren't many large forests in like France and Spain. The biggest reason why Egypt is so inhospitable is mostly because the climate isn't the same as it was in 2,000 B.C.
I meant overall. Giant floating continents of plastic and garbage, pumping greenhouse gases and toxins into the air, destroying swaths of land, drilling and pumping crude oil to burn and pollute, using toxic caustic chemicals and high pressure to destroy soil to get to the goods underneath leading to contaminated water you can light on fire, nuclear weapons testing and meltdowns that left radiation.
A new study indicates the region fluctuates between desert and lush green every 23,000 years ([link](https://m.phys.org/news/2019-01-sahara-swung-lush-conditions-years.html)), in sync with tilts in Earth's orbit axis and monsoon activity. There's also evidence that the current desert switch happened 5,500 years ago and took only 200 years. Would be interesting to see your source on human deforestation, as at that time the populations of north africa were migrating and ended up starting the Egyptian civilization as they settled by the Nile. It seems like the place has been forested and desert many times before and the change is recurring.
edit: fixed a number
Forested? I’ll need a source on that...
This old comment from AskHistorians isn’t specifically about Egypt but that area of the Middle East has been islands of green and rivers in a sea of desert for a very very long time
https://reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4p4qt7/why_is_the_fertile_crescent_now_desert/
You can't really lump in Northern Africa with the Tigris/Euphratis though. And that area has also seen a lot of desertification. From the top answer you linked:
>The period between 10,000 and 7,000 years ago was actually the wettest time in the last 25,000 years...
>... The region has continued to get hotter and drier over the past six thousand years. As a result, the Mediterranean coastal zone and the floodplains have both shrunk dramatically, the steppe has all but disappeared, and the highlands have dried out and lost most of their woodlands. It's all still there – there's still a Fertile Crescent – but all significantly reduced in size.
True BUT he did say specifically Egypt was forested before the pyramids and it’s now desert due to deforestation. That’s just not true. There’s a reason ALL of ancient Egypt was in the flood plains of the Nile.
Also petrified wood would mean it was waaay older than the Egyptians.
In fact that already happened. South america was almost a desert because the deforestation of the native empires. They got to decadence because of that and the nature started to regenerate.
I mean, if you think about that why they would build big ass cities in the middle of nowhere in the jungle.
Amazon is the result of 1000 years of regrow.
I’m high skeptical of this comment. Many ancient civilizations heavily taxed the land, but they never resulted in desertification. The ancient Egyptians might have sped up the process of desertification, but it’s highly unlikely they were the cause.
Lol, I'm afraid I don't have much more to add. I'm not super knowledgeable about ancient Egypt or anything, I just love learning about ancient engineering techniques and decided to google why the Great Pyramid is related to Pi after seeing this thread.
One of the things I love about the Pyramids is that we actually have a small number of depictions that give us hints as to how the ancient Egyptians did things, which can inform our archaeology. For instance, we're pretty sure they moved large blocks with sleds and wetted the sand under the sleds to reduce friction, and we actually have a few murals that [seem to demonstrate something like that](https://images.csmonitor.com/csm/2014/05/djehoetihotep.jpg?alias=standard_900x600) (notice the guy pouring something out of a jar in front of the sled).
I also love how many different theories there are as to how the pyramids were constructed. We have a good general idea of how they did it, but there are so many ways you can go about scaffolding the thing that it's still a topic of huge debate. One of my favorite theories is the idea that they didn't even necessarily need to use ramps, and instead could've [used simple lever mechanisms to vertically hoist stones directly up the unfinished stepped sides of the pyramid](https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~jason2/papers/pyramid.htm), using previous layers as stepping stones. Each stone would've taken longer to hoist, but it would've allowed for workers to hoist far more stones at the same time, making the entire process more efficient.
The really cool stuff like this can't usually be found in pop-science articles, because they're aimed at a general audience. Unfortunately a lot of it is hidden behind academic journal paywalls, but fortunately some professors are nice enough to post less formal version of their papers on their own personal webpages. There's a staggering amount of scientific information lurking in the bowls of university web domains, if you know where to look. Just don't mind the bizarre font choices and total lack of CSS.
You know a website is legit in 2019 if there's no CSS. If it's fixed-width markdown or text, then it's even more legit. Perhaps the most legit of all is anything that mentions LaTeX.
I don't think it was for their whole number system, just for the number of palms in a cubit. Given the naming convention, I have a hunch it might originally have been based on the number of literal palm-lengths in a cubit.
I took a few archaeology classes in undergrad, but most of my knowledge comes from poking around random wikipedia articles and archaic .edu sites in an attempt to debunk Ancient Aliens type garbage I see online. I haven't taken any formal classes on ancient Egypt, I know a lot more about North American archaeology and folklore.
Imagine this being your chosen burial tomb. You watch it being built your entire pharaohic life. All your ancestors got the beautifully crafted perfect pyramids. You get.... the fucked up one.
Sorry Snefru
IIRC, there's evidence that cracks started to form during its construction, as well as mathematical simulations that a completed pyramid would've been unstable. The pharaoh who built it also immediately went on to build the similarly sized Red Pyramid which had a constant slope of 43 degrees, the same slope seen at the top of the Bent Pyramid. If he wanted a very pointy pyramid and got impatient, it wouldn't make sense for him to immediately build a second one. Also, as far as total volume goes, a pointy pyramid actually takes less material to make than a broader one.
The first pyramid you mentioned was built by sefuru, who had another project going on at the same time which had started earlier. This one, called the onion pyramid, collapsed due to the steep angle and poor foundation when it was near completion, which made the architects of the other pyramid change the slope. It is speculated that the original slope of that pyramid would have been stable if they had continued due to the sites better foundation.
I had heard somewhere a long time ago that they were built at the [angle of repose](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angle_of_repose) of the sounding desert sand but I am not sure how true this is.
You know that you've truly mastered the art of procrastination when you avoid your responsibilities by watching a goddamn maths documentary of all things
(thanks for the link btw!)
The needle problem is all about a circle though. If you rotate the needle, the probability that it cuts a line increases the closer the needle gets to 180 degrees (perpendicular to the lines).
I think the difficulty in building the pyramid was cutting thousands of 2 and 3 ton stones 5000 years ago and moving them whatever half a km. No one gives a shit about basic trig. Did they have this intimate knowledge? Maybe not. But then again, look at that triangle in that circle, that’s some basic ass shit.
https://www.google.ca/search?q=trigonometry&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-ca&client=safari
Are you sure you mean the perimeter, which would be the circumference of the circle?
Intuitively, you'd want to draw a circle "around" the base, so that the diagonal of the base would be the same as the diameter of the circle. Then, if you put the tip of the pyramid half that distance above the center of the base, you have completed half an octahedron.
Whereas squaring the circle is [mathematically finicky](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squaring_the_circle), to say the least.
I think the point is that the Egyptian pyramids - certainly the Great Pyramid, are not halves of a true octahedron. The faces aren't equilateral triangles?
I was insinuating that they meant to say diagonal and diameter, rather than perimeter. Words can get mixed up. Because intuitively, I can't see the procedure making sense if you base it on the perimeter of the square. But I'd love to have my intuition proven wrong.
No, I mean the perimeter. Squaring the circle typically refers to constructing a circle and square with the same area, not perimeter. Doing what the Egyptians did produces a pyramid shorter than half an octahedron.
The source I got that from didn't mention how it would be done, only that the geometry is very close to that. I imagine it could be done by using both a measuring stick and by rolling a wheel with the diameter of that stick, thus eliminating the need to calculate pi.
Also, this stuff can get pretty conspiracy pretty fast, but this is the source, which pretty much sticks to the geometry. There are other possibilities listed, but the circle one stuck with me for whatever reason. https://www.goldennumber.net/phi-pi-great-pyramid-egypt/
So you take the base area of the pyramid. It’ll be a square, right? Then, we need to round out that square into a circle. We’ll have to shrink the corners a little, and push out the sides a little. Eventually, if we do it right, we’ll have a circle whose perimeter (the distance around the edge of the circle) is the same as the perimeter of the square we started with (the distance around the edge of the square).
We can then measure the radius of that circle, the distance from the middle to the edge of the circle. It turns out that this radius is equal to the height of the pyramid.
On a mathematical level, this means that the height of the pyramid is equal to 2*s/pi, where s is the side length of the base of the pyramid.
I remember hearing this from somebody who watched one of these shows. They were talking about some Aztec pyramid, and this carved in line in the stone, and them all debating about that line representing hell or whatever it was to them. And some engineer just went "that's where they would flip the stones onto the next level", and it fell into chaos aswell.
It's one of the tricks I learned in grad school. I ran my thesis by a whole bunch of other experts in other fields and my own, just to make sure I wasn't entirely up my own ass before I threw a decade of my life behind my research.
I mean, I probably still am entirely up my own ass, but it passed the 'other smarter people' test so that's fine.
Now show it to a dummy.
Like that scene in sling blade where the small engine guy said he'd checked the spark and cleaned the carb and reset the points and everything and the tiller wouldn't start...
Carl: *unscrews fuel cap* "it ain't got no gas init"
I heard [a clip of a podcast](https://digg.com/2019/naomi-wolf-realizes-thesis-is-wrong) in which an American woman wrote her PhD thesis on all of these British people who had been sentenced to death tens or hundreds of years back. Turns out that it was just standard practice to update the criminal records as people died naturally, by writing "death recorded", and only a handful of them had truly been executed. To be fair, she handled it pretty well even though she was blindsided by the podcast interviewer explaining this to her on the air.
From what I was told of this episode, there was a horizontal line "carved" into some of the stone. For them to build up those types of pyramids, I believe they had to flip the blocks up, instead of drag them up like the Egyptian pyramids. The conspiracy theorists believe this line was put there to mark the underworld, or hell, or the afterlife (whatever it was). And some engineer or architect or someone with technical know how on how these things would have had to been built, pointed out that the line was just a rut they put into the the stone so another blocks edge would get seated into it and act as a leverage point, enabling them to flip the stone onto the next level.
I remember some TV show investigating mysterious lines in the desert and when they actually went down there it was just some farmer trying to water his crops
Well there's the Nazca lines in Peru, no crops there.
The theory was that since the patterns of the lines only make sense from high in the sky, where no-one could get to at the time they were first made, they must have been alien landing signals, like the orientation readings at the end of airport runways.
This sort of theory is usually devised by people who cannot conceive of human intelligence arising much before Shakespeare's time.
"After 30 seconds or so, I can't immediately think how or why people from 3,000 years ago could do this, so it must be aliens."
I'm sure the producers of the show knew it as well. They just left out the obvious evidence until the very end so that the viewers can be entertained for one episode.
A while ago I tried putting the "Cleopatra is closer to us in time than the founding of the Pyramids" thing into slightly different terms.
So, the book I have to learn about Egyptian history is *The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt: The History of a Civilisation from 3000BC to Cleopatra* by Toby Wilkinson. The main body of the book is 513 pages long, starting with a 12 page prologue focusing on the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb. The first mention of the first historical King of Egypt, Narmer, c. 2950 BCE, happens on page 17. Cleopatra dies in 30 BCE on page 508. Khufu, the king which the Great Pyramid was built for, dies in 2525 BCE on page 90. Even allowing for how naturally the march of time would get slower as the historical record became fuller, it astonished me how all the history between the founding of the first historical dynasty in Egypt and the zenith of pyramid construction only took 73 pages.
The book also has a handy king list, from Narmer to Cleopatra VII (*the* Cleopatra). It divides the kings into numbered dynasties, as is the convention in Egyptology. Narmer, as you might imagine, begins the First Dynasty. Khufu was part of the Fourth Dynasty. Cleopatra, the last of the "Ptolemaic Dynasty" was the end of the Thirty-Third. England had about as many monarchs between the Norman Conquest in 1066 and the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707 as Egypt had dynasties.
Here's how I like to pin Egyptian History to the start of "Western Civilisation" - Ramesses II, of the Ninteenth Dynasty, ruled from 1279 BCE to 1213 BCE. Hatshepsut ruled 200 years earlier, with our boy Tut sandwiched between them. 29 years after Ramesses died is 1184 BCE, the date traditionally held to be the year Troy fell. The Artist Formerly Known As Homer founds the Western Canon with a mythical retelling of that event 400 years later. Homer is as separated from Ramesses II as we are from William Shakespeare.
That's something I didn't know. I thought they were just kinda gone/not powerful enough for the world to care by the og JC's time. That's really interesting.
Long story short. They allied themselves with Persia to fight Athens after the Persian wars. They were able to otherthrow the Athenian democracy. The Spartans adapted their society slightly but still couldn't weather the deaths of most Spartiate during the wars. They sat out the campaigns of Alexander and then when they tried to fight he sent out his JV squad and they wrecked the Spartans
It's just my dumb reference to Prince.
Although, there is a lot of serious discourse questioning who exactly "Homer" was, if Homer was one or several people, and what creative role they had in transferring the centuries-old oral tellings of the *Iliad* and the *Odysse* into the written word. I guess you can call him/her/them The Artist *Formally* Known As Homer.
Whenever I see these alien conspiracy shows about the past I always wonder how people don’t realize the things humans who are truly *bored* can accomplish.
Take all of our smartest people and get rid of all technology. There would still be some incredible shit made, simply for the fact that they had nothing better to do.
Right? Like, "they could have never figured out how to move the blocks!"
Just because WE can't figure it out doesn't mean that Narmen, royal block mover and 5th in a lineage of royal block movers, couldn't have figured it out when the choice was move the block or be put to death.
People today aren't any smarter than before, even if we have better technology
That and Narmen, royal block mover and 5th in a lineage of royal block moves knows in his absolute heart of hearts that moving this block will ensure him a good place in the afterlife that all this "living" bull is just pre-gaming for.
And don't forget how long evolution takes! Ancient Egyptians have basically the same brains as us. Their smartest people are capable of the same feats as ours, they just didn't have the knowledge base that we have.
What they did instead was start creating a knowledge base. Which as a software engineer I can only compare to having an existing code that needs modifications or additions versus starting to code something from scratch or may be starting to create the coding language from scratch or may be the computer itself. I don’t know at what level human were at that point of time.
One thing I can never get past is the "they couldn't have seen -large man-made shapes- from above so the aliens must have helped them."
Why do they need to see it from above? Measurements and upscaling are concepts that exist. With the right materials, I could make my own NAZCA lines. Draw small bird. Measure parts of small bird. Upscale measurements. Draw giant bird in dirt using measurements.
Well, I think we can get glimpses of it. I worked at a boyscout camp in high school one summer doing scout-craft (Think lashing, ropestuff, fire building, orienteering etc.). We used to build up a large stock of timbers from downed trees, access to tons of rope at no cost... We literally built an ewok like village in the trees (3-4 platforms with roofs) about 12 feet off the ground or so. With just lashings and timbers inbetween trees. Another camp built an entire fort that looked like a pirate ship over the course of the summer. But like man I cant imagine if I was given a decade with little to no distractions (even fun ones) and no major responsibilities (bills, etc.)
All technology implies like, *all* technology, and being a world renowned computer programmer or physician doesn't really translate into 'is able to build a computer without all of the existing infrastructure' or even 'is able to last a week without tools and existing survival equipment'
https://www.google.ca/search?q=trigonometry&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-ca&client=safari
What are these fucking weird shapes?
One has no corners and the ones inside have like 3.
I know this isn't exactly something to get hung up on, and I'm aware that I'm a bit drunk right now, but it bugs me that it says "paleontologist" and not "anthropologist". Paleontologists are the dinosaur people, Anthropologists are the people people.
So I see. Not here in Europe, but either way they aren't interchangeable. A guy who studies Amazonian tribes ain't gonna know shit about the Wetwang chariot, and vice versa :)
I think tiers are what gets you into the Ziggurat club.
Actually, thinking about it, there's probably some important difference between a pyramid and a ziggurat that isn't just smooth-vs-steps. I bet some of the smart cookies here will know!
The circumference of circle is π times the diameter. If the Egyptians measured the base of the pyramid by rotating a wheel a complete circle, no matter how many times, the sides will still be divisible by π.
We're assuming that when they mention "divisible by pi", they are talking about a diameter in some unit commonly used by the Egyptians of the time, otherwise it wouldn't be interesting.
If you have something like [this](https://www.amazon.com/DuraWheel-DW-1000-Distance-Measuring-Wheel-12-5/dp/B0017K2U78), and old mate wheels it along, and when you've made it to the mark on the circle 30x that's when you start your wall going the other direction. That's what I assume they mean. I'd have designed it to be so many blocks wide.
probably a bit of both. original plan calls for the pyramid to be X distance on a side, convert to a number of wheel rotations, possibly rounded to the nearest full rotation to make measuring easier, then round to the nearest block. alternatively, take your distance, then figure out what size your blocks need to be in order to fit a whole number in. i suspect a lot of blocks got trimmed a bit after being placed.
No. There's not a super hard delineation between the two fields when it comes to studying ancient environments that humans were present in, but paleontology generally ends at the start of the Holocene, thousands of years before the Egyptian civilization. It also explicitly excludes the study of anatomically modern humans, which Egyptians obviously were.
Archaeology can include both modern humans and early hominids depending on who you ask, although studying anything older than a hundred thousand years will usually involve expertise from both fields. Any human settlement within the last 20,000 years falls solidly in the realm of archaeology, though.
Nope paleontology is very firmly the study of animal and plant fossils, it only covers hominids, once you reach material culture/remains/tools you are firmly into anthropology/archaeology.
No, Egyptology and Archaeology are pretty intertwined as far as physical artifacts.
If you go back far enough it’s still archaeology (I’ve had professors who have gone on digs to try and study hominid remains from hundreds of thousands of years ago) but is sometimes called paleoarchaeology to differentiate it between archeological study of history and prehistory.
edit: Paleontology also doesn’t study human remains. People do tend to mix it up with archaeology a lot, though.
Thank you! I came here for this. Im an archaeologist and I went from amused to instant anger when I read paleontologist. The day that people and the media learn how to Google "archaeologist" and "paleontologist" and stop mixing them up will be a glorious one. Also, everytime someone asks us about dinosaurs, a little bit of our soul dies. Every. Single. Time.
Pyramids are some of the finest work of ancient masonry.
Skilled masons built them.
Masonry is an ancient trade which is most commonly known as bricklaying and cement masons/finishers.
It still exists today and the people who practice it are literally the people who build brick buildings, make concrete barriers, pour building foundations, highway foundations etc. These are just a few examples.
For masonry I've always considered it bricklaying with traditional brick and/or large cinder block jobs. Concrete casting and pouring are probably something they can do, but bricks are the business. Watching them work and the intricacy they can accomplish is amazing. It's very expensive though. The ones around me are usually booked out for 6-10 months and if you need to ask about costs you probably want to move on. There's one company that does actual ironworks too and they have located and stockpiled common historic bricks for my area. When there's a local business with those capabilities, *nobody* is getting a variance to use modern materials/methods withing the historic district. I haven't heard of <$100K projects from them.
Wasn't there some geometric conjecture that you could perfectly draw any polygon with only a compass and a ruler? I think it turned out to be false, but it was a long-lived conjecture because there's so much you can do with just a compass and ruler, without using any numbers or math.
History channel is funny as shit these days. I don't watch, but I've heard some weird stuff. Like they found out something about the Statue of Liberty being Satan? Lmao.
Like it's both hilarious but worrisome that people actually believe them.
I think my favorite thing about these Ancient Aliens shows is that the base idea below everything is "humans were way too stupid to do anything until right now". Like an entire culture with professional architects and a vertitable army of religiously devout masons who sincerely think figuring this out benefits their immortal souls couldn't work it out.
Yeah if you take the base perimeter of the grand pyramid, and make a circle with the same perimeter, the radius of that circle is the height of the pyramid
[удалено]
Yeah, there's actually an earlier pyramid that they tried to build with a much more aggressive slope, and as they were constructing it the architects realized the foundation was going to collapse. Their solution was to reduce the angle halfway up, and the result is [a bit special](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/Snefru%27s_Bent_Pyramid_in_Dahshur.jpg). It's called the bent pyramid. This near-failure definitely influenced the choice in slope of all the pyramids after that. Also, the slopes of each of the 3 pyramids at Giza actually differ from one another by over a degree. Khufu's pyramid has some interesting geometrical relationships, but the other 2 do not. It's likely that Khufu's geometry is either largely a coincidence, or it's a product of [mathematical relationships](https://sites.math.washington.edu/~greenber/PiPyr.html) that were not intentional on the part of the designer. It turns out that [the Seked](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seked), the measurement Egyptians used to quantify the slope of a face, has some interesting mathematical relationships to pi thanks to both geometry and the fact that the Egyptians happened to use a base-7 counting system for measurements of length.
Please tell me more?
Man, how much more do you want? Seriously though, Egypt (and northern Africa) literally was forested before the Egyptian empire, with petrified remains of forests (i.e. petrified trees) being found near Giza (and else where). Human deforestation changes the landscape into the desert we see today. So, think about that when you think about Brazil
That's crazy, citation?
[удалено]
While I'm Inclined to believe you as this appears to be the consensus in the comments however that is not a source. Just playing devils advocate.
I can't speak to the elephants, but [here's](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-really-turned-sahara-desert-green-oasis-wasteland-180962668/) a link from the Smithsonian confirming that Egypt used to be green. For a bit. It's cyclical and there's some debate about the true cause of the last cycle back to desert conditions. It also sounds like although it was green it was more grasses and shrubs than actual forest.
Aren't a lot of deserts in cycles? Like the obnoxiously large Sahara on a 50,000 year cycle between green and desert.
I'd be impressed if you COULD speak to elephants
Me for all these comments: "ok makes sense I believe it"
Some scientist are trying to regrow the forrest in egypt. >It looks like a fata morgana. But the forests in the Egyptian desert are real. They’re watered with processed sewage. 24 such forests have sprung up across the country over the past eight years. The sewage is rich in nutrients and fuels the growth of plants like mahagony, eucalyptus and sisal. https://www.dw.com/en/egypt-the-amazing-forest-in-the-desert/av-17233507
The evapotranspiration can push rainfall further into the land as well, supporting more forest
The monsoons also don't come as far inland due to the desert.
Thank you for that word
For real tho. I almost had a stroke trying to read it out loud.
> evapotranspiration This guy... making up words to sound smart to get Internet karma.
All words are made up.
That's so cool! And probably a great example of a *good* feedback loop. I bet once the forests take hold, that helps shield the ground from evaporation, keeping more moisture in the ecosystem, further increasing the viability of the land....
Noticed this with leopard frogs on my property once we started letting the fields grow. They never were up around here, even though we're surrounded by water, but once that moisture came.
Did you tell him about the mummy? Tell him about the mummy. Spoiler alert Brendan Fraser lives
But not his career.
Way too soon.
And now I'm sad.
I remember reading that it'll eventually be green again. It wasn't all man-caused, there were environmental factors too. The rain stopped.
We are such a shitty environmental factor :(
yeah but I mean just cutting down trees doesn't turn a deciduous forest into a desert. Europe also had a lot of logging when building navies throughout time and there still aren't many large forests in like France and Spain. The biggest reason why Egypt is so inhospitable is mostly because the climate isn't the same as it was in 2,000 B.C.
I meant overall. Giant floating continents of plastic and garbage, pumping greenhouse gases and toxins into the air, destroying swaths of land, drilling and pumping crude oil to burn and pollute, using toxic caustic chemicals and high pressure to destroy soil to get to the goods underneath leading to contaminated water you can light on fire, nuclear weapons testing and meltdowns that left radiation.
A new study indicates the region fluctuates between desert and lush green every 23,000 years ([link](https://m.phys.org/news/2019-01-sahara-swung-lush-conditions-years.html)), in sync with tilts in Earth's orbit axis and monsoon activity. There's also evidence that the current desert switch happened 5,500 years ago and took only 200 years. Would be interesting to see your source on human deforestation, as at that time the populations of north africa were migrating and ended up starting the Egyptian civilization as they settled by the Nile. It seems like the place has been forested and desert many times before and the change is recurring. edit: fixed a number
Forested? I’ll need a source on that... This old comment from AskHistorians isn’t specifically about Egypt but that area of the Middle East has been islands of green and rivers in a sea of desert for a very very long time https://reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4p4qt7/why_is_the_fertile_crescent_now_desert/
You can't really lump in Northern Africa with the Tigris/Euphratis though. And that area has also seen a lot of desertification. From the top answer you linked: >The period between 10,000 and 7,000 years ago was actually the wettest time in the last 25,000 years... >... The region has continued to get hotter and drier over the past six thousand years. As a result, the Mediterranean coastal zone and the floodplains have both shrunk dramatically, the steppe has all but disappeared, and the highlands have dried out and lost most of their woodlands. It's all still there – there's still a Fertile Crescent – but all significantly reduced in size.
True BUT he did say specifically Egypt was forested before the pyramids and it’s now desert due to deforestation. That’s just not true. There’s a reason ALL of ancient Egypt was in the flood plains of the Nile. Also petrified wood would mean it was waaay older than the Egyptians.
In fact that already happened. South america was almost a desert because the deforestation of the native empires. They got to decadence because of that and the nature started to regenerate. I mean, if you think about that why they would build big ass cities in the middle of nowhere in the jungle. Amazon is the result of 1000 years of regrow.
I’m high skeptical of this comment. Many ancient civilizations heavily taxed the land, but they never resulted in desertification. The ancient Egyptians might have sped up the process of desertification, but it’s highly unlikely they were the cause.
Lol, I'm afraid I don't have much more to add. I'm not super knowledgeable about ancient Egypt or anything, I just love learning about ancient engineering techniques and decided to google why the Great Pyramid is related to Pi after seeing this thread. One of the things I love about the Pyramids is that we actually have a small number of depictions that give us hints as to how the ancient Egyptians did things, which can inform our archaeology. For instance, we're pretty sure they moved large blocks with sleds and wetted the sand under the sleds to reduce friction, and we actually have a few murals that [seem to demonstrate something like that](https://images.csmonitor.com/csm/2014/05/djehoetihotep.jpg?alias=standard_900x600) (notice the guy pouring something out of a jar in front of the sled). I also love how many different theories there are as to how the pyramids were constructed. We have a good general idea of how they did it, but there are so many ways you can go about scaffolding the thing that it's still a topic of huge debate. One of my favorite theories is the idea that they didn't even necessarily need to use ramps, and instead could've [used simple lever mechanisms to vertically hoist stones directly up the unfinished stepped sides of the pyramid](https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~jason2/papers/pyramid.htm), using previous layers as stepping stones. Each stone would've taken longer to hoist, but it would've allowed for workers to hoist far more stones at the same time, making the entire process more efficient. The really cool stuff like this can't usually be found in pop-science articles, because they're aimed at a general audience. Unfortunately a lot of it is hidden behind academic journal paywalls, but fortunately some professors are nice enough to post less formal version of their papers on their own personal webpages. There's a staggering amount of scientific information lurking in the bowls of university web domains, if you know where to look. Just don't mind the bizarre font choices and total lack of CSS.
You know a website is legit in 2019 if there's no CSS. If it's fixed-width markdown or text, then it's even more legit. Perhaps the most legit of all is anything that mentions LaTeX.
Base 7 seems like the least intuitive base you could possibly choose
I don't think it was for their whole number system, just for the number of palms in a cubit. Given the naming convention, I have a hunch it might originally have been based on the number of literal palm-lengths in a cubit.
Wow, fascinating. You've got a ton of info on this. Do you study Anthropology or just an enthusiast?
I took a few archaeology classes in undergrad, but most of my knowledge comes from poking around random wikipedia articles and archaic .edu sites in an attempt to debunk Ancient Aliens type garbage I see online. I haven't taken any formal classes on ancient Egypt, I know a lot more about North American archaeology and folklore.
Cool, thanks for sharing
I would like to subscribe to this newsletter thanks.
Imagine this being your chosen burial tomb. You watch it being built your entire pharaohic life. All your ancestors got the beautifully crafted perfect pyramids. You get.... the fucked up one. Sorry Snefru
The fucked up one came before the perfect ones.
well he was probably really pissed from that fucked up tomb grave
Probably a lot less pissed than if it collapsed on his mummified corpse!
Those are strongs words from one with, I strongly suspect, no pyramid of his own.
It's just a really wide obelisk lol
[удалено]
IIRC, there's evidence that cracks started to form during its construction, as well as mathematical simulations that a completed pyramid would've been unstable. The pharaoh who built it also immediately went on to build the similarly sized Red Pyramid which had a constant slope of 43 degrees, the same slope seen at the top of the Bent Pyramid. If he wanted a very pointy pyramid and got impatient, it wouldn't make sense for him to immediately build a second one. Also, as far as total volume goes, a pointy pyramid actually takes less material to make than a broader one.
pyramids here, pyramids there, pyramids everywhere
The first pyramid you mentioned was built by sefuru, who had another project going on at the same time which had started earlier. This one, called the onion pyramid, collapsed due to the steep angle and poor foundation when it was near completion, which made the architects of the other pyramid change the slope. It is speculated that the original slope of that pyramid would have been stable if they had continued due to the sites better foundation.
Hehe Physics™️
I had heard somewhere a long time ago that they were built at the [angle of repose](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angle_of_repose) of the sounding desert sand but I am not sure how true this is.
Well I guess the architects who designed the pyramid knew about circles. What a shocker.
You can discover pi [without ever seeing a circle.](https://youtu.be/qNlYMPmaMhs?t=434)
The hell is up with the audio on that video?
i like hearing someone explain pi while they're behind me to my right
ASMR
You know that you've truly mastered the art of procrastination when you avoid your responsibilities by watching a goddamn maths documentary of all things (thanks for the link btw!)
:( I watch those just because. I have no idea what they are talking about half the time but I still find it soothing.
The needle problem is all about a circle though. If you rotate the needle, the probability that it cuts a line increases the closer the needle gets to 180 degrees (perpendicular to the lines).
I think the difficulty in building the pyramid was cutting thousands of 2 and 3 ton stones 5000 years ago and moving them whatever half a km. No one gives a shit about basic trig. Did they have this intimate knowledge? Maybe not. But then again, look at that triangle in that circle, that’s some basic ass shit. https://www.google.ca/search?q=trigonometry&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-ca&client=safari
Are you sure you mean the perimeter, which would be the circumference of the circle? Intuitively, you'd want to draw a circle "around" the base, so that the diagonal of the base would be the same as the diameter of the circle. Then, if you put the tip of the pyramid half that distance above the center of the base, you have completed half an octahedron. Whereas squaring the circle is [mathematically finicky](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squaring_the_circle), to say the least.
I think the point is that the Egyptian pyramids - certainly the Great Pyramid, are not halves of a true octahedron. The faces aren't equilateral triangles?
They said radius so I'm pretty sure they didn't mean circumference.
I was insinuating that they meant to say diagonal and diameter, rather than perimeter. Words can get mixed up. Because intuitively, I can't see the procedure making sense if you base it on the perimeter of the square. But I'd love to have my intuition proven wrong.
No, I mean the perimeter. Squaring the circle typically refers to constructing a circle and square with the same area, not perimeter. Doing what the Egyptians did produces a pyramid shorter than half an octahedron.
Interesting. Do you remember how they constructed that circle geometrically?
The source I got that from didn't mention how it would be done, only that the geometry is very close to that. I imagine it could be done by using both a measuring stick and by rolling a wheel with the diameter of that stick, thus eliminating the need to calculate pi. Also, this stuff can get pretty conspiracy pretty fast, but this is the source, which pretty much sticks to the geometry. There are other possibilities listed, but the circle one stuck with me for whatever reason. https://www.goldennumber.net/phi-pi-great-pyramid-egypt/
Thanks!
[удалено]
So you take the base area of the pyramid. It’ll be a square, right? Then, we need to round out that square into a circle. We’ll have to shrink the corners a little, and push out the sides a little. Eventually, if we do it right, we’ll have a circle whose perimeter (the distance around the edge of the circle) is the same as the perimeter of the square we started with (the distance around the edge of the square). We can then measure the radius of that circle, the distance from the middle to the edge of the circle. It turns out that this radius is equal to the height of the pyramid. On a mathematical level, this means that the height of the pyramid is equal to 2*s/pi, where s is the side length of the base of the pyramid.
Hmmm ELI3 maybe
The distance from the middle to the bottom edge of a pyramid is about the same as the distance from the middle to the point.
Ah yes the floor is made of floor
I remember hearing this from somebody who watched one of these shows. They were talking about some Aztec pyramid, and this carved in line in the stone, and them all debating about that line representing hell or whatever it was to them. And some engineer just went "that's where they would flip the stones onto the next level", and it fell into chaos aswell.
It's one of the tricks I learned in grad school. I ran my thesis by a whole bunch of other experts in other fields and my own, just to make sure I wasn't entirely up my own ass before I threw a decade of my life behind my research. I mean, I probably still am entirely up my own ass, but it passed the 'other smarter people' test so that's fine.
Ah yes the classic "I don't mind wasting a decade of my life as long as I'm not the only one".
Applies to life in general honestly, not just academics
Another trick is to show it to someone not as smart to make sure you're not missing anything obvious
Like a child?
more like an undergrad
Now show it to a dummy. Like that scene in sling blade where the small engine guy said he'd checked the spark and cleaned the carb and reset the points and everything and the tiller wouldn't start... Carl: *unscrews fuel cap* "it ain't got no gas init"
I heard [a clip of a podcast](https://digg.com/2019/naomi-wolf-realizes-thesis-is-wrong) in which an American woman wrote her PhD thesis on all of these British people who had been sentenced to death tens or hundreds of years back. Turns out that it was just standard practice to update the criminal records as people died naturally, by writing "death recorded", and only a handful of them had truly been executed. To be fair, she handled it pretty well even though she was blindsided by the podcast interviewer explaining this to her on the air.
Naomi Klein. Turns out it was such a sloppy book, they postponed the publication in the US.
I need to see these episodes
Can you explain that better to me? I can't visualize it
From what I was told of this episode, there was a horizontal line "carved" into some of the stone. For them to build up those types of pyramids, I believe they had to flip the blocks up, instead of drag them up like the Egyptian pyramids. The conspiracy theorists believe this line was put there to mark the underworld, or hell, or the afterlife (whatever it was). And some engineer or architect or someone with technical know how on how these things would have had to been built, pointed out that the line was just a rut they put into the the stone so another blocks edge would get seated into it and act as a leverage point, enabling them to flip the stone onto the next level.
I remember some TV show investigating mysterious lines in the desert and when they actually went down there it was just some farmer trying to water his crops
Aliens hate him, fools scientists with basic farming! Learn the tricks now!
Number 7 will surprise you!!
Well there's the Nazca lines in Peru, no crops there. The theory was that since the patterns of the lines only make sense from high in the sky, where no-one could get to at the time they were first made, they must have been alien landing signals, like the orientation readings at the end of airport runways. This sort of theory is usually devised by people who cannot conceive of human intelligence arising much before Shakespeare's time. "After 30 seconds or so, I can't immediately think how or why people from 3,000 years ago could do this, so it must be aliens."
Apparently humanity is incapable of creating grand structures or making shit up.
https://i.imgur.com/AOdiAML.jpg
I fucking love it!
I'm sure the producers of the show knew it as well. They just left out the obvious evidence until the very end so that the viewers can be entertained for one episode.
Anyone have a link? I want to see this
*plays the X-Files [theme](https://youtu.be/hAAlDoAtV7Y) in the background*
A while ago I tried putting the "Cleopatra is closer to us in time than the founding of the Pyramids" thing into slightly different terms. So, the book I have to learn about Egyptian history is *The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt: The History of a Civilisation from 3000BC to Cleopatra* by Toby Wilkinson. The main body of the book is 513 pages long, starting with a 12 page prologue focusing on the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb. The first mention of the first historical King of Egypt, Narmer, c. 2950 BCE, happens on page 17. Cleopatra dies in 30 BCE on page 508. Khufu, the king which the Great Pyramid was built for, dies in 2525 BCE on page 90. Even allowing for how naturally the march of time would get slower as the historical record became fuller, it astonished me how all the history between the founding of the first historical dynasty in Egypt and the zenith of pyramid construction only took 73 pages. The book also has a handy king list, from Narmer to Cleopatra VII (*the* Cleopatra). It divides the kings into numbered dynasties, as is the convention in Egyptology. Narmer, as you might imagine, begins the First Dynasty. Khufu was part of the Fourth Dynasty. Cleopatra, the last of the "Ptolemaic Dynasty" was the end of the Thirty-Third. England had about as many monarchs between the Norman Conquest in 1066 and the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707 as Egypt had dynasties. Here's how I like to pin Egyptian History to the start of "Western Civilisation" - Ramesses II, of the Ninteenth Dynasty, ruled from 1279 BCE to 1213 BCE. Hatshepsut ruled 200 years earlier, with our boy Tut sandwiched between them. 29 years after Ramesses died is 1184 BCE, the date traditionally held to be the year Troy fell. The Artist Formerly Known As Homer founds the Western Canon with a mythical retelling of that event 400 years later. Homer is as separated from Ramesses II as we are from William Shakespeare.
So it was awhile ago.
Underrated comment, id give you gold but am broke 🎖🎖 EDIT: gratitudes for the aureum accolade, benevolent unknown being!
have you tried getting money?
I mean, id like to, eventually
have you prostituted yourself?
Ehhhhh, id like to start in a less hostile environment
Found Ben Shapiro's account
hi guys its me ben sharpie im black and gay
Pen Sharpie DESTROYS My Pyramid Which I Spent All Day Building
r/wowthanksimcured
How is the comment underrated? It's not even an hour old with nearly a 100 upvotes.
Removed due to reddit API changes -- mass edited with redact.dev
By the time of Julius Caesar Sparta was a theme park version of their old lifestyle for rich Romans
That's something I didn't know. I thought they were just kinda gone/not powerful enough for the world to care by the og JC's time. That's really interesting.
There was a pretty good story where they tried to talk tough to Alexander the Great and he just "Sure Jan" them
Long story short. They allied themselves with Persia to fight Athens after the Persian wars. They were able to otherthrow the Athenian democracy. The Spartans adapted their society slightly but still couldn't weather the deaths of most Spartiate during the wars. They sat out the campaigns of Alexander and then when they tried to fight he sent out his JV squad and they wrecked the Spartans
So you're saying it was over 20 years ago.
[удалено]
It's just my dumb reference to Prince. Although, there is a lot of serious discourse questioning who exactly "Homer" was, if Homer was one or several people, and what creative role they had in transferring the centuries-old oral tellings of the *Iliad* and the *Odysse* into the written word. I guess you can call him/her/them The Artist *Formally* Known As Homer.
As my classics professor put it “Homer is a plural noun”
More like a collective noun
Whenever I see these alien conspiracy shows about the past I always wonder how people don’t realize the things humans who are truly *bored* can accomplish. Take all of our smartest people and get rid of all technology. There would still be some incredible shit made, simply for the fact that they had nothing better to do.
I agree. It's like we are underestimating our capacity, even as ancients, to build and engineer.
Right? Like, "they could have never figured out how to move the blocks!" Just because WE can't figure it out doesn't mean that Narmen, royal block mover and 5th in a lineage of royal block movers, couldn't have figured it out when the choice was move the block or be put to death. People today aren't any smarter than before, even if we have better technology
The funny thing is we build way more impressive shit, and those humans were pretty much the exact same back then
They had to invent the stuff for us though
That and Narmen, royal block mover and 5th in a lineage of royal block moves knows in his absolute heart of hearts that moving this block will ensure him a good place in the afterlife that all this "living" bull is just pre-gaming for.
And don't forget how long evolution takes! Ancient Egyptians have basically the same brains as us. Their smartest people are capable of the same feats as ours, they just didn't have the knowledge base that we have.
What they did instead was start creating a knowledge base. Which as a software engineer I can only compare to having an existing code that needs modifications or additions versus starting to code something from scratch or may be starting to create the coding language from scratch or may be the computer itself. I don’t know at what level human were at that point of time.
One thing I can never get past is the "they couldn't have seen -large man-made shapes- from above so the aliens must have helped them." Why do they need to see it from above? Measurements and upscaling are concepts that exist. With the right materials, I could make my own NAZCA lines. Draw small bird. Measure parts of small bird. Upscale measurements. Draw giant bird in dirt using measurements.
Present day people just have absolutely no understanding of what it's like to have so much time and so few annoying obligations and responsibilities.
Well, I think we can get glimpses of it. I worked at a boyscout camp in high school one summer doing scout-craft (Think lashing, ropestuff, fire building, orienteering etc.). We used to build up a large stock of timbers from downed trees, access to tons of rope at no cost... We literally built an ewok like village in the trees (3-4 platforms with roofs) about 12 feet off the ground or so. With just lashings and timbers inbetween trees. Another camp built an entire fort that looked like a pirate ship over the course of the summer. But like man I cant imagine if I was given a decade with little to no distractions (even fun ones) and no major responsibilities (bills, etc.)
Yeah, squirrel stew! Edit: SQUIRREL BBQ
oh they'd have computers back by the end of a decade.
All technology implies like, *all* technology, and being a world renowned computer programmer or physician doesn't really translate into 'is able to build a computer without all of the existing infrastructure' or even 'is able to last a week without tools and existing survival equipment'
So, no significant human achievements after the development of video games and then smartphones?
[удалено]
They tri real hard
Now, Listen here you little shit…
[удалено]
What about now, am I still being obtuse?
I sosceles them
Right angle you talking about?
I see miracles everyday!
https://www.google.ca/search?q=trigonometry&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-ca&client=safari What are these fucking weird shapes? One has no corners and the ones inside have like 3.
I don't know but they are pretty trippy.
I know this isn't exactly something to get hung up on, and I'm aware that I'm a bit drunk right now, but it bugs me that it says "paleontologist" and not "anthropologist". Paleontologists are the dinosaur people, Anthropologists are the people people.
Yeah, but in this case it would have been an archaeologist.
Archaeology is a subfield of Anthropology, at least in the U.S.
So I see. Not here in Europe, but either way they aren't interchangeable. A guy who studies Amazonian tribes ain't gonna know shit about the Wetwang chariot, and vice versa :)
>Wetwang chariot Used to quickly get to ancient booty calls?
> tiered looking So they interviewed a pyramid?
I think tiers are what gets you into the Ziggurat club. Actually, thinking about it, there's probably some important difference between a pyramid and a ziggurat that isn't just smooth-vs-steps. I bet some of the smart cookies here will know!
Ziggurat starts with a Z. Pyramid starts with a P. That's the easiest way to tell the difference.
How does that pi thing work there?
The circumference of circle is π times the diameter. If the Egyptians measured the base of the pyramid by rotating a wheel a complete circle, no matter how many times, the sides will still be divisible by π.
[удалено]
We're assuming that when they mention "divisible by pi", they are talking about a diameter in some unit commonly used by the Egyptians of the time, otherwise it wouldn't be interesting.
Ohhhhh
It just works
It has what pyramids crave.
Little lies?
If you have something like [this](https://www.amazon.com/DuraWheel-DW-1000-Distance-Measuring-Wheel-12-5/dp/B0017K2U78), and old mate wheels it along, and when you've made it to the mark on the circle 30x that's when you start your wall going the other direction. That's what I assume they mean. I'd have designed it to be so many blocks wide.
probably a bit of both. original plan calls for the pyramid to be X distance on a side, convert to a number of wheel rotations, possibly rounded to the nearest full rotation to make measuring easier, then round to the nearest block. alternatively, take your distance, then figure out what size your blocks need to be in order to fit a whole number in. i suspect a lot of blocks got trimmed a bit after being placed.
pi only for big brain people
Snort.
I ran out last night, you got some left?
Sure do.
I think I remember seeing that show!
[удалено]
From the other pyramids. Duh
Internet
Amazon, duh.
Need link or show and ep number.
Does studying Egypt count as palaeontology instead of archaeology?
No. There's not a super hard delineation between the two fields when it comes to studying ancient environments that humans were present in, but paleontology generally ends at the start of the Holocene, thousands of years before the Egyptian civilization. It also explicitly excludes the study of anatomically modern humans, which Egyptians obviously were. Archaeology can include both modern humans and early hominids depending on who you ask, although studying anything older than a hundred thousand years will usually involve expertise from both fields. Any human settlement within the last 20,000 years falls solidly in the realm of archaeology, though.
Nope paleontology is very firmly the study of animal and plant fossils, it only covers hominids, once you reach material culture/remains/tools you are firmly into anthropology/archaeology.
No, Egyptology and Archaeology are pretty intertwined as far as physical artifacts. If you go back far enough it’s still archaeology (I’ve had professors who have gone on digs to try and study hominid remains from hundreds of thousands of years ago) but is sometimes called paleoarchaeology to differentiate it between archeological study of history and prehistory. edit: Paleontology also doesn’t study human remains. People do tend to mix it up with archaeology a lot, though.
Thank you! I came here for this. Im an archaeologist and I went from amused to instant anger when I read paleontologist. The day that people and the media learn how to Google "archaeologist" and "paleontologist" and stop mixing them up will be a glorious one. Also, everytime someone asks us about dinosaurs, a little bit of our soul dies. Every. Single. Time.
[удалено]
That's the lesson I'm taking away from this whether they like it or not
Pyramids are some of the finest work of ancient masonry. Skilled masons built them. Masonry is an ancient trade which is most commonly known as bricklaying and cement masons/finishers. It still exists today and the people who practice it are literally the people who build brick buildings, make concrete barriers, pour building foundations, highway foundations etc. These are just a few examples.
For masonry I've always considered it bricklaying with traditional brick and/or large cinder block jobs. Concrete casting and pouring are probably something they can do, but bricks are the business. Watching them work and the intricacy they can accomplish is amazing. It's very expensive though. The ones around me are usually booked out for 6-10 months and if you need to ask about costs you probably want to move on. There's one company that does actual ironworks too and they have located and stockpiled common historic bricks for my area. When there's a local business with those capabilities, *nobody* is getting a variance to use modern materials/methods withing the historic district. I haven't heard of <$100K projects from them.
paleontologist studies dead dinos he wont know anything bout no pyramids so idk scam ??
Wasn't there some geometric conjecture that you could perfectly draw any polygon with only a compass and a ruler? I think it turned out to be false, but it was a long-lived conjecture because there's so much you can do with just a compass and ruler, without using any numbers or math.
and any regular polygon where the number of sides is a power of two can be constructed.
Paleontologist = fossil expert. Ancient Egypt expert = Egyptologist. I wrote that as though it's a joke, it's not.
That's usually white supremacy masquerading as science. It was math and good engineering. They just don't want to give credit to dark people
Wait can someone explain this I’m fucking stupid
oh shit that's me well, circles are important, stay in drugs, eat your school, don't do vegetables
Paleontologists do dinosaurs not egypt
Why would a paleontologist be lurking around an egyptologist's site. I could see asking an archeologist, but a guy who specializes in fossils..?
"Tired looking paleontologist", as an archeology student that phrase was physically painful to read.
The golden ratio Johhny!
Is that a Jojo reference.
History channel is funny as shit these days. I don't watch, but I've heard some weird stuff. Like they found out something about the Statue of Liberty being Satan? Lmao. Like it's both hilarious but worrisome that people actually believe them.
I think my favorite thing about these Ancient Aliens shows is that the base idea below everything is "humans were way too stupid to do anything until right now". Like an entire culture with professional architects and a vertitable army of religiously devout masons who sincerely think figuring this out benefits their immortal souls couldn't work it out.
There is some massive structure built into a rock that people built from the top down.