What a time we live. What a deafening silence ! Maybe I need my ears checking.

I just finished watching last night an extraordinary documentary … “The Lost City of the Pyramids” (Director, Dev Varma … Producer, Richard Reisz).

Zahi Hawass has for some time now been defending his country from the worst kind of cultural imperialism that started when Napoleon (I think it was) visited Egypt and started the obsession with all things Egyptian. Unfortunately this included labelling them as “for all” and trampling over the very people who had built them … the Egyptians !

Hawass is a genius in my opinion. I’ve seen the amount of NOISE and vehement vitriol that skulks around the subject of the Pyramids. Anyone can set themselves up as somebody with “insights” into the Pyramids, and all the mystical mumbo jumbo that that entails.

It started with the obsession with the numerology of the Pyramids. It continued with that Robot being about to find “something” behind a “door” half way up one of the Pyramids tunnels. These theories reached such heights that it was almost to be expected that an “Alien” would beam straight into the inner chamber of the Pyramids at any moment. In fact these ideas have entered the cultural landscape so firmly that films like “Alien vs Predator” have images of Alien ships hovering above Pyramids. All very interesting in the terms of Science Fiction but some people take these things as a given “truth”.

So we’ve had rumours of “secret excavations” by Hawass … MAN ! This has been going since the early 90’s ! Hawass seems to be a master of feeding these “Pyramidiots” what they want to hear and then leave them to truss themselves up in the self spun web of their own conspiracy theories. I’d LOVE to meet Hawass ! I find him very inspirational.

So it is with somewhat of a poetic wry irony that I took great satisfaction in viewing what this program revealed to me. The Egyptian builders were not “slaves” as Herodotus says. In fact Herodotus gets everything wrong ! I believe he never actually went to Egypt. There are far more reliable sources.

Hawass and other archaeologists have discovered the living areas of the ACTUAL builders of the Pyramids. They are complete and UNDISTURBED by grave robbers. They show a workforce that was very well fed with the most expensive food available. Medicine was available in exactly the same form as was available to Pharaohs. Families were also present which is shown by the bone fragments present. All this makes it highly unlikely that the builders were enslaved. If they were they were very well looked after slaves.

Here we reach maybe one of the most profound “mysteries” of the Pyramids. Mark Lehner compares their building to a Amish Barn Raising in the USA. It was social, it was cultural, it was religious. The “mystery” of their building has much to do with a social revolution of the time that allowed thousands of people to work together under a shared goal, to innovate ways of building such a large structure. You can see some of them in this Wikpedia article. This is Ubuntu. This is partly where modern civilisation began. Look at our cities. Look at the Greek obsession with Egypt. Look at our big projects. Bridges. Ships. The Space Shuttle. The International Space Station. They follow the same skills of thousands of people working together as was discovered then .. when these Pyramids were built. The program even had the head of a large construction business who confirmed what was being discovered by drawing up modern day work plans.

So WHAT an extraordinary revelation. The Pyramids were built by “ordinary” Egyptians … humans … US ! No need for strange explanations that seem to deny what WE are capable of.

I had a dream years ago about this. I was descending down from the side of a Pyramid and entering into a bazaar of many stalls and people. In the sky a face was depicted in the clouds … a human face.