Review of Ancient Aliens S22E02 Egypt’s Lost Pyramids

​As colorful and inventive as the medieval Arabic legends of ancient Egypt were—originating many of the tropes used in sci-fi stories about ancient cultures even today, such as impossibly advanced ancient technology, otherworldly magic, hidden scientific secrets, booby-trapped pyramids, etc.—there are times I wish that these legends had never arisen. The medieval stories of fallen angels and Hermetic alchemists building temples, pyramids, and vanished cities full of astounding technology fed directly into modern claims about extraterrestrial intervention. Indeed, the late Erich von Däniken made a half-understood account of the most prominent of these legends, the story of the construction of the Great Pyramid first given in the Akhbār al-zamān, but known to him from a later plagiarist, the foundation for his ET claims about the pyramids, repeated from Chariots of the Gods straight through to his death.

​Our episode this week focuses on the Pyramid of Djedefre at Abu Rawash, a ruin about eight kilometers north of Giza. The ruins are all that remains of the pyramid built by Khufu’s son. There is some debate about whether the pyramid was completed or if it had been abandoned half-finished. It was called the “Unfinished Pyramid” down to the start of this century, when a growing number of Egyptologists argued it had once been complete. If so, it would originally have been the size of Menkaure’s pyramid, but it suffered near-total destruction over a very long period that saw stones removed from the New Kingdom down to the nineteenth century, sometimes at a rate of three hundred camel-loads per day at the end. The Roman and early Christian pyramids saw the greatest period of destruction.
 
Segment 1
The episode opens with the Giza Pyramids and Ramy Romany, the Egyptologists who whores himself to fake documentary shows for attention. He calls the pyramids “perfect” and parrots the line that they remain “mysterious” in their mathematical and geometrical perfection. The pyramids’ measurements are then given, and Romany again calls the Great Pyramid “perfect” and something that we could not recreate today “even with all our technology.” That’s not true. What is true is that we wouldn’t recreate it because it would cost too much and we can’t command that much labor anymore. If we had thirty years, all the money of an empire, and an endless supply of labor, we could pile rocks atop each other.
 
The talking heads express astonishment that Egyptian civilization lasted so long and was so old. Then they talk about various outbreaks for Egyptomania in the nineteenth century and the origins of professional Egyptology in that era.
 
After this, Tsoukalos contends that the pyramids are “not just rocks piled on top of each other. They are highly sophisticated engineering feats” that ancient people should not have been able to do. Tsoukalos asserts that Egyptians recorded that the “so-called Guardians of the Sky” gave the knowledge to the Egyptians. As I have pointed out with depressing regularity—and neither Tsoukalos nor Ancient Aliens ever learns the lesson—the Egyptians said no such thing. The “Guardians of the Sky” is Erich von Däniken’s long-ago mistranslation of the Watchers from the Book of Enoch, which he conflated with an Arabic story from al-Maqrizi’s fifteenth-century Al-Khitat about fallen angels providing the Egyptian kings with knowledge. Now, the funny thing is that Tsoukalos actually used to know this: He specifically attributed the claim to al-Maqrizi back in 2011: “If you're wondering what ‘texts’ I’m referring to, check out the AL-KHITAT by Al-Maqrizi,” he posted on Twitter. But along the way, he “forgot” that medieval Arabic texts are not in fact ancient Egyptian records, and the more times he repeats his own misunderstood version of von Däniken’s mistakes, the more distorted it becomes.
 
Segment 2
The second segment finally gets around to Djedefre’s pyramid at Abu Rawash. Several real Egyptologists describe the pyramid and its surrounding structures, and the usual looney tunes chime in with what appear to be scripted lines listing features of the site. The show attempts to challenge the age of the whole set of Fourth Dynasty pyramids by rehashing Zecharia Sitchin’s 1983 conspiracy theory that Col. Vyse fabricated the quarry marks naming Khufu inside the Great Pyramid, a claim that is prima facie absurd. Sitchin had claimed the cartouche of Khufu contained a spelling mistake that Vyse also made in his journal (a circle with side-by-side dots instead of stacked dashes), and Tsoukalos repeats the claim, his voice cracking as he drags out “spelling mis-TAAAAKE?!?!”), but the photograph displayed on screen clearly shows no such spelling mistake in the pyramid, as archaeologists have long pointed out. It takes some gall to brazenly rehash a debunked conspiracy while displaying the proof of its falsity. Except, of course, that no one on the show likely ever looked at the b-roll.
 
Meanwhile, the late von Däniken shows up for a posthumous appearance, and—no surprise—he cites “the Khitat” as evidence that the ancients believed the Great Pyramid to predate Noah’s Flood. As I mentioned, al-Maqrizi’s al-Khitat dates to the fifteenth century CE, drawing on legends that originate around 950 to 1000 CE, themselves based in early medieval stories originally told of the Temple of Akhmim—not the pyramids—sometime between 500 and 850 CE. However you slice it, the stories are not old enough to represent anything genuine to ancient Egypt.
 
The narrator \ identifies al-Maqrizi as a “fourteenth century” scholar, and while he was born in 1364, his Khitat was almost certainly composed in the fifteenth century. The narration falsely claims that al-Maqrizi wrote that the legendary antediluvian king Surid (whom they refer to as Saurid, following Vyse’s early Victorian transliteration) built the Giza pyramid after a visitation by beings who “descended from heaven.” This is categorically false. The story clearly states that he built them in response to a symbolic dream vision the priests of Egypt interpreted as referring to the destruction of the Earth.
 
The narrator then tells us that al-Maqrizi wrote that “King Surid and his men” built the pyramid by placing sheets covered with writing on blocks of stone and floating them into place. It’s cute that the producers and their graphics team mistake the use of “sheets” to mean bedsheets, showing blocks draped in fabric painted with weird patterns. The word “sheets” in my (and others’) translations of al-Maqrizi is an English rendering of a word referring to sheets of paper—to parchments—on which were written magical incantations. Al-Maqrizi does not say the rocks floated into place, but that the magic made them slide across the desert to the place of the pyramids: “The workers had with them sheets (papyri) covered with writing, and as soon as a stone was cut and trimmed, they placed one of the sheets on the stone and gave it a blow, and the blow was enough to make it travel a distance of 100 sahmes (200 spans of the arrow), and this continued until the stone arrived at the Pyramids’ plateau.” He goes on to explain how the rocks were lifted and bolted into place. It’s all a fairy story of course—one that al-Maqrizi did not himself compose but borrowed from the earlier writer Ibrahim ibn Wasif Shah, who in turn was copying verbatim from the Akhbar al-zaman of c. 950 CE, the oldest surviving account, or their common source.
 
I have made all of these texts available in English for over a decade now (which even Hugh Newman, who appears in this episode, once acknowledged), and I wrote a book on the subject, so there really is no excuse for mangling the medieval texts so badly.
 
Segment 3
The third segment returns to Abu Rawash to discuss the “mystery” of its destruction. Childress falsely claims archaeologists claim it was dismantled to make new pyramids. That’s not true. It’s stones were used in several Roman and Coptic buildings, including a well-known Christian monastery, and continued to be used in the Arabian and Ottoman periods. Childress claims it is hard to do this, and Romany agrees that it is “not easy to dismantle” a pyramid. The narrator refers to the “only recorded attempt” to dismantle a pyramid—another story given by al-Maqrizi—when Al-Aziz Uthman, the sultan of Egypt in the late 1100s, ordered Menkaure’s pyramid destroyed. Al-Maqrizi writes that “after lengthy efforts and enormous expense, exhausted by fatigue, they were forced to abandon the work without being able to accomplish it. All they managed to do was to deface the pyramid and give proof of their impotence and the futility of their efforts.” Andrew Collins gives additional details—that they worked eight months and removed only two stones per day—quoting them from al-Maqrizi without acknowledging the source. The narrator says that it would have taken more than twenty years of around-the-clock work to destroy the Abu Rawash pyramid, so it could not have been purposely destroyed, as no one would put in that much effort. That’s ridiculous, since we know the destruction started in the New Kingdom and continued until the nineteenth century CE—more than three thousand years! It doesn’t require nearly as much sustained effort when you have three thousand years to do it.
 
Instead, the talking heads wonder why there are scorch marks on the rocks of the pyramid, so Robert Schoch claims that it was hit by “massive solar flares around the end of the last ice age.” Sigh. The ancients used fire and vinegar to break apart the rocks. Al-Maqrizi specifically says the Caliph al-Ma‘mun used them to open the Great Pyramid, and there is little doubt similar efforts occurred with more sustained effort to break up Abu Rawash.
 
Schoch then launches into his debunked claim that the Great Sphinx dates back to the Ice Age, a claim that originated in nineteenth-century French archaeologists’ misinterpretation of Ptolemaic writings. We need not rehash this here.
 
William Henry says that the Egyptians lacked “really advanced language” and so needed what the narrator calls “an advanced alien race” to build the pyramids for them.
 
Segment 4
The fourth segment claims that Djedfre’s pyramid exploded from within. The argument is that Christopher Dunn’s speculation that the pyramids were energy and chemical plants harnessing earth energies means that Abu Rawash was one, too, and the chemicals inside exploded. According to Dunn, an explosion in the Great Pyramid shut down that pyramid’s power generation capability, and Abu Rawash was worse. Travis Taylor—who, I will remind you, was the so-called “chief scientist” for the U.S. government’s UFO effort—preposterously agrees that the Abu Rawash pyramid “blew up from the inside” because it was a “wireless” electromagnetic power transmitter that somehow hit the wrong frequency and shattered like glass before an opera singer’s high note. If that were true, you would expect to see the remaining blocks scattered in a particular pattern, along with specific kinds of damage to the blocks. None of this is visible. We would also expect to see some application of the supposed power the pyramids were generating, yet not a single electrical device survives.
 
Segment 5
The fifth segment shows us the cenotaph of Osiris at Giza, and Romany asks why there is a tomb for Osiris. “Why does a god need a tomb?” Well, for one thing, Osiris is the only god who died and had a sarcophagus in the first place (Plutarch, Isis and Osiris 12). As the ancients wrote, around the time that cenotaph was built, there was an annual ritual called the “Hours of Osiris” that, much like the Stations of the Cross, traced the death and rebirth of the god. His empty grave symbolized his resurrection—which is why they built one.
 
The narrator claims that “Egyptian writings” tell us that Osiris and Isis descended to Earth “from the belt stars of Orion,” which is not true. This leads to William Henry rehashing Robert Bauval’s “Orion Correlation Theory,” long debunked, and claiming that the pyramids “perfectly match” Orion’s belt 12,500 years ago. They do not. Even Graham Hancock acknowledges that the correlation is, for him, more symbolic than mathematically precise.
 
Then the show moves on to “Zep Tepi,” the anglicized name (which Hancock and Bauval altered from tep zepi, used by Egyptologist R. T. Rundle Clark) for the “first time” in Egyptian mythology. Then, naturally, the show mistakenly claims that the Turin Royal Canon, an incomplete hieratic king list on papyrus, lists thousands of years for the reigns of the gods. As I pointed out a while back, the Turin papyrus is too fragmentary to give a clear reading on the ages of the gods and demigods; instead, the show is really referencing the various variants of Manetho’s king list without understanding that it is doing so. Similarly, the show falsely claims that “the Hebrew Bible” describes “fallen angels” known as “Watchers” living alongside humans before the Great Flood. This is not in the Jewish, Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant Bibles and is instead from the Book of Enoch, a noncanonical text, except in Ethiopia. (The Watchers in Daniel are not fallen angels but angels in good standing.)
 
It is getting exhausting chronicling how piss-poor the writing of this episode has been, even on the simplest of factual statements. It begins to feel like the writers either are even more ignorant of their subjects than the first group were when the show started 17 years ago, or else they are generating scripts by A.I. now and not bothering to fact-check the results.
 
Segment 6
The final segment returns to last year’s false claim that Italian researchers found a massive machine and underground city beneath the Giza Plateau, a claim utterly absurd on the face of it, both because the researchers are ancient astronaut theorists and ufologists and because the scanning technology used to make the claim is not technically capable of performing the tasks claimed for it. The show inflates the researchers into “archaeologists” and “Egyptologists,” but they are not. The show ends with the talking heads expressing hope that “military grade” technology will finally prove that ancient Egypt dates back “tens of the thousands of years” to the age of space alien visitors.