Piers Morgan Asks If Debunking Bad Pyramid Ideas Is Racist Against “White Guys”

Earlier this week, Zahi Hawass appeared on Piers Morgan’s streaming show Uncensored to discuss his stumbling appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, and Morgan brought in social media gadflies Jimmy Corsetti and Dan Richards to question Hawass with him. Nearly a million people watched the bizarre exercise in contrarians chasing fantasies up their own asses, and things got off to a pretty bad start when Morgan revealed just how much of a hall of mirrors we had entered with his first question: “What was your reaction to the reaction you got when you appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast?” He started out at least three degrees of separation from the real archaeology of Giza to focus on the “reaction to the reaction.” Very social media of him.

(The show aired last weekend, but I was unfortunately otherwise occupied and have only just gotten to review it.)

​Morgan’s questions did not get better. “It’s always been traditionally assumed that the pyramids were built by 100,000 slaves,” Morgan opined, apparently unaware of a century’s worth of scholarly consensus that there is no evidence the pyramids were primarily constructed with slave labor. He suggests that Hawass has only “recently” found evidence against a belief Morgan has apparently held since his childhood, when presumably he learned it from a cartoon. I doubt he was reading Herodotus or Flavius Josephus, ancient sources where the claim originally appeared. (Former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin popularized the claim anew in the 1970s, when he falsely claimed that Jewish slaves built the pyramids, a claim debunked by Perizonius in the 1600s.)
 
After letting Hawass explain the evidence that the Egyptians built the pyramids, Morgan showed his real purpose when he announced that he wanted to discuss the “world-famous” Graham Hancock and turned the matter to what he implied was reverse racism against white men: “So I I guess my question there, Dr. Hawas is do you have an objection to people like Graham Hancock having their own theories about the pyramids because they’re not actually from the Middle East, because they’re white guys from England.”
 
Hawass rather bluntly pointed out that many prominent Egyptologists are, in fact, white people from the United States and Europe, so the objection is not rooted in race. He said that one needed scientists to do science, not amateurs from “New York or London.” Morgan seemed to take offense at this, replying that his favorite fringe speculators say “you guys are the pyramid establishment and you don’t like outsiders because you don’t want them contradicting your narrative.”
 
At this point, without pausing for a response, he brought in Corsetti and Richards to continue the hostile questioning, three on one.
 
Corsetti calls the Great Pyramid “the most mysterious and debated structure in all of human history,” and he brings up the old canard that it might not be a tomb since no mummy was found in it. Yet he neglects to mention that the very texts used to justify a belief that the pyramid is an antediluvian scientific repository (medieval Arabic legends: see here, here, and here) specifically state that the Arabs found grave goods and a mummy inside the pyramid. You can’t have it both ways. Either the texts on which your speculation is founded are accurate, or they are not.
 
Morgan brings up old pyramidology numerological claims from the nineteenth century, as filtered through Erich von Däniken’s and Graham Hancock’s recycling of Charles Piazzi Smyth’s ideas. Morgan is interested in whether the pyramids perimeter, multiplied by 43,200 is the same as the Earth’s equatorial circumference. (It’s not, by the way—it’s off by about 240 km. There is also a very detailed analysis of the claim by Thomas W. Schroeder here.) Hawass says he’s never heard of this—which is bizarre given that these kinds of claims date back to the 1800s and appeared in Egyptology books at the time, which he must undoubtedly have encountered in his career.
 
Corsetti jumps in and tries to relate this to Mesopotamia: “It's the same number on the Sumerian kings list. 43,200 has been seen in ancient history inexplicably. And the Sumerians are the earliest document human civilization we have. And that number ties in with them.” It’s not inexplicable. The so-called “precessional numbers” weren’t derived, as Morgan and Corsetti imply, from the precession of the equinoxes (unknown before the Greeks) but from the very obvious use of key natural numbers, namely 2, 3, 4, 6, and 12 to multiply out special super-large numbers that harmonized with observable movements of the sun, moon, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn. We know this because those measurements appear ancient tablets and texts, and astrologers from Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, including the influential Abu Ma’shar, produced the same numbers using planetary observations and assuming (wrongly) that precession moved at one degree per century, instead of the correct figure of 71.6 years, which fringe thinkers have to round to 72 to get back to multiples of 2, 3, 4, 6, and 12.
 
Morgan and Corsetti were very mad at Hawass because he (correctly) said that accessing hidden voids in the pyramid detected by noninvasive scans is not as easy or as simply as drilling a hole and shoving a camera inside; one needs to study and plan how to do so as non-destructively and safely as possible, and even then, only after making a reasonable case that there is a reasonable supposition that the feature is an intentional chamber. Corsetti would prefer to drill first and deal with the consequences later.
 
At this point, Morgan brings in Richards, who wants to bring up the concept of “Zep Tepi,” which Hawass was not familiar with in his Rogan interview. The reason, as I mentioned at the time, is that “Zep Tepi” is a later garbling by fringe writers of a 1959 transliteration, tep zepi, from a hieroglyphic original (zp-tp.j) that is not transliterated that way in most Egyptology books. Even though I explained, with receipts, how the term got garbled in its transition to fringe staple, Richards insists it is a common Ancient Egyptian term for the creation, and Hawass is still confused. “No, I teach the Egyptian creation but I am saying this term that you're talking about I never heard of it. Maybe it is not I never heard it in the world of Egyptology.”
 
Richards insisted that slaves must have been involved in building the pyramids, though his reasons are very confusing: “There could be graves of tens of thousands of slaves off the site that haven’t been discovered that were doing all the grunt work while somebody else was holding the plumb bob.” I’m not sure why he wants to die on this hill, but conventionally, books on the pyramids typically state that the Egyptians may have had some forced labor in building the pyramids, as in every other aspect of Egyptian life, but the majority of workers were not “slaves” in the sense of being owned, even if their labor was regulated by the king.
 
Corsetti chimes in with a howler: “Between the Old Kingdom and the Middle Kingdom is approximately 126 years of completely missing history. […] It’s multiple generations which means that nobody was alive afterwards to say what was happening before.” Apparently, he isn’t aware of the First Intermediate Period, despite knowing its exact length, or that evidence of its existence remains. Granted, few monuments remain from this period compared to the Old and Middle Kingdoms, but tombs were built, inscriptions made, etc. For instance, the warlord Ankhtifi offered an autobiography on the walls of his tomb, which was discovered a century ago. This history is not “completely missing.” Papyrus records undoubtedly were also created in this period and used by later Middle Kingdom scribes, even if they do not survive.
 
Corsetti argues that “missing history” proves that we don’t know how the pyramids were built (even if the builders left documentation in the form of a papyrus and workers’ marks on the stones), and then the conversation becomes a back-and-forth about whether a sufficiently motivated and sufficiently large group of people can move heavy stones and align them accurately. The argument seems to boil down to Richards vastly underestimating what humans can do when the tight schedules of modern construction are not an issue and labor is in a near-infinite supply.
 
In the end, Corsetti and Richards beg Hawass to give them a free vacation to the pyramids to “study” them with him, Morgan calls himself a “real Egypt pyramid nerd,” and everyone smiles for the camera, and nothing changes. We’ll do this all again in a few weeks or months when the next social media superstar wants to goose likes and views.