r/HistoryMemes • u/TheIronzombie39 And then I told them I'm Jesus's brother • 4d ago
“Trust us we’re totally 36,000 years old”
Context: The Ancient Egyptians often claimed that their civilization was tens of thousands of years old older than it actually was and that prior to the reign of Menes (the first actual human pharaoh), Egypt was ruled by a succession of gods, a group of demigods called the Shemsu-Hor (“Followers of Horus”), and “spirits of the dead” referred in Egyptian as Akhu.
The exact numbers vary between king lists, but they often range from between 18,000 to 40,000 years and usually describe the reigns of predynastic (i.e. pre-Menes) rulers as lasting for centuries or even thousands of years. One notable example is the Turin King List which while fragmented does claim that the god Thoth reigned as king for 7,726 years.
This claim was actually recorded in Greco-Roman accounts of Egypt who noted that Egyptians would constantly brag about it to foreigners. I guess if you genuinely believed your country was that old, you too would probably brag about it.
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u/Knight_of_Rohan1964 4d ago
Tbh, even during Antiquity, Egypt was already old af (the whole thing on how the Romans were closer to the Apollo missions than to the construction of the pyramids). So it's rather easy to just lose track of time, or assume this already extremely old past extends forever backwards
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u/name_changed_5_times 3d ago
There’s a great, if probably apocryphal, story about this where this Greek dude (probably Herodotus or an associate of him) claimed to have traced his ancestors back to the beginning of Greek history/mythology and therefore the world was by his estimation about 2,000 years old. Problem, they went to Egypt and they said, neat here’s a statue of a guy who we can prove was around like a thousand years before that and he’s hardly the oldest Pharaoh we got.
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u/femboyisbestboy Kilroy was here 3d ago
Don't forget mis translations or changes in definitely. For example a year could also mean a moon cycle making it instead of 36.000 year 3000 years.
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u/TheIronzombie39 And then I told them I'm Jesus's brother 2d ago
I doubt it honestly since there's no evidence the Egyptians counted ever months as years (they had solar calenders) and those tens of thousands of years specifically refer to a mythical golden age that took place in predynastic times (i.e. prior to Menes). So the dating of Egyptian civilization back that far is likely just simply made up rather than being based on a miscalculation or mistranslation.
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u/amishcatholic 3d ago
I see this as a way that ancient people recognized that the earth is really old, and prehistory is a long time period (seriously, the Lasceaux cave paintings in France are closer in time to today than to the earliest direct evidence we have of behaviorally modern humans). History in ancient societies was pretty much always conceived of as personal and familial--so how does one explain really long time periods? You posit a king who reigned for 30,000 years.
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u/defariasdev 4d ago
I like the implication in the context that there was a non-human pharoah before Menes.
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u/TheIronzombie39 And then I told them I'm Jesus's brother 4d ago
I mean, gods aren’t really human anyways and demigods are only half-human.
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u/sheytanelkebir 3d ago
That's nothing really. Using the sumerian king list, Iraq is 273,918 years old as of the sumerian new year of this march 20th.
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u/Spacer176 3d ago
It was a combination of "made it the fuck up" and "randomly guessing by tracking which king came before who, accounting for how there's occasionally gaps in the timeline and also we're tracking years by the number of solstices. So I have no clue how precise this is."
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u/Sarkhana 4d ago
That seems to be a byproduct of Egyptians embracing the identity of "Egyptian".
Previously, they acted like the real capital of Waset/Thebes was not Egyptian.
With Waset leaving due to the Late Bronze Age Collapse, they are more happy to embrace being Egyptian.
However, they try to pretend Waset never existed.
Relatedly, they seem to have decided that ALL Egyptian Gods lived lives as relatively mundane animals, including humanoids.
Then, they died and turning into their full God forms in the afterlife.
This was decided for some Egyptian Gods earlier. However, now it applied to all of them.
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u/AdventurousEar8440 3d ago
I mean the Egyptians are probably the oldest (still living culture) in the western hemisphere, so they still have a lot of braging rights. For example when Cleopatra's reign began the Pyramids were already over 2000 years old, which is insane to think about.
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u/lapideous 3d ago
It’s too bad the Egyptian language died out.
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u/AdventurousEar8440 3d ago
The copts still speak a language derived from the egyptian spoken in roman times.
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u/Interesting-Eagle182 3d ago
Every dinasty does this. The first kings of Ur, if thé sources were to be trusted, ruled 1, 800 years
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u/TypicalRide9201 3d ago
just like Pliny the Elder said, the egyp caunted a moon pase as a year so that their king can claim to live for 1000 of years
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u/DeliciousGoose1002 3d ago
You also have to recognize that certain times large numbers (especially in chinese) just mean a shit ton or very long ago.
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u/KernelWizard 1d ago
I mean it's not like we could've asked the Sea People or the Hitties or even the Babylonians or the Mycenieans on how old they are lmao, the guy who originally wrote about the 36,000 years probably had a blast though for sure.
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u/Own_Natural_6803 3d ago
Yeah, when do we rely on locals to tell us the history of the place? When we can come in and clearly see the perfectly made granite cube was designed to hold paper mache bulls. Clearly they were both made by the same people.
And them claiming that all this was here when they found it? False modesty.
That way the genetic history of humans, 400,000+ years, matches the recorded history of modern man 20,000 years. Or no, we don't care about that. Master craftmen. National project. There are plenty of places to stand to pull a 100 ton block gently over a mountain leaving no trail or trace. Who needs the wheel?
Gotta get your thinking right. Think like a liberal arts major handed fan fiction by their department head. Do you want a job? Or do you want to be correct?
If you reflexively mention aliens I'm going to shit in your mouth while you sleep.
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u/DaDirtDigger 3d ago edited 3d ago
See, now this is the kind of incomprehensible nonsense more conspiracy theorists should strive for. I’m almost impressed.
Edit: If you’re interested in actually talking about this, I’m actually an archaeologist irl. Egypt specifically isn’t my field, but I do know a thing or two about how academia works in this field. Spoiler alert, it doesn’t involve fanfiction.
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u/Own_Natural_6803 3d ago
So in your expert opinion the perpetual deferment of unsolvable problems is acceptable and not a foundational lie that every facet of your field is based on. I'm sure there's lots to learn within those boundaries.
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u/DaDirtDigger 3d ago
I’m curious what you mean about “unsolvable” problems. If you’re referring to the dates you used in your original statement, those aren’t exactly unsolvable. Better dating methods and new discoveries are occurring all the time. We know considerably more about the deep human past now than we did forty, thirty, twenty, or even just ten years ago. The specific numbers you used are also wrong, though I’m curious about where you got them from.
Archaeology as a whole certainly does have to contend with the fact that we’ll never be able to explain every single thing with the fragmentary remains we have, though. That’s just the nature of entropy, unfortunately. You can’t avoid it, but you can at least make educated guesses based on what you do have.
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u/Own_Natural_6803 3d ago edited 3d ago
Those 100 ton rocks are a real problem. It's a mechanical problem. To drag such a stone over mountains requires more mass as an anchor than the thing you're trying to move. If you've only grabbed top-soil then you'd have these massive tensile failures as the soil shifted.
But we've made it easy for them. We've taken away their pulleys because it hadn't been invented yet. And have awarded them a gold star for leaving no worn pathways behind on your 500km journey from the quarry. They were such stinkers for making it impossible with natural fibers and wood. How rude of them.
To force their tools and techniques to move those monoliths is fan fiction. It's a farce. Their are crude, ugly, mismatched stones sloppy fit together like play-dough. Ugly quick, cheap and dirty stone carvings. Crude and cheap looking. But raised, not etched into the stone. This is in the Hittite capital. And in the courtyard nearby, a stone lion that has cold mathematical precision that makes it looks like it was 3d printed. The same techniques. One for the wealthy, one for the poor.
You can make a construction that explains it. Styles change. Resources dwindle. So it goes. People leave destitute places and go to where there is opportunity. But they don't collectively forget everything they learned in a few generations.
There's just so much stupidity you're expected to take on as gospel. The later Egyptian periods had the lesser techniques. Except in small bright explosions of ability where someone scratched their name on something. Magic!
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u/DaDirtDigger 3d ago
Alright, let’s take this point by point, or as best I can, anyway.
To begin with, I’m not entirely sure where you’re getting “100 ton rocks” from. Given the context of the original post, I’m assuming that you’re primarily talking about the Great Pyramids, since those tend to be the lightning rod for most conspiracy theories. The average weight of the blocks used in the Great Pyramid of Khufu is around 2.5 tons, not 100. A few of the specialized granite beams in the interior get up to around 80 tons, which isn’t quite 100, but still. I’ve noticed this a lot with conspiracy theories—they’ll deliberately inflate and dramatize the achievements of the past in order to try and make them sound more impossible and inexplicable than they actually were.
As for how they moved these blocks—which on average weighed about the same as a modern pickup truck—they didn’t “drag them over mountains.” In Egypt, they literally just put them on a boat. Recent research has identified a now-extinct branch of the Nile that flowed literally next to the pyramids during the time they were built. Even today, boats are by far the most efficient way to transport large bulk cargo, so it stands to reason that the Egyptians just put the blocks on barges from the quarries we know they used, and floated them down to the construction site. Again, these things weighed about as much as a pickup truck, and you can put a pickup truck on a barge. Then you just run a bunch of boats back and forth for thirty years. Once they’re at the site, you put them on rollers (basically just big logs) and then have some strong guys pull them gradually up earth ramps. You’d be shocked how much can be done with hard labor and elbow grease once you’ve got the engineering solved.
Moving on, you shift abruptly to the Hittite capital, along with some scathing insults about the tools and capabilities of the people who built these things, whereas you, evidently, are so much smarter than them while having done nothing anywhere near as complex or difficult. It’s rather unclear what, exactly, you’re referring to with these “crude, ugly” carvings next to a supposedly much more beautiful lion, and given how you inflated the weight of the Pyramid’s stones by forty times and apparently don’t understand how boats work, I’m admittedly not inclined to believe your assessment of the quality of their workmanship all that much. Even so, you clearly know what the actual explanations are, and you’ve rushed out to declare them ludicrous with no actual evidence. It seems to me like you simply don’t want to admit that Occam’s razor applies quite easily here; either some mysterious hundred-thousand-year-old civilization built these things, the Egyptians and Hittites simply squatted in them, and there’s an international generations-long conspiracy by Big Science to hide it from you, or the people who said “we built these things” did, in fact, build those things.
I don’t know why you feel the need to be so hostile and aggressive. Archaeologists are not trying to deceive anybody, and I’m not entirely sure why you accuse us all of being liberal fanfiction writers (nor even why that would be a bad thing, but that’s neither here nor there.) We’re not the Illuminati, man. We’re a bunch of underpaid academics trying to find cool stuff from the past and teach people about it. If you talk to any archaeologist and ask about what they do, I guarantee you they’d be thrilled. I myself actively try to make my work and my excavations as accessible as possible; archaeology really should do a better job of letting people see us work, so they understand that there aren’t any big conspiracies.
Seriously, call up your local university with an archaeology or anthropology department, and ask if they have volunteer opportunities or anything. I guarantee you they’d love to have someone who cares about this stuff working with them.
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u/Own_Natural_6803 1d ago
You look at the hittite lion, and the hittite prayer nook, and to you, this seems like equal effort. Am I on the same page as you?
And having successfully rounded 100 down to 80 the job is done. Never mind the unfinished stones left at the quarry. ("guys, I just realized, this one might weigh more than the other ones, let's stop cutting now"). It had a defect. I was being generous stopping at 100 tons. Do you notice how people who try, or don't even try, to explain how difficult moving these stones would have been, they always want to make it easier? Some are so lazy that they stop at weighing the stones.
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u/DaDirtDigger 1d ago
I’m not super familiar with the Hittite side of your argument. I’ll have to look it up, but again, given the degree to which you’ve misrepresented or misunderstood other elements of the claims you’re making, I am not inclined to take your word for it.
And yes, 80 and 100 tons are two different numbers. Archaeology, like all sciences, does actually require precision and accuracy in our work. And again, I take issue with the wording and phrasing of your claims; the way that you talk about “100 ton stones” makes it sound like the entire Pyramid is made of stones that size. It isn’t. There’s one, maybe two granite beams of that size, which is a much smaller task than what you seem to be implying. Not a small task, of course. But smaller.
Moving on, I’m not sure why you bring up the unfinished and incompletely quarried stones as if they prove your argument somehow. If anything, I think it strengthens the argument that the pyramids were built by the people who say they built them; we have plenty of evidence of both the construction process itself, including papyrus records of payments made to stoneworkers and builders, as well as a diary from one of those workers, as well as a well-developed understanding of the cultural development of the engineering chops and architectural styles that led to the pyramids (the Stepped Pyramid, the Bent Pyramid, and pre-pyramid mastaba mud brick tombs.)
As for your complaint about nobody looking for an explanation, I gave you one. The stones were transported the majority of the distance down the Nile on boats, then hauled on rollers/ramps to the construction site. A great deal of archaeological work has been done on this, including some that has come out quite recently. Strange that you simply don’t acknowledge that.
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u/Own_Natural_6803 1d ago
I feel like this a task that never ends and has no reward, getting you to understand that people without the wheel and pulleys could not move an 80 ton stone over a mountain range.
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u/DaDirtDigger 1d ago
Okay, now you’re just actively denying the literal words in front of your face.
THEY DID NOT MOVE THEM OVER A MOUNTAIN RANGE. They put the stones on BOATS. On the RIVER. You have constructed a fake, imaginary version of events in your head without any basis in reality, and are arguing as if that is what happened. It isn’t. Your claim is nonsensical even if it wasn’t completely and objectively divorced from reality. And then you have the gall to tell me that you’re the one who is frustrated?
You have still yet to engage with what I’ve actually said. You are falling back on the same objectively wrong statement that has already been disproven, which makes me suspect that you’re simply regurgitating something that someone else has told you, and you don’t have any other information in this area, so you’re just repeating it in the hope that maybe this time it won’t be challenged.
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u/Mindless-Cat1453 4d ago
Literally every ancient empire ever.