In this episode, we talk with archaeologist Dr. John Anthony West about his work on the Great Sphinx, the discovery of the pyramids of ancient Egypt, and the theory that the Sphinx may be much older than we think. Dr. West is a professor of geology at the University of Boston, and is the author of the book, "Serpent in the Sky: The Ancient Egypt Mythology and the Mythology of the Ancient Sphinx." He is also the host of the popular TV show, "The Mysteries of Ancient Egypt" and co-author of the first edition of "The Key to Ancient Egypt: A Guide to Egypt's Ancient Traveler's Guide to the Ancient World." He is a frequent guest on the Tonight Show with Jay Shetty and Graham Hancock, and was a long-time friend and supporter of the late John Adams West's theories about the ancient Egyptian pyramids and Sphinx. We talk about how John became interested in the ancient Egypt and the theories he developed, and how he became a believer in the theories that he developed over the last half-century or so of his life. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in Ancient Egypt and Ancient Egypt, especially if you haven't heard of John's work, or have ever heard of him. Thanks to our sponsor, Mr. Shrader, for sponsoring this episode of Ancient Egyptology. It's a must listen episode! and we hope you enjoy it! Thank you for supporting the show! . If you like it, please consider becoming a patron of Ancient egyptology and/or sharing it on your social media, or sharing it with your friends, family and the Ancient Egyptians podcast. . . . and don't forget to leave us a rating and review it on Apple Podcasts! We'll be looking out for you in the future episodes! Subscribe to Ancient Egypsies on Anchor! Thanks again for listening and reviewing! - John Adams for the podcast, John Adams for the next episode, John's words of wisdom, John Adams, for the show, and for the work he did for Ancient Egypt? Timestamps: 5:00:00 - 6:00-8:00 7:30-9:30 8:30 - 9:40-10:40 - 13:00, 14:40, 15:00 , 16:30, 17:00s, 18:00 | 19:30s 21:00 & 22:00 s 23:00 + 26:00S 27:00 @ 29:00 ? 30s
00:00:00.000ready five four three two one mr. shock first of all thank you very very very much for being here i've been following your work for a long time now and uh i'm very appreciative of you and very appreciative of everything you've done and i've been fascinated by the subject of ancient egypt so i'm i really i'm really excited very psyched thank you it's a real pleasure to be here i've heard a lot about I've heard a lot about you.
00:00:30.000My, of course, the late John Anthony West, I think, was on with you a couple of times, maybe?
00:01:00.000Well, his work, that DVD series he did, Magical Egypt, was amazing.
00:01:05.000And I had seen your work before that in that Mysteries of the Sphinx thing that was narrated by Charlton Heston.
00:01:12.000Charlton Heston, NBC, 1993. I think, in many ways, it was the Mystery of the Sphinx that really broke everything open.
00:01:19.000It brought everything to the public attention.
00:01:22.000I've had many people tell me, I'm not trying to brag or anything, I'm just saying factually, that this really opened up a new field, if we could put it that way, a new way of looking at things among the popular groups.
00:01:38.000Public, you know, press, the popular media, but people around the world versus the academic scholarly journals and the back and forth, that type of thing.
00:01:48.000You have to remember I'm a faculty member.
00:01:53.000And many of the academics have poo-pooed, should we say, over the years bringing things to the public, but I think it's been important to do.
00:02:01.000Now what we're talking about for the people that are uninformed is the idea that some of the structures in ancient Egypt are far older than conventional wisdom or conventional modern-day archaeology, modern-day Egyptologists.
00:02:16.000They would like us to believe that all of this spawned from a very specific time period.
00:02:21.000And people like John Anthony West and yourself and some other folks like Graham Hancock are proposing that it's entirely possible that there were many different eras of construction in Egypt and that there are some structures that are far, far older than we think.
00:02:38.000And what I was alluding to is this really opened up with our work on redating the Great Sphinx.
00:02:44.000And I think you know the story, but maybe just to summarize in the smallest of nutshells, John Anthony West, before I met him, He became a follower, should we say?
00:02:56.000I shouldn't say follower, because that sounds wrong.
00:02:58.000That sounds like it's a religion dogma.
00:03:00.000But he became interested in the work of the late Schwaller de Lubitsch, who died, passed away in 1961. But he had mentioned in one line that the Sphinx had been weathered by rain.
00:03:14.000I would say precipitation as a geologist, not wind and sand.
00:03:17.000So this, if it were true, and it is true, would put the Sphinx back to a much earlier period, which would tie in with Schwaller's work and John Anthony West's subsequent work that there were indications that dynastic Egypt as we know it,
00:03:33.000going back to about 3000 BC, was really a legacy of what I call now an earlier cycle of civilization.
00:03:42.000Something that goes back much, much earlier, which at this point I date back to the end of the last Ice Age.
00:03:48.000Ice Age ended 9700 BC, just to put it in perspective for people.
00:03:52.000So when did you first get on board with this?
00:03:58.000John Anthony West, okay, so the story goes this way.
00:04:01.000John Anthony West published Serpent in the Sky, his probably most famous book, first edition, 1979. He was then looking for someone that could really validate, or at least...
00:04:15.000Assess, from a scientific point of view, this theory about the Sphinx, which he had just barely sort of touched the surface based on Schwaller, that maybe it could be older, but this was really a geological question.
00:04:29.000He mentions that in 1979 in Serpent in the Sky.
00:04:33.000John Anthony West went on to become very involved with Egypt, and he started traveling to Egypt.
00:04:41.000He wrote The Traveler's Key to Ancient Egypt in 1985, also mentions in appendix, I think it was, just the, quote, older Sphinx theory, but really looking for someone to at least assess it scientifically.
00:04:54.000He met a fellow at In Egypt, actually, at the time, Robert Eddy, who is Ph.D. English literature, I believe, something like that, but he was teaching in Cairo, American University in Cairo,
00:05:16.000I was and still do teach at Boston University full-time.
00:05:21.000Robert Eddy and myself got to know each other.
00:05:24.000Robert Eddy mentioned me as a geologist to John Anthony West and that maybe this was someone who seems fairly knowledgeable, fairly open-minded about things.
00:05:36.000At the time, did you have any thoughts?
00:06:16.000So there were two things going on in my head back then which maybe prepped me for this.
00:06:22.000Number one, I knew the conventional story.
00:06:25.000I knew that the Sphinx goes back to 2500 BC according to the standard Egyptologists.
00:06:32.000In 1989, which is when I first, I believe it was 1989, I first actually met West in person, I had in my mind that the Egyptologists must be correct because they've studied it, they must know what they're doing.
00:06:46.000I was coming from an academic point of view.
00:06:50.000I'm just giving, you know, saying where I'm coming from.
00:06:53.000I had gone to Yale University to get my PhD in geology and geophysics.
00:06:57.000I was very well grounded in, quote, the status quo academic point of view.
00:07:03.000So I thought when I first went to Egypt, I would just prove West wrong.
00:07:07.000I would just prove that the Egyptologists knew what they were talking about.
00:07:13.000I was also trained in many ways, both as a graduate student and going back to my grandmother, who I had great respect for, and was also very, should we say, liberal and open-minded but critical.
00:07:25.000You always have to follow the evidence wherever it goes, and that's always been my rule of thumb.
00:07:31.000That not everything is always the way people say it is, even if they're, quote, authorities.
00:07:37.000And something I already knew when I went to Egypt for the first time was that some of the very old Egyptologists in the late 19th, early 20th century had actually suggested that just the way it looks, the feel of the Sphinx, Not based on hard evidence,
00:07:54.000really, that maybe it was older than the pyramids, that maybe it goes back earlier.
00:07:59.000So I felt that it wasn't all said and done and, you know, pat and sound that the Egyptologists necessarily knew what they were talking about in modern times because some of the Earlier Egyptologists, who they held in very high respect, supposedly,
00:08:49.000Theosophy was founded in the late 19th century.
00:08:53.000It questioned a lot of the materialistic values, a lot of the dogma of science of the time, of religion of the time.
00:09:01.000It looked to the East in particular, to other philosophies, other worldviews.
00:09:07.000So basically it was a way—this is what it did for me at least—and I'm not a theosophist.
00:09:12.000I don't want to say I'm a theosophist.
00:09:15.000But reading theosophical works on top of everything else allowed me, I think, to expand my horizons and to see that maybe— The dogma of the day is just that, the dogma of the day, that there are other possibilities.
00:09:31.000And not that we accept something just because someone said it or because it's old or because it's this religion or that religion or that's supposed to be an ancient culture, but no.
00:09:40.000You keep everything open, you look at the evidence, and that's really where I was coming from.
00:09:46.000But my point is that Even in the late 1980s, early 1990s, when I first got involved with this, if I looked at it critically, the evidence was not that definitive for the age of the Sphinx.
00:10:00.000So, I was going in with open-minded possibilities, but honestly, when I first went to Egypt with John Anthony West in 1990, I thought, before I got off the plane, that this would be a simple open-and-shut case.
00:10:40.000Because my first impression of the Sphinx was now that I saw it on the ground in person, there was something wrong with the Egyptological dating.
00:10:49.000Because when you look at the Sphinx, As a geologist with a geological eye, this was not weathered by wind and sand.
00:10:59.000This was not desert erosion and weathering that I saw on the Sphinx, the body of the Sphinx, which is very difficult to tell because it's been heavily repaired and reworked, but particularly on the walls of what are known as the Sphinx enclosure.
00:11:13.000The Sphinx enclosure is important because it preserves a lot of the details.
00:11:19.000And if the audience has not been to Egypt, they should realize that when they carved the Sphinx, it's all solid bedrock, only the head initially was above the ground surface.
00:11:32.000They carved down into the rock to free up the body, what I call the core body of the Sphinx.
00:11:40.000And it's that core body and the walls of the enclosure, more or less the quarry around it, if you want to use that term, that show these ancient weathering, precipitation, erosional features that are incompatible with the last 5,000 years of climatic history.
00:12:07.000Either this was a weird geological anomaly or something else was going on And the Sphinx might go back to earlier period.
00:12:17.000Also, I want to point out that when you look at the Sphinx, and other geologists have looked at this as well, they did not just chip away at the rock to carve the body.
00:12:28.000More or less, you could have chipped away at the rock with pickaxes and that type of thing, shoveled out chips of rock in baskets.
00:12:37.000What they did is they carved out huge Huge blocks of stone.
00:12:41.000And when I say huge, we're talking multi-ton, tens of tons, some of them maybe over 50 tons or more of limestone.
00:12:48.000They moved those due east of the Sphinx and built what is now known as the Sphinx Temple, which is still there in Ruinas.
00:13:06.000I think those constructions which are contemporary with the oldest portion of the Sphinx in some ways are more impressive if you think about the technology and what went into constructing them.
00:13:29.000The first one that he pulled up was a computer image that showed the Sphinx Okay, I'm looking at it now, yes.
00:13:36.000And in this image, what you can see, that's a computer image that's actually from Mystery of the Sphinx, and then there's an inset that's an aerial photograph, the real thing, and that shows how when they were carving the body, they cut out huge blocks and then put them in position to make what's known as the Sphinx Temple due east of the Sphinx.
00:13:58.000And the second image is the Sphinx Temple?
00:14:00.000Okay, and you look at this, it says the Sphinx faces due east, the rising sun, and right in front of it is the Sphinx Temple.
00:14:07.000So this is a humongous temple made out of these huge blocks of stone, which were carved out when they carved the body of the Sphinx.
00:14:17.000And here you see in this image another picture of the Sphinx Temple.
00:14:22.000And so these erosion features that you're looking at here...
00:14:33.000Let's go back to the sphinx enclosure itself.
00:14:36.000It's a sphinx enclosure where you see the rolling, undulating profile, the erosional features, Here you see it in that picture.
00:14:45.000The vertical fissures, and I know you're familiar with this personally, because I've heard you talk about it with John Anthony West, that can only be caused by precipitation.
00:14:55.000The rocks are like a layer cake, so it takes out the softer layers, it recedes the softer layers, some of the harder layers stick out further.
00:15:04.000But the water also finds its way down crevices and cracks, natural features that are slightly softer, and it forms these vertical fissures.
00:15:15.000I want to make the point because a lot of people get confused.
00:15:18.000They say, couldn't it be rising Nile floods?
00:15:39.000It could be much stronger rainfall, you know, huge flash floods, that type of thing.
00:15:46.000And part of the story that I hope we'll get to is that...
00:15:50.000Initially, I'm jumping around here a little bit, but initially I was thinking 5,000 to 7,000 BC. That was very conservative based on the geological data, based on the seismic, which we have to get to also.
00:16:05.000But now I believe we're talking prior to 9,700 BC for the original construction of the Sphinx, and we can talk about why the dating.
00:16:15.000And at 9700 BC, we have the end of the Younger Dryas, the end of the glacial epoch, the end of the last ice age.
00:16:25.000I have now put together the story based on evidence.
00:16:30.000And whenever I say, if I say I believe something or I think something, it's always based on evidence that I've been piecing together, that what we had ending the Younger Dryas, ending the last ice age, was a huge eruption from the sun, a huge solar outburst.
00:16:45.000Huge climatic changes which put, among other things, a lot of precipitation, a lot of moisture into the air which came down as precipitation with huge floods, huge essentially thunderstorms, etc.
00:17:00.000And I think a lot of the initial erosion that we still see on the walls of the Sphinx enclosure go back to that period.
00:17:07.000So you had the situation where you would get this incredible Weathering and erosion.
00:17:15.000And then it continued for thousands of years after that and was reinforced until you had the Sahara coming in in relatively recent times and geologically Holocene times.
00:17:35.000And before that, it was very fertile savanna, lots of plants there.
00:17:41.000People have seen it even in popular movies and whatnot, how the Sahara at one point had water and all kinds of animals.
00:17:48.000That's before the end of the last ice age, before these incredible changes that we have at 9700 B.C., So that's where the Sphinx, I think the original Sphinx goes back to that time period, and that's what the Egyptians called Zeb Tepe.
00:18:05.000This was a first time for them, or what I call an earlier cycle of civilization.
00:18:11.000The last cycle, the one that we're still part of, in my terminology, is the last 5,000 years.
00:18:17.000So civilization arising, re-emerging, I should say, I think?
00:18:41.000And just to map this out, a period from about 9700 BC, this is what I'm reconstructing now, to about 4000 to 3000 BC where we have civilization re-emerging between that period, so thousands of years,
00:18:58.0009700 BC to say 3700 BC for round numbers, 6000 years.
00:19:03.000We have essentially a dark period and what I've been now calling Siddha, solar-induced dark age.
00:19:10.000Sort of ironic, the sun would induce a dark age because it brought civilization back to an earlier stage, if you would.
00:19:52.000In fact, a lot of the markers, and I don't want to be debating the issue necessarily, but a lot of the markers that people have used for a comet At the Younger Dryas or during the Younger Dryas.
00:20:06.000Really, most of them are at the beginning of the Younger Dryas.
00:20:10.000But a lot of the dating is very, very iffy.
00:20:14.000I found it interesting, for instance, someone will use something as a marker for the Younger Dryas and it will give a date of 12,000 plus or minus 4,000 years.
00:20:24.000So, you know, this is just the way geology is.
00:20:26.000But I remember – I can't remember his name.
00:20:47.000But anyway, he was one of the people that was, quote, comet proponent.
00:20:52.000And he started pointing out a lot of the evidence, microspurials, glassy spheres, nanodiamonds.
00:21:03.000I don't think he mentioned, by all means, shocked quartz, etc.
00:21:07.000And everyone has been assuming this has to be from a physical impact in the sense of something coming down, like a comet or asteroid, that type of thing.
00:21:17.000But the problem is you don't necessarily find craters.
00:21:19.000You don't necessarily find the pieces of the comet.
00:21:23.000You should find some physical remains.
00:21:25.000And he mentioned, and I found it very interesting, he mentioned In passing, what I've been working on now for a number of years that, no, and I was once on the comet bandwagon, I'll put it that way, and I'm not trying to knock.
00:21:39.000But when you look at the evidence, what is not being considered by a lot of people, and he mentioned this is, in passing, he said, well, you know, something else that could cause is lightning.
00:21:58.000But if you have a major solar outburst, major coronal mass ejections, and an astrophysicist who's now deceased, he was at Cornell, Thomas Gold, who did a lot of really good, in fact, prize-winning work in astrophysics, First pointed out in the 1960s that if you have a major solar outburst,
00:22:18.000major coronal mass ejection, you would get essentially huge, what would be like huge lightning strikes over incredible areas of the Earth simultaneously.
00:22:29.000This would cause vitrification, it would cause all these features and Just as within the last year, there's been more work done showing that fulgurites, where lightning strikes in modern times, even small lightning strikes like that can cause,
00:22:46.000can create things like shocked quartz, other, quote, impact features that people have always said, well, it must be a comet or an asteroid.
00:23:25.000And there's a couple of aspects to both.
00:23:27.000When you say both, there is indications that comets diving into the Sun actually cause coronal mass ejections.
00:23:35.000They correlate it with disturbing the Sun.
00:23:37.000So in some cases, you'll have the, I'll call it the comet group.
00:23:41.000Talking about how we go through these comet streams periodically, I agree 100%.
00:23:46.000In fact, I talk about this in some of my early books because I really was into comets at the time.
00:23:52.000Voyages of the Pyramid Builders, for instance, I talk about how comets might have begun and ended the Younger Dryas.
00:23:58.000But I wasn't thinking about solar activity at that time, seriously, as no one else was.
00:24:04.000But we now find that comets diving into the Sun, when we go through comet streams, that can set off solar activity.
00:24:11.000So in fact, I think it could be both, but it could be that the comets are affecting the Sun, which is then affecting the Earth, rather than directly, if that makes sense.
00:24:52.000And what we have at 9700 BC, and this is based on sediment cores and ice cores, we also have lunar data that supports this.
00:25:01.000At 9700 BC, we have incredible climatic change going from, you know, deep ice age To modern warming and this literally now based on what they call micro stratigraphy from Greenland ice cores can be dated within,
00:25:40.000So I think this ties in our support that there was a massive solar event in 9700 B.C. What we had just on a slide a minute ago when I saw it out the side of my eye was a graph of, based on isotope data,
00:25:57.000what they call proxies, of solar activity, again based on primarily ice cores, sediment cores, and the sun was incredibly active in 9700 BC and shortly after there, and it had huge, if you think of it anthropomorphically,
00:26:33.000Civilization was able to reemerge, redevelop again.
00:26:37.000And we've had incredibly good conditions, should we say, for the last 5,000 years, quiet conditions, stable conditions on Earth for civilization to reemerge.
00:27:00.000I'm not trying to sell people on being preppers.
00:27:02.000But the reality is the Sun has started to become active again, just as it was at the end of the last Ice Age.
00:27:08.000And I think this makes perfect sense because the Sun is a star.
00:27:13.000It goes through cycles like other stars do, and we're a little planet orbiting it.
00:27:19.000And we're, like all the other planets, affected by this study.
00:27:23.000It's fascinating, though, that we have this incredible need to keep things exactly the way they are to the point where we're in denial about any potential change.
00:27:30.000Even if you're studying things, everybody's like, oh, it'll be fine.
00:27:42.000One of the astrophysicists some decades ago said about the sun, it was sort of the last vestige of Aristotelianism in modern science.
00:27:50.000Everyone assumed the sun is stable, essentially perfect.
00:27:53.000Yes, it goes through little sun cycles of 11 and 22 years and maybe some bigger ones of a few years.
00:28:00.000But no one wanted to think of it as what it is, just a plain old star that goes through periods of the equilibrium.
00:28:09.000We've been in relative solar equilibrium for thousands of years now, but it goes through disequilibrium and has, we'll call it hiccups and spurts, and has to recalibrate itself, if you would.
00:28:24.000And so at the end of the last Ice Age, we had this massive solar event, solar outbursts, what they call solar proton events.
00:28:35.000It would have messed up the ionosphere, caused all kinds of geomagnetic storms.
00:28:40.000This ties in with earthquake activity that we see at the end of the last Ice Age because we now have lots of evidence That solar activity upsets the magnetosphere and the magnetic fields on the Earth.
00:28:53.000The electrical currents in the Earth will trigger earthquakes that are about to happen anyway.
00:29:05.000Katie, my wife, on the right here, and a good analogy is when you have an avalanche that's just about ready to go, you can clap your hands in some cases, and it sets off this huge avalanche.
00:29:38.000Probably, this is me speaking, because of the solar activity that set it off.
00:29:43.000So when you start getting things like platinum In iridium and osmium spikes, that's not necessarily extraterrestrial.
00:29:52.000That could be from terrestrial volcanic activity that was occurring at that period.
00:29:57.000So yes, there's extraterrestrial causes, but I think that there's a very strong case to be made That this is solar, that this is the sun influencing us, which is really important too.
00:30:25.000And I think we're seeing the beginning of this, or we saw the beginning of this, because again, I'm a geologist, so I think in broad terms, a few hundred years is nothing.
00:30:39.0001859. Are you aware of the Carrington event?
00:30:45.000From a human perspective, major solar outburst.
00:30:48.000From an astrophysical perspective, it was nothing.
00:30:50.000But it was coronal mass ejection, actually two in a row, that hit us in 1859. It's known as the Carrington Event after Richard Carrington, who first saw the solar flares, the really bright solar flares that were associated with it.
00:31:06.000It was picked up on the primitive magnetometers of the time that they had, for instance, in London, etc., studied by the physicists of the time.
00:31:14.000And 1859, there were electronics around.
00:31:20.000The telegraph system acted as huge antenna that picked up the changing magnetic fields, generated electricity along it, burnt out the telegraph lines, literally set telegraph...
00:31:38.000You know, the places where the telegraph operators worked on fire, telegraph stations on fire, that type of thing.
00:31:46.000If we had a Carrington-level event now, which is really quite minor from an astrophysical perspective, orders of magnitude less than what happened at the end of the last ice age, It would fry our grid lines.
00:32:01.000It would knock out all the huge transformers.
00:32:05.000It would, before it did that, as it's coming in, it would probably knock out all the satellites, the GPS systems, communications.
00:32:13.000I mean, it would really bring us to our knees.
00:32:25.000So bright, brilliant, at one o'clock, ordinary print can be read by the light.
00:32:28.000Exactly, because one thing you get is these bright auroras, these bright, what people think of as northern and southern lights, but in 1859, they saw them around the world.
00:32:41.000Back at the end of the last ice age, because they were so powerful, when they become more intense, they take on Very discrete structures in the sky.
00:32:52.000Here's some what are known as, again, northern lights, auroral displays.
00:32:59.000But see how it starts to take on a discrete structure on the right there?
00:33:02.000And to describe it to the audience, do you see how it sort of looks like a person with their hands up in the air?
00:33:07.000They start to take on more and more discrete structures.
00:33:10.000Some of them look like people with their hands up in the air and little legs.
00:33:30.000And it will ultimately come down, if you have a tense enough one, as you did at the end of the last ice age, it will look like if you were there living You know, 12,000 years ago, 10,000, 11,700 years ago, at the end of the last ice age,
00:33:45.000and you saw this, you would see these things in the sky.
00:34:13.000Yeah, this is plasma discharge formation.
00:34:16.000Plasma is essentially, think of as electrically charged particles, electrons, protons, that type of thing.
00:34:23.000As it comes off the sun, in this case, think of a coronal mass ejection, a huge ball of charged gas is one way to describe it.
00:34:32.000Hitting the atmosphere, driving down into the atmosphere, causing these like northern lights on steroids, if you want to put it that way.
00:34:42.000But it takes on very specific images that look like stick figures.
00:34:46.000So these are things you would see in the sky, except in many cases they're spinning electrically.
00:34:53.000You wouldn't notice that they were spinning necessarily.
00:34:55.000And they look sort of like – because we tend to anthropomorphize.
00:34:59.000We tend to look at like even clouds or rocks formations and we make them look like what we think they look like.
00:35:06.000So they look sort of like stick figure men.
00:35:08.000Is any of this an actual photograph or are these just graphic illustrations?
00:35:12.000These are graphic illustrations but what we can show – No, because we haven't experienced this, fortunately, since photography.
00:35:19.000But what we do have are petroglyphs dating back to the end of the last Ice Age, where people were seeing this in the sky, and they were drawing it on the walls of caves, on the walls of rocks.
00:36:02.000But they're seeing this around the world in the sky and recording it.
00:36:07.000Also, the motif of when these take on certain forms, they take on what look like bird's heads.
00:36:14.000So the bird-headed man, a motif that you see around the world going back.
00:36:20.000It all goes back to the end of the last Ice Age and what people were experiencing, what they were seeing, if you want to call it gods in the sky or whatever, but they were seeing this and it was having a real effect on their life.
00:36:33.000What is causing that very specific pattern, that very specific shape that you're seeing with the two dots?
00:36:39.000The best way to say it is you've got this, this is simplistic, but you've got these huge electrical charges coming down.
00:36:46.000They sort of focus like a tornado focuses.
00:36:50.000Or if you think of running water out of a spigot, if you play with it, you can sort of squeeze it and make it form different shapes.
00:37:20.000And then it gets even more fascinating, and this is something that ties in actually with Katie, my wife, Catherine Ulysses, And Perat's team has confirmed it.
00:37:30.000On Easter Island, you have the Rongo Rongo script, which also duplicates this and seems to be a record.
00:37:39.000You know, the modern Rongo Rongo are only a few hundred years old, but just like any manuscript or anything, it was copied over and over and seems to go back to it, too.
00:37:49.000And if you look at some of the rongo-rongo, and I know a lot of your audience can't see this, but you look at some of them, they're even more definitive, showing what Peratt was able to reproduce experimentally, and there they have it,
00:38:34.000You would have incredible radiation levels at the surface of the Earth.
00:38:39.000Paula Violetta, a physicist I know, and he's published on this, has talked about how during an event like this, you would have levels of radiation that were so high that large mammals, we are large mammals, large mammals, if they couldn't Protect themselves.
00:38:55.000They could die within, you know, three to six, seven days, a week or so.
00:39:02.000You go underground, you go into caves, you go into places, because rock will protect you from the surface radiation under these circumstances.
00:39:11.000Now, you don't need to stay there forever.
00:39:13.000You can, you know, because these solar events probably came Now, this is hypothetical because we've not experienced a huge one like this, but they probably came, and then it would back off a little bit, but then maybe another one would come.
00:39:28.000Again, I'm a geologist, so think of a huge earthquake and then aftershocks.
00:39:33.000Aftershocks that actually last centuries or millennia in some cases, you know, smaller ones.
00:39:38.000So something that was happening, and you see this around the world too, is that where people survived, I believe in part because they had access to natural caves initially, then they built underground structures for when they came again, and it also encouraged our We developed this whole tradition,
00:39:59.000should we say, of having a place to go, even if it's not occurring at the moment.
00:40:04.000They knew that these things do occur, at least for some thousands of years, and we're aware of this, so we're being prepared.
00:40:12.000An analogy I would use is during the Cold War here, what did a lot of people build in their backyards?
00:41:32.000Because, for instance, we can document linguistically, and this is other people's work, but I think it ties right in.
00:41:39.000They haven't been able to explain it cogently otherwise.
00:41:41.000That there is, for instance, in Turkey, Middle East, there is a constriction of the population to the Anatolia region, Cappadocia, where you have these underground shelters.
00:41:55.000You have a geology that was easy to go into and escape.
00:42:00.000And linguistically, we can map back Indo-European languages to a small pocket that survived there at the end of the last ice age.
00:42:10.000So, you know, I think there was a massive—around the world, you would have had populations being constricted, and then they spread out again.
00:42:18.000And when they were constricted, there's—I see the slide there for the linguistic data.
00:42:22.000When you constrict down in one area, of course, you lose a lot of the technology.
00:42:28.000You lose a lot of the high— Culture, if you would.
00:42:32.000You know, you go back to a much more primitive stage and that's what we find.
00:42:36.000So we find, for instance, in Anatolia, western Turkey, you know, near Asia as it was called.
00:42:44.000In ancient times, you find not only, of course, you know, things like Quebec Le Tepe, which goes back before this huge catastrophe with the monumental stone megaliths, etc., but what you find there 2,000 years later in the same general area,
00:43:01.000you find, for instance, Charalhuyuk, which is a bunch of mud brick houses all clustered together.
00:43:09.000It's gone into what I call, Katie and I call Siddha, this solar-induced dark age where they lost a lot of it.
00:43:17.000Not unlike an analogy, I think it's easy for people to understand analogies, the end of the Roman Empire and everything that was lost there and then going into a much more primitive state.
00:43:30.000With the Dark Ages, the European Dark Ages in this case, you look at the technology, it was much higher during the Roman Empire until maybe 1000 or 1200 AD again in many realms.
00:43:47.000Same thing here, although this was such a mighty throwback, it took thousands of years for people to reemerge and at least start to get up to the status where they had been before.
00:44:00.000Have you presented this in front of other scholars?
00:45:03.000One thing I'll mention right now is as of relatively recently, now it's still very, very small, but at Boston University I've been allowed to found what is called the ISOC, the The Institute for the Study of the Origins of Civilization,
00:45:21.000which is really just me at the moment.
00:45:23.000But I want to build it up, and I'd like to get – I'm not trying to sound the wrong way, but I'd like to get people to donate to it, et cetera, et cetera.
00:45:31.000Also, I've found it with some colleagues of mine, including some academic colleagues.
00:45:38.000Oracle, which stands for the Organization for the Research of Ancient Cultures.
00:45:42.000So we're bringing it into the mainstream both as a private – Not-for-profit foundation as an institute through Boston University to really be looking at these things in a, when I say professional way, what I mean by that is, you know,
00:45:58.000evidence-based way, but also looking outside the standard dogmas, the standard boxes, standard paradigms, and the standard vested interest because So much science.
00:46:11.000People say to me all the time, they think science is supposed to be objective.
00:46:14.000Well, maybe it is supposed to be objective, but who are the scientists doing it?
00:46:18.000They have all their subjective biases and notions and vested interests.
00:46:23.000I'm not trying to knock anyone, but...
00:46:30.000And one of the things that happened in that documentary from 1993 that I was kind of stunned by was the reaction by the conventional Egyptologist when you brought up this evidence where he was very dismissive, almost mockingly, in this weird sort of a way where he was like,
00:47:26.000You know, I haven't gotten necessarily the...
00:47:28.000I've had colleagues say to me in no uncertain terms, very well meaning, that I could have had a wonderful career and had all the promotions and advancements going up through the academic...
00:47:43.000You know, ladder, if you would, with no problems if I just stuck to my, you know, some little specialty that no one really cared about.
00:48:30.000Because that was an American Association for Advancement of Science debate on the Sphinx, which turned out I thought I was going in for a real debate.
00:48:41.000I thought it was going to be a great debate.
00:48:43.000We were really going to discuss the evidence back and forth.
00:48:46.000I brought all my data, the seismic data, which is very, very important, which we haven't even touched on yet.
00:48:52.000Other types of data we haven't touched on.
00:48:54.000Because I want to make the point, it's much more than a little bit of weathering on the Sphinx.
00:48:59.000And I've heard so many critics, even to my face, they say, well, you don't redate civilization based on a weathering profile.
00:49:06.000No, I've got lots more than weathering profile.
00:49:09.000The weathering profile and erosion is the easiest thing to explain.
00:49:13.000And yes, it's what I saw initially in that first 30 to 120 seconds, because that's before I brought in equipment and worked with Tom DeBecky to do seismic work, to do other types of more detailed analysis.
00:49:26.000I would not be talking to you today if it was just an erosional profile.
00:49:31.000For my own self, I wouldn't put enough stock in that.
00:49:36.000But when it ties in with everything else, we have a cogent picture.
00:49:41.000But getting back to someone being dismissive like that, that was 1992. Gobekli Tepe had technically been discovered back in the 1960s, but they misdated it completely.
00:49:53.000They thought it was maybe 1,000 or 2,000 years old, Byzantine or Roman, Greco-Roman period, not end of the last ice age, not You know, 12,000 years old.
00:50:05.000And how did they make the distinction that it was 12,000 years old?
00:50:11.000Klaus Schmidt went back to it in about 1994-95, so a couple of years after that dismissive comment from the Egyptologist Mark Lehner, who I think is the specific person you're referring to.
00:50:24.000At the American Association for the Advancement of Science debate, which I just went to make the comment.
00:50:30.000I went into that thinking that was going to be a debate.
00:50:33.000I came out of it realizing that they were just trying to set me up to put me down and shut me up forever, which they were not successful in doing.
00:50:42.000Why do you think that they're so reluctant to just listen to the evidence and look at the information and consider the possibility that maybe there had been an ancient civilization?
00:50:52.000Because it upsets the standard timeline, the standard story, and it also upsets a lot of people's concept of progression.
00:51:00.000And this is something John Anthony West liked to talk about.
00:51:04.000He called it the church of progress, that we've gotten better and better and better.
00:51:08.000And I talk to so many people that think that we are the end-all and be-all.
00:51:14.000We're the best that there ever has been.
00:51:16.000Well, maybe we are in terms of certain types of technology.
00:51:20.000I'm not making any claim that people in the past could ever do what we're doing now, doing a podcast with all the electronics.
00:51:27.000But as I pointed out, that also makes us really vulnerable to things.
00:51:31.000But I would argue that there is a not so remote possibility that they knew things that we don't know, that they may have understood things that we don't understand.
00:51:43.000They may have had a worldview that would benefit us to at least have a feel for it.
00:51:50.000I mean, I don't want to go off on spiritual tangents.
00:51:52.000I could if I wanted to, or philosophical tangents.
00:51:56.000But I also have a training as an anthropologist.
00:52:00.000I have an undergraduate degree in anthropology on top of everything else.
00:52:04.000And I'm fascinated by human approaches to life and the environment and their situation.
00:52:11.000And I'm convinced that we do have things to learn from the ancients, whether it's the really remote ancients or the more recent ancients from only 5,000 years ago, even dynastic Egypt,
00:52:27.000and that it's not all simply a one-way progress, that there are fits and starts, that there have been high points and low points and high points again.
00:52:36.000And I'm not frankly convinced that we're at the highest point when it comes to certain aspects.
00:52:41.000We might be at a high point with certain types of technology, but I'm not convinced that we're at a high point when it comes to...
00:52:52.000Oh, certainly not with stone construction.
00:52:53.000So there are types of technology we are not at a high point with, much less getting into this philosophical or spiritual or whatever you want to call it.
00:53:02.000And we don't think of it as technology because we think of technology as being something that's electronic.
00:53:08.000And if you ask me how did they build the pyramids, I will tell you I don't know.
00:53:13.000If you ask me how they constructed the Sphinx Temple, they carved out those huge blocks of stone that can weigh 50 or more tons and move them in such tight spaces with such tight tolerances, I don't know.
00:53:27.000I mean, I'm not going to— No one really knows.
00:53:51.000And yeah, you can try to hypothesize levers and that type of thing.
00:53:55.000But it's – this has been said before and I've seen – I wasn't there in person but I've seen off-the-record document – you know, footage of it when they've tried to just construct a little pyramid with very small blocks and then they end up using modern machines and they still aren't very successful.
00:54:19.000So there's a real resistance, I find, among a lot of my academic colleagues to want to even suggest that people could have known things in the past that we don't know now.
00:54:29.000Or if they knew something in the past that we don't know now, it was so trivial that it was worth forgetting, worth not worrying about.
00:54:41.000And I hate to be stereotypic, I'm broad-brushing, but many Egyptologists, when I read their works or I listen to them at conferences, etc., I get the impression that they might love Egyptology and studying the ancient Egyptians,
00:54:59.000but they also have this view that, oh, these guys made wonderful temples and had some fantastic art, but really, you know, they're sort of primitive and ha-ha-ha, isn't that silly?
00:55:25.000Then you also have in Egyptology, and I want to give you another example of this, not just me bringing in scientific evidence and data and the Egyptologists rejecting it, But just recently, in the last couple of years, have you heard about the project on the Great Pyramid,
00:55:42.000They've been using muography, which is a highly sophisticated technique using muons that come from outer space or come from the atmosphere.
00:55:52.000You can set up detectors long-term and pick these up.
00:55:57.000They're sort of like, think of x-rays technology, but using muons, which are sort of exotic particles that most people are not aware of because they just pass right through us without interacting.
00:56:09.000But when you've got massive stone, massive stone will block some of them so you can pick up essentially an image over a long period of time.
00:56:19.000So this is really high-tech physics, very expensive.
00:56:23.000A consortium of physicists did work on the Great Pyramid.
00:56:29.000But they put up, you know, tens of millions, if not more, worth of a high, you know, sophisticated physical physics equipment, gathered all this data.
00:57:38.000Space between the rocks is nothing important.
00:57:41.000But what I wanted to say, which is really important, some Egyptologists actually called for the whole project to be closed down because they don't like the results.
00:57:51.000And they called it, quote, propaganda.
00:58:59.000Now the proof will be in the pudding, as they say, if they ever enter it or at least put a probe into it.
00:59:05.000But my point right now is to just dismiss the data is nonsense.
00:59:10.000To call for the whole project to be shut down is nonsense, in my opinion.
00:59:14.000Who's calling for the project to be shut down?
00:59:16.000Some of the Egyptian Egyptologists, close to the ministry.
00:59:21.000And my point is they've done the same thing to me.
00:59:23.000So, for instance, when we did seismic work and we found the chamber under the left paw of the Sphinx, that's never been explored since, at least not to my knowledge.
00:59:31.000And they just dismiss it and say, we know there's nothing there.
00:59:36.000And that was despite the fact that we also found a chamber at the rump of the Sphinx, which I didn't know about at the time, but they already knew about.
00:59:43.000So it confirmed that our data was good because we were finding something they knew about.
00:59:47.000But when we find something they don't know about and they don't want to be there, they dismiss it and don't want to pursue it further.
00:59:56.000They have explored one of those chambers, correct?
00:59:58.000Did they explore the one that's in the rump?
01:01:22.000So for a long time, the question has been, in my mind, and we talk about this even on Mystery of the Sphinx, what was the original head of the Sphinx?
01:01:33.000We've speculated and other people speculate it might have been a lion, for instance, Leo, because it faces on the equinox, the constellation Leo in the sky.
01:01:46.000Not today, but 10,000 BC or so, more or less at the very end of the last ice age.
01:01:53.000Now, I've had a lot of colleagues of mine, academic colleagues, say that's nonsense, you know, it doesn't mean anything because they weren't even recognizing the constellations back then.
01:02:04.000We now have plenty of evidence that at least some of the constellations that we recognize today, Leo I would put in that category, Taurus is in that category, Orion is in that category.
01:02:18.000Some of them we don't have evidence for, but the ones I just mentioned, the These are constellations that go back well into the end of the last ice age.
01:02:37.000So to me it's fascinating that some of these constellations that we recognize today were recognized tens of thousands of years ago.
01:02:46.000So to me it's not nonsense that they carved a structure 10,000 BC approximately, that was facing its own image in the sky.
01:02:55.000So one suggestion was that maybe it's Leo.
01:02:58.000But recently, Dr. Manu Safsadeh, another colleague of mine, he recognized initially that there is a title, what's known as a dual title, In dynastic Egypt that goes back to the fourth dynasty and even back to the first dynasty with the earliest writings and it,
01:03:22.000when properly translated, basically refers to the Sphinx as the guardian of an archive and not the Sphinx as we think of it as a lion with a human head, but as a lioness.
01:03:37.000And there was a name for this lioness, Mehet.
01:03:40.000She was the goddess Mehet, who guarded an archive.
01:03:47.000When I say we, Manu Seifsadeh, myself, and Robert Buval, who you may know up from Orion Correlation and some of his work ties in with this, the archaeoastronomy.
01:03:58.000But we've now We found that there is this sign, which we named the JAW sign in honor of John Anthony West.
01:04:24.000If I could put a plug in, if people go to my website, www.robertschoch, and that's R-O-B-E-R-T-S-C-H-O-C-H. The main thing is my name's spelled S-C-H-O-C-H. So www.robertshock.com,
01:04:42.000they can go, I did a popular summary of the paper, and they can also go and download the original paper in the peer-reviewed journal, Archaeological Discovery, where we argue that what we have here is the lioness methit.
01:04:58.000She has what looks like a bent rod coming out of her back.
01:05:03.000When people look at the actual image and then above it is axe.
01:05:13.000When I say primitive, even for the ancient Egyptians in dynastic Egypt, it would have been sort of a symbolic axe, if you would, which was a sign of someone who was in charge of things, an overseer, that type of thing.
01:05:31.000We would now call it a primitive key, but it represents a key.
01:05:35.000And so it's basically saying that this is the guardian of the archives of Medhit, the locked chamber or vault.
01:05:44.000And we also have images, I see it up on the board now, if you look at, you've got the lioness with the key, and you also have a lioness, not in that image, but a different image that we had before.
01:05:57.000If you look at that, can you see how there's a lioness, sort of a diagrammatic Shape over what looks like a facade.
01:06:10.000If you then go to the Stella that sits between the paws of the Sphinx.
01:06:19.000You have the same image, much more artistically rendered, of the Sphinx sitting over a facade, over what looks like a building.
01:07:11.000Hopefully there's still things there, or maybe it was gutted and cleaned out at some point.
01:07:15.000But here we have the seismic work, one of the seismic maps, I'll call it, tomographic.
01:07:25.000And what's labeled as anomaly A, under the left paw, that is the chamber we found under the left paw that the Egyptologists have wanted to deny ever since, and they don't want to explore it, and we haven't gotten permission to explore it yet.
01:07:49.000Now, okay, this is 1991 or so, early 1990s.
01:07:54.000As of last year, 2017, we have textual evidence, ancient hieroglyphs talking about this chamber, talking about the Sphinx, talking about the Sphinx being a lioness guarding a chamber.
01:08:08.000And I want to point out that the earliest hieroglyphs that we have that refer to this are about 33,3100 B.C., Which is hundreds of years before the Egyptologists claimed the Sphinx was even thought about being carved.
01:08:22.000Which is somewhere around 2500 BC? 2500 BC. That coincides with the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza?
01:08:36.000So the Egyptologists claim that the Sphinx was first carved 2500 BC. Right.
01:08:42.000Yet there's no mention of the carving of the Sphinx then.
01:08:45.000They cite the, not the inventory stella, that's another stella.
01:08:49.000They cite the Thutmose IV Dream Stella, which is a thousand plus years later, which had at one point a partial cartouffe of kathra.
01:08:59.000Partial cartouche of Khafra, which has since flaked away.
01:09:03.000It was there reputedly in the 19th century.
01:09:06.000There were drawings of it, which we, to put in our plug-in, just if people are interested in getting more information, Robert Bavall and I wrote a book last year, published last year, called Origins of the Sphinx, where we discuss a lot of this.
01:09:25.000So there's a partial cartouche of Khafre, which Egyptologists said, aha, this proves that Khafre carved the Sphinx, because the Sphinx sits due east of Khafre's pyramid.
01:09:36.000Khafre was the pharaoh in 2500 BC, therefore the Sphinx must be 2500 BC. I contend, and Robert Buval and other people who are in our line of thinking contend, that this stella that's over a thousand years later does not say that he carved the Sphinx,
01:10:03.000Just like Thutmose IV, who was putting up the stela, was restoring the Sphinx.
01:10:09.000And when you look at the Sphinx, it has been restored numerous times, including blocks of limestone that were put onto it to restore some of the very ancient weathering that when I asked Tsai Hawass, one of my biggest critics,
01:10:25.000how old those blocks are, he said they were Fourth Dynasty.
01:10:30.000Now, why would you restore it in the Fourth Dynasty when it had just been built, you know, literally a century or two ago?
01:10:36.000You don't need to restore a meter worth of weathering.
01:10:40.000His answer, and I'm not trying to make fun of him, is that it's rotten rock, that it wasn't very high-quality rock.
01:10:46.000Somehow it just crumbled away, you know, a meter or so in a couple hundred years.
01:11:55.000Manu Saifside, my co-author, just discovered that...
01:12:01.000I don't know exactly when he found the inscription, but he first pointed out to Robert Bouval and myself about a year ago.
01:12:10.000About a year ago and we all worked on it and confirmed it and put together the pieces.
01:12:16.000I mean he really gets the most credit for it.
01:12:19.000He knows his hieroglyphics really, really well.
01:12:21.000Where did they find this hieroglyphic of this INS? It's shown in several different Ancient artifacts.
01:12:31.000So, for instance, there's a statue of Vizier from the Fourth Dynasty who may have actually overseen the construction of the Great Pyramid or I would say the reconstruction of the Great Pyramid because I want to get back to that.
01:12:48.000I think the Great Pyramid, just like the Sphinx, was being reconstructed, refurbished, if you would, during the Old Kingdom, not constructed de novo.
01:13:36.000Again, 500 or more years before the Sphinx was supposedly built.
01:13:42.000So now we have this hieroglyphic text that goes back, refutes what the Egyptologists are saying.
01:13:49.000And not only that, but when you look at the way they write it, this is the earliest writing, so it's not Surprising we don't have anything earlier.
01:13:59.000Maybe eventually we'll find earlier, you know, the precursors.
01:14:03.000But they are also in the context, it seems abundantly evident, they're referring to it as a very old structure itself.
01:14:31.000And, you know, it's a classic thing, too, that in some cases – so I'll put it – Related to the Sphinx, and maybe hopefully somewhat analogous, I pointed out decades ago,
01:14:47.000and John Anthony West and I working on this, that the Sphinx, the head is not the original head.
01:14:53.000And I'm not sure if I'm the very first one to ever say that.
01:14:56.000I'm not going to try to take cred, but it was quite obvious to me when I, as I mentioned, without anyone saying that to me.
01:15:03.000I had not heard that someone else suggest that.
01:15:08.000Egyptologists, with of course out ever citing me or John Anthony West, have also been suggesting that in some cases.
01:15:16.000And some have suggested that maybe it was Khufu's face on the Sphinx rather than Khafre's face after we brought in Frank Domingo who demonstrated that's not Khafre's face.
01:15:27.000Frank Domingo, if you remember from Mystery of the Sphinx, was a New York City police officer, forensic expert, who literally would reconstruct faces, compare faces.
01:15:38.000That was his business, and to present it in court.
01:15:41.000He analyzed the face of the Sphinx in the face of Khafre, also known as Shefran.
01:15:47.000The pharaoh, the Egyptologists before our time, before we got involved in this, always said these were the same faces.
01:15:55.000The face of the Sphinx, the face of Kapra.
01:15:57.000Frank Domingo came out very definitively that they're not the same face and they're both competent artists.
01:16:03.000They're not, frankly, the same ethnicity of face.
01:16:08.000And for Mark Lehner to publish in National Geographic, I'll paraphrase him, the Sphinx came alive when he reconstructed it with the face of Shefran, or face of Khafre.
01:16:44.000But Egyptology is not necessarily science either.
01:16:46.000And I'm not saying that in a nasty way, but it's an important point because Egyptology, a lot of Egyptologists classically come more from an art history background, that type of thing.
01:16:59.000So tying in with the question you asked before, I literally, it's funny how things work, I literally, when I was in graduate school, took a seminar in sciences and other disciplines.
01:17:12.000You know, this was because I was being trained as a scientist.
01:17:15.000And one of the papers we had to read at the time, this was long before I ever thought about going to Egypt, was...
01:17:23.000How Egyptologists are resistant to scientific information and scientific data.
01:17:30.000And how to help, you know, try to overcome that if you're working with Egyptologists basically.
01:17:35.000Which the answer was it's very difficult.
01:17:37.000And it's not to put them down because I have lots of colleagues in other fields that are not sciences.
01:17:43.000But classically, I would contend Egyptology is not a science.
01:17:48.000It comes more from art history or from linguistic studies, you know, translating hieroglyphs, historical studies, and those are all very important academic studies.
01:17:58.000But you do sometimes get people in a certain field and they're resistant to outsiders from another field, especially when they think it's a field that's so far apart and so diverse.
01:18:11.000From what they understand, what they know, their own mindset.
01:18:15.000Yeah, and their mindset is not geared towards scientific data.
01:18:25.000So when you initially saw these erosion features and the first 30 to 90 seconds or whatever you said it was, 120 seconds, when you first looked at it and knew Did you have any idea that your life would take the turn that it's taken?
01:18:44.000I mean, did you have any indication you would be thrown into such a shitstorm all these years later?
01:18:51.000Here we are in 2018. You're still fighting the good fight.
01:19:28.000And so we first presented the evidence at the Geological Society of America annual meeting in 1991, I guess it was.
01:19:37.000Yeah, 1991. And I want to say bluntly, I think?
01:19:59.000They didn't think this was so great because they saw the implications for their Egyptological colleagues, and they started, you know, a little rumbling there.
01:20:07.000Then the journalists come in back then, you know, no internet like we have it now, just phones, and the journalists start calling Egyptologists that were not there, had not seen the data, etc.
01:20:18.000Immediately they were telling the journalists that this has to all be nonsense, that hundreds of Egyptologists have studied this for, you know, Two or three centuries, which is total nonsense.
01:20:29.000It turns out I knew every Egyptologist, because there's so few, that have actually studied the Sphinx personally.
01:21:14.000Yeah, and they were really just attacking.
01:21:17.000And then in Egypt at one point, they were putting things in the Arabic press.
01:21:23.000Little did they know I have enough friends that would read it to me.
01:21:26.000And they were saying that I wasn't even a faculty member at Boston University, which is an outright lie since I'd just been tenured.
01:21:33.000So there was no doubt I was a faculty member there.
01:21:36.000But this was other academics saying this, but they never thought it would get back to me.
01:21:41.000I mean, really, really mean and nasty.
01:21:45.000So, getting back to the evidence, so they set up, and this was, I think, unprecedented.
01:21:50.000Within months, they'd set up this debate at the AAAS, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
01:21:57.000And I thought, again, I was so naive, I thought, oh, this is wonderful.
01:22:02.000Finally, we'll get rid of all this nonsense and this name-calling and, you know, the stuff in the popular press that You know, journalists, you can't blame them.
01:22:10.000They don't know what's going on necessarily.
01:22:12.000And we'll really get the evidence out and we'll be able to discuss it sanely and objectively.
01:22:19.000Turns out that wasn't the case at all.
01:22:22.000It was just from my perspective, they were just calling me more names and trying to set up straw men.
01:22:29.000Is this Egyptologist who was in that documentary who dismissed everything?
01:23:41.000And then what he does is he starts asking me a question, some detailed question about the geology and, well, if that's the case, how can such and such?
01:23:51.000And I think it, in hindsight, might have been fed to him by some geoarchaeologist, as they call it, someone who does archaeology but knows a little geology.
01:24:02.000And I realized in hindsight, it was meant to be one of those got you questions, I guess they say nowadays, where I wouldn't be able to answer it.
01:24:58.000And again, you know, it was just a personal thing.
01:25:01.000There was no other witnesses to my knowledge of this.
01:25:03.000But if he had really wanted to discuss things, I was willing to discuss it with him.
01:25:10.000It's so disturbing that someone would put their own ego so far above the information that needs to be distributed to scholars and people and students and all these folks out there that have questions about the history of the human race.
01:25:22.000That someone would put their own reputation and ego above all of that and not have the The mindset to realize, well, we have new evidence and what we thought of before, we're going to have to apply to this new evidence and create a new timeline.
01:25:38.000It doesn't dismiss all the things they learned in the past.
01:25:42.000In fact, I'm glad you brought that up because I've long contended that people talk about rewriting history, etc.
01:25:48.000Well, yes, I understand that argument.
01:25:50.000And I think we do need to rewrite good chunks of our very early history.
01:25:54.000But I've never denied dynastic Egypt in the basic chronology for dynastic Egypt.
01:26:01.000Now, what I say is that we've got a whole new chapter to add to it going back in time, plus—and I want to mention the Great Pyramid here—plus things like the Great Pyramid.
01:26:12.000The standard dating for the Great Pyramid is, let's say, 2550 BC or so, the Pharaoh Khufu, also known as Cheops, just in case people hear those terms.
01:26:23.000I don't deny that he had something to do with the Great Pyramid, but when I study it geologically, and I don't want to get into great detail here, when I study it geologically, I think there was an older structure there.
01:26:35.000I think there was something else there.
01:26:37.000For instance, the subterranean chamber, I suspect, goes back much earlier than the time of Fourth Dynasty Khufu.
01:26:45.000So, for instance, to bring in Robert Buval, he has his Orion correlation of the three pyramids to the belt stars of Orion, which correlate very well at about 10,500 BC. So he'll talk, and we talk about this in our joint book, Origins of the Sphinx,
01:27:01.000how there was a master plan going back to that period.
01:27:04.000A lot of people have said, well, that's nonsense.
01:27:06.000Why would they be following a master plan thousands of years later when they finally got around to building these structures?
01:27:14.000I think there were earlier markers or structures at those spots.
01:27:19.000The pyramids in this case, those three major pyramids, were built over or enhanced or restored older structures, if that makes sense.
01:27:29.000So, for instance, under the Great Pyramid is what I call the Sacred Mound.
01:27:33.000It's actually literally a stone outcropping mound, and Jean-Paul Buval...
01:27:41.000Robert Buval's older brother is actually an architect.
01:27:45.000Robert Buval himself was trained as an engineer.
01:27:47.000They both make the point, among other things, that if you're building the Great Pyramid, I mean, this is a humongous structure with incredible weight.
01:27:55.000It's much easier to Flatten the plateau at that point and get a nice level base rather than try to build over and around a mound that's to this day incorporated within the Great Pyramid.
01:28:09.000This takes a lot more energy and work and is a much more difficult engineering feat, but it makes sense if you want to preserve that If it was sacred to them or whatever, that older structure.
01:28:22.000Do we have images of this older structure?
01:28:24.000You can't see it at this point because it's totally covered.
01:29:37.000I believe you have that with the Great Pyramid.
01:29:39.000I believe you have that with the second pyramid.
01:29:42.000You have that with the Sphinx, most definitely, and the Valley Temple and the Sphinx Temple.
01:29:47.000The first piece of evidence that really convinced me that something was going on with the Sphinx So, the first evidence that I saw that made me suspicious that the Egyptologists did not have it right was within that first 30 to 120 seconds that I described,
01:30:05.000the weathering and the heads too small.
01:30:07.000The first piece of really solid evidence was looking at the walls of the Sphinx and Valley Temple that were constructed from the stones that came out of the Sphinx enclosure.
01:31:35.000Just to clarify, so you feel that this time period of the coronal mass ejections was somewhere around 10,000 Well, 9700 BC. And I say that very specifically because based on Greenland,
01:31:55.000ice core data in particular, you can literally count back year by year.
01:32:02.000And the best estimate is about 9700 BC, you know, take a decade or something.
01:32:08.000So from that point to 2500 BC, which is where most conventional Egyptologists date the construction of the pyramid, you believe that the Great Pyramid was probably built on top of this great mound,
01:32:25.000which represented an older structure, but Correct.
01:32:29.000These are the people that their civilization was destroyed, and then thousands of years later were able to somehow or another rebuild these incredible structures.
01:32:40.000Yeah, so thousands of years later—well, I don't know if they were rebuilding a pyramid as it was before, or they were building a new pyramid on top of it.
01:32:48.000They obviously had retained some of the incredible wisdom and knowledge.
01:33:34.000So I think that for all three of the major pyramids on the Giza Plateau, We have evidence that there was something there, whether they were pyramids as we see them now, which is quite a possibility, and they were just refurbished,
01:33:52.000We have evidence that goes back to that much earlier period, before the demise of high civilization, if I could put it that way, at the end of the last ice age, and then it was reappropriated, reused, rebuilt.
01:34:08.000You've restored whatever term you want to use in dynastic Egyptian times.
01:34:42.000I wanted to point something out and just give people a perspective of time that 2,500 years ago, the conventional dating of the construction of the Great Pyramids, Cleopatra is closer to the construction of the iPhone Than she is to the construction of the Great Pyramids.
01:35:31.000And we are closer to the dynastic Egyptians, even the old kingdom dynastic Egyptians, we are closer to them in time than they were to the end of the last ice age and the demise of that earlier civilization.
01:35:46.000Because the dynastic Egypt arose, rough terms, 5,000 years ago.
01:35:53.000That was about 3,000 BC. That Was they arose over 6,000 years after, close to 7,000 years after the end of the last ice age.
01:36:09.000So we're talking real spans of time here.
01:36:12.000And we're looking at a chart right here.
01:36:14.000Is there a place where other people can go and see this?
01:36:18.000Yes, they can go see a chart like this is on my website.
01:36:23.000In the SIDA article, if you go to my website, Robert Schoch, www.robertschoch.com, and go to the website, you'll see charts like this.
01:36:35.000But what you should do is go to the main page of the website, and then I believe it is Research Highlights.
01:36:43.000Go to what's called Research Highlights.
01:36:46.000Actually, I think for those on the podcast are seen here, and then go to what's called the SIDA article.
01:36:52.000S-I-D-A. And this is what we're looking at.
01:36:54.000We're looking at it on the website now.
01:36:55.000Yeah, which stands for Solar Induced Dark Age, SIDA. And again, it's ironic, I think, that the sun, which of course is bright, could induce a dark age.
01:37:03.000But when you have a major eruption like this, a major outburst from the sun hitting Earth...
01:37:09.000And all the ramifications we were talking about, it's going to bring any civilization down.
01:37:16.000So thousands and thousands of years of rebuilding civilization and rising back up to some still unbelievably incredible technological level.
01:37:26.000So even if they did rebuild the pyramid at 2500 BC, it's still this incredible feat.
01:38:08.000That's significant because they were using granite in many cases, and conventional Egyptologists have confirmed this verbally with me.
01:38:18.000They would use granite when they were indicating they were restoring an older structure.
01:38:24.000And there's no question that granite goes back to the Fourth Dynasty, just like there's no...
01:38:30.000Question that the granite on the valley in Sphinx Temple goes back to at least the Fourth Dynasty, if not earlier, but they're using it to restore.
01:38:39.000So we have all this indication that dynastic Egypt acknowledged that they were restoring older structures.
01:38:47.000So getting back to where we were just on the Great Pyramid.
01:38:51.000So no matter how you look at it, to try to build a Great Pyramid today, Whether you're talking 2500 BC or earlier, I mean, how were they doing it?
01:39:23.000Is it possible that the people in that part of the world somehow or another survived the coronal mass ejection and they came out better than the people in other parts of the world that were really knocked into the Stone Age?
01:39:36.000No, I don't think there's any evidence for that.
01:39:38.000Because we seem to have a huge gap around the world.
01:40:04.000In its height, which is not in its height now, you know, at the end of Siddha, let's say, for re-emergence, may have just been, I hate to say the Goldilocks words, but just right for everything to come together for this to,
01:40:23.000It's very easily defended, that type of thing.
01:40:30.000And also, I do want to tie in with what you were saying.
01:40:33.000It is, and I've certainly thought about this, it is possible that we are electrical and the fluctuating electric fields and magnetic fields, did they have some influence sort of on brain development or, you know, that's real speculation, but I wouldn't say it's impossible either.
01:40:50.000So these people, is it possible that they retain some of the knowledge from thousands and thousands of years now?
01:40:56.000Oh, I think they definitely retain some of the knowledge, just like we have monasteries in Europe during the Dark Ages retaining knowledge.
01:41:02.000And what's interesting is in some cases you retain chunks of knowledge that don't even make sense out of context, except that they know they're important.
01:41:15.000Think in Europe, where you would have pieces of technology that would be retained, but you don't have the whole complex.
01:41:25.000Or think in literary terms, that's probably the easiest, where you have parts of...
01:41:30.000Like a history of Alexander, where the whole thing did not survive, but, you know, six out of nine chapters or whatever survived.
01:41:39.000And even though they knew it was an incomplete manuscript, they would make numerous copies of that incomplete manuscript knowing that it was important to keep it.
01:41:51.000Although the Dead Sea Scrolls potentially were absolutely complete, or at least most of them were complete when they were buried and, you know, put away for storage.
01:42:00.000A lot of the incomplete list there may be because they degraded, because they were discovered by locals who then tore them apart and sold pieces here or there.
01:42:11.000I'm referring more to a situation where you have ancient knowledge or ancient manuscripts, and even though, say, the monks in a monastery knew that this was not a complete list, They knew that even in its incompleteness, it was important to maintain as much of it as possible.
01:42:30.000It's just stunning that a civilization that was knocked down like every other civilization, somehow or another 2500 BC, rose to this incredible level of construction that is just unparalleled anywhere else on the planet Earth.
01:42:44.000Oh yeah, and it did it very, very quickly.
01:42:46.000Very quickly, which I think is indicative potentially that they were reusing knowledge that had been passed down and somehow maybe things just clicked together.
01:43:00.000Maybe it took one genius to start putting things together and that set off a renaissance, if you would.
01:43:06.000I mean we've seen that historically in much more recent times.
01:43:10.000And maybe perhaps the understanding of how it was built and designed is more prevalent amongst the civilization, amongst the community, than maybe it would be today.
01:43:40.000It's so fascinating to think that this could potentially happen to us.
01:43:44.000Well, it's not only fascinating, I hate to use the term, it's scary and I think we're incredibly vulnerable and people are not addressing this.
01:43:53.000It's not the type of thing to address for some reason because of major solar outbursts and coronal mass ejection and all the related phenomena.
01:44:55.000And on top of everything else, we're going to bring on this artificial radiation around the world.
01:45:01.000And again, I'm not saying this – I don't have anything to sell.
01:45:07.000Sometimes I hear people talk about this because they want to sell their prepping kit, and now they're going to say, oh, for so much money, I'll sell you – Jim Baker style.
01:45:43.000They went through natural catastrophes, which are not unrealistic that we could go through them again and be potentially much more vulnerable than they were at that time.
01:45:57.000Because we're so reliant on electronics?
01:46:01.000Are there any hieroglyphs that are convincing or at least point to some of the construction methods of the pyramid or of any of the other giant structures?
01:46:24.000Because what we have surviving are generally religious, somewhat literary things in tombs.
01:46:34.000Now, I don't buy for a second that the Great Pyramid was a tomb or initially a tomb.
01:46:38.000That's like saying a huge cathedral is just a tomb because you find a couple of bodies there.
01:46:43.000And you've never actually found bodies in the Great Pyramid or any of the major pyramids.
01:46:48.000And as you know, I know you know this, the pyramid construction goes downhill as you go into later dynastic Egypt.
01:46:55.000So they seem to have either gotten sloppier or just lost some of the technological finesse they had.
01:47:02.000So you find in some of the tombs These what almost seems silly pictures of them dragging huge statues on, you know, sledges where they're supposedly pouring oil or water in front of it to lubricate it.
01:47:18.000And, you know, the Egyptologists say, aha, this is how they built it all.
01:47:51.000But put it this way, if they find a bunch of iPhones 12,000 years from now or 5,000 years from now, whichever period we want to talk about, No.
01:48:13.000So why would you expect it for the Great Pyramid?
01:48:16.000You know, it'd be a lucky find if you did.
01:48:22.000And not to throw out too much academia type stuff, but one of the things I studied as a graduate school is I took a series of courses in taphonomy, which is basically how did things get preserved.
01:49:31.000Sometimes people say, well, how could they do that without metal tools?
01:49:35.000Well, maybe metallurgy does go back further.
01:49:38.000Maybe it was lost and then reinvented again.
01:49:41.000So again, I don't deny the standard time frame, but there could be a lot of things going back further.
01:49:45.000Before that, and if you have metal, and I'm not trying to focus on metal now, and I'm not making any big claims about metallurgy at an earlier time, but let's just say, for instance, as a thought experiment, if you had metallurgy much earlier than Right.
01:50:24.000If you have a warehouse and you're not paying attention to it all the time, it's an old warehouse, there have been cases where people have found someone broke in not to steal the things in the warehouse, but to steal the copper piping.
01:50:38.000Now, there's some more interesting pieces of evidence that came out of the Great Pyramid And a lot of the other structures of Egypt have been the pottery that's incredibly difficult to reproduce, like those stone vases.
01:51:13.000You used the term colloquially to put it that way.
01:51:16.000It looks like pottery because that's how people imagine.
01:51:19.000It looks like a beautifully shaped pot.
01:51:23.000And they go back to the earliest dynastic Egypt and probably much earlier.
01:51:28.000They are carved out of really hard granites and schists and nice, you know, these really hard stones and to incredible tolerances and incredibly thin, incredibly beautifully carved.
01:51:43.000And what's importantly, too, a very small opening.
01:52:39.000Try that because that's what I'm pretty sure I saw one of them that was carved out of that.
01:52:44.000So what I was saying is that these are really hard to carve.
01:52:49.000They use very narrow openings like you said.
01:52:51.000Sometimes they put handles on them so they're not just spinning them on a lathe because how would you get the handles on it because that's not put on separately.
01:53:51.000The speculation is that they were doing it the same way they were doing it in New Kingdom times.
01:53:56.000So when you look at them in New Kingdom times, as a general rule, you get things similar to this.
01:54:03.000New Kingdoms, let's say 1500 BC, just for round numbers, you get similar types of vases and whatnot, but they're actually, to my eye, much cruder generally.
01:54:15.000They're made out of softer stone, more your calcites and limestones and marbles, that type of thing.
01:54:21.000They generally are just not, they don't have the same artistic finesse to them, the same perfection to them.
01:54:27.000And the New Kingdom Egyptians did show diagrams, as we just saw, of how they did it, or supposedly did it.
01:54:33.000And that may well be how they were doing it.
01:54:35.000But I question as a geologist whether that would really work for these beautiful, harder stone, much more perfect in my experience.
01:54:46.000Older ones that you find going back to the earliest dynasties, and you find in some cases thousands of them.
01:54:53.000So at Saqqara, the steppe pyramid, generally considered the oldest pyramid, although I would question that.
01:54:59.000But it's definitely an old pyramid, even by Egyptological standards.
01:55:04.000You found thousands of these really well carved ones from the harder stone, the more artistic ones, if we could call it that.
01:55:16.000I don't even think they were necessarily carved at that time.
01:55:19.000I think this may have been a hoard that they had preserved from thousands of years earlier.
01:55:24.000Sort of a stockpile or museum, if you would.
01:55:27.000In fact, what we're finding for many of these, quote, tombs and temples, not temples, tombs and pyramids, that type of thing, is that maybe essentially they were stockpiles.
01:55:36.000They were the equivalent of fallout shelters, if you would, where you stock away supplies, that type of thing.
01:55:43.000That may have been part of the original structure.
01:55:47.000Some of these had very long necks too.
01:56:53.000And then when we go through Egypt with the megalithic statues and whatnot, you can find over and over We're good to go.
01:57:20.000The whole subject is so fascinating to me, but this bowl thing is very weird because it's almost like one of the crazier pieces of evidence, but it's dismissed.
01:57:31.000Oh, it's absolutely dismissed, and it's not unlike, and I only think of this because I know you saw it.
01:57:36.000If you remember, because I watched recently, to refresh my memory, the podcast where you interviewed John Anthony West, and he showed a picture, which happened to be my hand, But in my hand was a little bead that was found at Quebecle Tepe.
01:57:52.000And the thing is, remember that little bead had this, it was a very hard, probably volcanic stone.
01:57:58.000And a little teeny hole drilled all the way through it, the long way.
01:58:03.000So you had a drilling that's, you know, a centimeter or more long going through.
01:58:08.000It's not just a little hole punched through, but a little tunnel going through.
01:59:29.000Is there anything that's interesting to you?
01:59:31.000Well, yeah, the speculation is that they may have been using some kind of lathe for it, at least in part.
01:59:36.000But the problem is you can't turn it and still have the handle sticking out if you do standard work on a spinning lathe, that type of thing.
01:59:46.000So there's something else that has to be going on there.
01:59:49.000I was going to say, part of the problem with any of this knowledge being passed down, right up until at least the 1600s, early 1700s, you know, there were guild systems where you would retain knowledge of how you do certain technological things.
02:00:04.000And I think that may go back to very, very ancient times, but you don't want to just give out.
02:01:06.000The primary construction material for the Great Pyramid is limestone.
02:01:12.000Some of the limestone was quarried pretty much on site, and you can still see the quarries there.
02:01:18.000Other high-quality limestone, known as Tura limestone, was brought from across the Nile, and you can still see the Tura limestone quarries.
02:01:28.000And then granite was used for parts of the construction, particularly to line the king's chamber.
02:01:35.000And this granite was brought from southern Egypt, brought down the Nile, I should say, from the south to the north.
02:01:43.000The Nile flows from the south to the north.
02:01:45.000And it's Aswan granite, and you're talking about huge blocks of stone, up to 90 tons or so have been the estimates for those particular stones in the King's Chamber.
02:01:55.000So when you go into the King's Chamber, it's totally lined with this beautiful red Aswan granite.
02:02:01.000You've got this big coffer there that, you know, if they give you permission, you can lie in, and it's a neat feeling to lie in, and a lot of people have, you know, All kinds of experiences, etc.
02:03:31.000Basically, the Arabs called it that because their concept was, if I remember correctly, that men would have a chamber with a flat ceiling on it.
02:03:41.000The Queen's Chamber, which is lower down in the pyramid, has an inverted V-shaped ceiling to it.
02:03:51.000And they thought that was for the queen.
02:04:16.000And we have good evidence for that, going back to earliest dynastic times, if not earlier, that they, I forget what you call it in modern times, but you have a drill bit Mm-hmm.
02:05:31.000I don't go there because I want real evidence.
02:05:34.000So I see real evidence that they were doing things that...
02:05:39.000Seem really unbelievable from a standard status quo conventional point of view, say the standard Egyptological point of view of how, quote, how primitive they were.
02:05:51.000But I'm not into speculating inordinately as to, well, what kind of technology they might have had.
02:06:27.000And I don't think you're going to find pictures of this on the internet because it's very hard to photograph.
02:06:33.000But when you look at that in person, you can see how they drilled out, you know, the hinge several inches in diameter and did a core drill because you can still see, if I remember there, you can still see the sort of the stub where it broke off.
02:07:01.000I'm not speculating that they had such things, but you can tell in modern times that someone used a power saw or a power drill or this type of tool or that type of tool.
02:07:12.000Thousands of years from now, you might be able to still see that.
02:07:23.000You know, I mean, these guys, I sometimes almost find it silly when people say, well, you know, how could, oh yeah, there, that's a nice example of it.
02:07:48.000So I almost find it, I don't almost find it, I do find it silly sometimes when people say to me, the critics, the skeptics, oh, you know, if they were doing all this stuff, well, where's examples of their tools?
02:08:01.000Well, I mean, how many guys just leave, you know, they walk away from a site and they leave their toolbox there?
02:08:08.000You know, or forget, I mean, all the mechanics I've ever known and people like that, they're very careful to pick up every tool and put it back and make sure they've got all their equipment before they leave the site.
02:08:20.000Well, go to the Empire State Building and try to find a hammer.
02:09:01.000Supposedly the analogy – If you're used to something, I'll put it this way, if you're used to seeing something on a regular basis, you stop questioning it.
02:10:11.000So you think that's just purely speculation?
02:10:14.000Yeah, or it could be sort of The equivalent of modern cartoons of, you know, simple explanation of how something works.
02:10:24.000And a lot of that is really more to say, okay, if you're a watchmaker, say 200 years ago, you're a watchmaker, you might have some sign that indicates you're a watchmaker, but don't try to take that sign as a blueprint of how you actually made watches.
02:11:40.000You know, it's so smoothly polished, etc.
02:11:43.000You have to look very hard to find any tool marks or evidence of how it was carved because, you know, really good workmanship, you remove all that, ultimately.
02:11:56.000So that's part of the problem with some of this really high-quality Egyptian work is that they would remove the traces.
02:12:48.000Yeah, so I think it really all goes back to this very early formative period, if you would, this really important period for humanity and what was happening.
02:13:05.000And I mean, carve something like that today.
02:13:08.000I don't know what it would cost, who you could pay.
02:13:12.000I've heard, you know, this is anecdotal, but I've talked to stone cutters and that type of thing.
02:13:18.000And, you know, to try to duplicate some of what they see in Egypt, I mean, it just would take them so long and so much work and it would be so expensive.
02:14:03.000Is there anyone else that's doing the same kind of work?
02:14:06.000Is there anybody else that's with you on this?
02:14:08.000Well, I think I'm the one that's doing this right now, but I think there are a lot of other pieces that tie in.
02:14:14.000So Peratt, Dr. Peratt's work, but he's sort of been, you know, he had some health issues and other things, and he's older.
02:14:22.000The Electric Universe, there's what's known as the Electric Universe community, which ties in with this, that electrical phenomena and plasma discharges are more important.
02:14:33.000There's a whole group now that I think are starting to think about what if we had another Carrington event in the near future?
02:14:42.000How would that affect our grid systems?
02:14:45.000So what I'm saying is I think there are a lot of little pieces that are starting to come together.
02:14:50.000And, you know, starting to come together, weaving this together.
02:14:55.000But what I'm trying to do right now is to paint the broad picture, the broad strokes, And I think it goes back to the end of the last ice age and what was happening then right up until now and what the implications are.
02:15:15.000I think people are picking up on it and sometimes you know people are picking up on it when, how did they say it, the sincerest, what is it?
02:15:38.000Yeah, people are starting to talk about a lot of these things, especially the plasma and the sun and solar events, and all of a sudden, by chance, they're talking about it.
02:15:47.000Not necessarily mentioning me, but I think, you know, I know they attended a lecture or they maybe read my book, but Yeah, these things take time and I'm not asking for a lot of, you know, oh, everyone has to acknowledge me.
02:16:01.000But I think it's important to get the information out and I think as we have things like your podcast and people read the books and I'm able to talk at conferences, we slowly get this out.
02:16:16.000I mean, put it this way, Copernicus, and I'm not comparing myself to Copernicus, but Copernicus and the heliocentric view, you know, he publishes that on his deathbed.
02:16:29.000That was a view that actually went back to the rare predecessors in ancient times, of course.
02:16:35.000But he publishes that on his deathbed, and, you know, a couple generations later, there's still...
02:16:43.000Persecuting Galileo for supporting it.
02:16:46.000Things go quicker now, but it still takes some time.
02:16:51.000I see a big difference now than I do in the 1990s for even the redating of the Sphinx.
02:16:59.000Do you think it's because of the internet?
02:17:33.000So one of the problems I see with all this information and misinformation and all these factoids out there is it's very confusing for many people if they're not I'm not trying to claim you have to go to experts and authorities because that's part of the problem too when you have the pseudo-authorities who just are pushing their own agendas and frankly don't know what they're talking about.
02:17:57.000I see too many of that among, let's say, certain academics and skeptics, that type of thing.
02:18:04.000But it's also confusing when you only take information and You don't know how to put it all together.
02:18:16.000And what I find with students, and I'm not picky on them, I'm saying this with all due respect, they have so much access to facts and factoids, we'll use that term, but they have to understand the bigger picture.
02:18:30.000They have to be able to understand critically and think critically about it to put things together.
02:19:01.000Yeah, I mean, we could put on some fake lab coats right now and just make some nonsense video and get 100,000 views by the end of the year.
02:19:14.000Is that they say you can't please everyone all the time, but it seems like in some cases in my career in this field, I've been able to displease everyone because I'll come out with positions sometimes.
02:19:29.000I'll come out with positions sometimes where I'm not pleasing my academic colleagues, but I'm not extreme enough for the, should we say, other side?
02:20:14.000If the evidence isn't there, it's not, you know?
02:20:16.000It is fascinating that they do dig up these ancient structures and Machu Picchu and all these different places where, like, wow, these construction methods are really pretty impressive.
02:22:05.000Things that we don't really understand that you and I have been discussing about and there's so many more we could discuss, but those are real.
02:22:13.000And so many people that I know that watch shows like that, when I talk to them, and I'm talking academics who would never admit that they watch it.
02:22:40.000It's not the way to go, but they are real things that need to be looked into.
02:22:46.000So even when I speak at a conference like that, there are so many very intelligent people that are there besides the other.
02:22:53.000You know, there are different types of people.
02:22:55.000But I know many people, they'll have PhDs and stuff, and they'll go to it for a sort of between entertainment, but also to get exposed to things they're not going to be exposed to by the standard academic Right.
02:23:11.000You're not going to get exposed to a lot of these types of questions if you just go to the standard closed academic conferences.
02:24:15.000Oracle Online, O-R-A-C-U-L, online, you know, all one word,.org.
02:24:24.000And what we're trying to do with this, and also through the Institute for the Study of the Origins of Civilization, ISOC, which I'm trying to do at Boston University, Is to have a forum where we can look at these topics seriously using evidence,
02:24:44.000but also not be dismissive just because we have to uphold the standard dogma.
02:24:50.000So I don't want to go with just a nonsense, you know, flippant or easy out to sell someone's book, you know, this crazy book, or...
02:25:00.000Yeah, I'm not being nasty about anyone.
02:25:04.000Or, you know, just stick to the standard paradigm, but thinking out of the box, as they say, but thinking out of the box using real evidence and using real logic and using real rationality.
02:25:20.000Is there more resistance towards redating Egypt and Egyptology, particularly ancient Egypt, versus other cultures like Gobekli Tepe and some other ancient structures that they're finding?
02:25:33.000Well, I would say Gobekli Tepe, the beauty of Gobekli Tepe is that...
02:25:37.000There's no civilization attached to it.
02:26:39.000Well, to me, this is happening And the dating confirms it in the aftermath of the initial solar outburst at the end of last ice age when you had all this tumultuous, you know, things happening.
02:26:53.000Earthquakes and the precipitation, the rain, the fire coming down, the thunder.
02:27:00.000So you have this incredible situation where we have captured at Quebecle Tepe the catastrophe that was going on and how they were trying to reconstruct it.
02:27:10.000And I think, I don't want to say they gave up, but for whatever reason, it was probably just so much, they ended up covering the whole thing artificially.
02:27:18.000Maybe to preserve it, maybe they intended to go back to it, maybe for posterity.
02:27:23.000I don't know what their thinking was we could, you know, I don't speculate about that.
02:27:28.000But tying in with what you were just asking, Gebekli Tepe is not tied to some other later civilization as is dynastic Egypt.
02:27:39.000So there's not a lot of dogma involved.
02:27:46.000Is Gobekli Tepe and, you know, those that want to uphold the standard story saying, well, yeah, it's pretty, but it's not that sophisticated.
02:27:56.000They're trying to say it's hunter-gatherers.
02:27:58.000Yeah, they call it hunter-gatherers, and they say, oh, hunter-gatherers are thereby primitive, and therefore they, you know, they just try to wave their arms and say – it's sort of like saying it's an anomaly – But not much of an anomaly, so we don't need to really worry about it.
02:28:14.000But they've only, correct me if I'm wrong, they've only uncovered a very small percentage of it.
02:28:22.000It's an enormous structure, and in that picture that's up, we'll describe it for those that don't see the picture.
02:28:29.000But there's pictures like this in my book, Forgotten Civilization.
02:28:32.000In fact, I think that's right out of my book, probably, or very similar to one.
02:28:36.000You can see the pillar in the back on the left.
02:28:38.000Do you see how that was knocked down and it's propped up and it has been put back into position and they built these crude walls against it before they buried the whole thing.
02:28:49.000So this whole site underwent dramatic catastrophe, was being put together quickly again and then...
02:29:27.000Now, if you saw that in a museum of modern art, it could fit right in.
02:29:33.000Two points I just wanted to make before I forget them.
02:29:36.000One, when you're carving these pillars to get a 10 or 15 ton pillar like that, Finalized, you have to carve a much bigger chunk of rock initially because, of course, you have to leave the rock where you're going to have the animal.
02:29:51.000You have to leave the rock because they're not incising these in.
02:29:55.000They're carving them in relief, so that's a lot more complicated.
02:30:00.000So this is an incredible technological feat.
02:30:03.000Also, off the record, and this one, if you look at that one, Do you see how it's got a wild pig?
02:30:09.000Pigs and whatnot, but do you also see the weathered surface?
02:30:12.000I'm going to teach you a little geology here.
02:30:15.000That is an older pillar that was being reused at the end of the last ice age, I believe.
02:30:20.000So some of these structures actually go back earlier.
02:30:23.000And before Klaus Schmidt passed away unexpectedly, he was talking about this too, that even there they were maybe reusing some structures that were a little bit earlier or maybe several thousand years earlier.
02:30:36.000So this goes back, the origins of Quebec Le Tepe may go back thousands of years earlier when all is said and done, once we get the evidence in, well into the end of the last ice age, stuffed out about 9700 BC. I was going to say,
02:30:54.000before I forget it, A lot going on here.
02:30:58.000Off the record, and of course they would never admit to this, but off the record, I've spoken to archaeologists when, you know, they're in a giddy mood and...
02:31:10.000And ask them, well, if you just found, say, that...
02:31:15.000Animal, on the Gebekli Tepe pillar in isolation, or you just found one of these pillars or part of one in isolation, you were just looking at, how old do you think it would be?
02:31:24.000And I've heard the answer, 600 BC, 1000 BC, based on the technological finesse, the beauty of the carving?
02:31:48.000Well, if they just found, say, that little feline type thing on the side of the pillar just broken off in just an isolation, they'd probably say, one told me, yeah, oh, maybe it's 1000 BC at most.
02:32:32.000It's easy for me to say this, but once you've queried a block, if you're moving a kilometer, it's not that much harder to move it 10 kilometers.
02:32:42.000It just takes more effort, but it's the same technology.
02:32:44.000It's really querying it, be able to move it to begin with, and then be able to carve it into these beautiful structures.
02:32:52.000And something I want to point out too is that a lot of times when I talk about Quebecle Tepe, I'll make the comment about Stonehenge because people are familiar with Stonehenge.
02:33:02.000But Stonehenge, when you look at the blocks there, they're so much cruder than what we have at Quebecle Tepe.
02:33:10.000And the Quebecle Tepe stone pillars, the central ones...
02:33:16.000And particularly, they are so beautifully carved.
02:33:19.000But if you look at them, they're also very, very thin in their smallest dimension.
02:33:47.000And how they were seeing similar things in the sky.
02:33:50.000But I wanted to point out that when you carve a pillar like that, that's so thin and narrow, that's much more difficult to keep it from snapping, to keep it from breaking.
02:34:01.000Also, if you see in that pillar how it's set into the bedrock, it's set in just literally very, very shallowly set into the bedrock.
02:34:13.000Klaus Schmidt commented to me that, and he published this too, that they seem to be using some kind of concrete or cement to help set them into the bedrock, which is untold of at such an early period.
02:34:28.000When he first was excavating them before he got down to the bottom, I think he said this to me verbally, he estimated that about a third, at least a third of the pillars should be set into the bedrock just to hold it up, prop it up, not just on the order of centimeters,
02:36:28.000And Klaus Schmidt, when Katie and I were there, I think he waved his arms and he talked about how there's all these other hills out there that probably have more under them.
02:36:38.000I mean, you're talking a huge complex.
02:36:39.000And we know that in some cases because you see little fragments sticking up and that type of thing.
02:36:44.000And also, remember when you're doing archaeology, And I have training in archaeology, despite what some of my critics say.
02:36:54.000When you're doing archaeology, it's inherently destructive because you can't put it back together.
02:37:01.000So if you don't do it carefully, you don't do it right, you're destroying evidence.
02:37:05.000You are inherently destroying evidence.
02:37:07.000So a lot of people nowadays, professionals, they don't want to excavate an entire site at one time.
02:38:10.000And I bring this all up because this is a very ancient city.
02:38:14.000When they excavate In Urfa, not archaeological excavations, but say they build a new road or they build a new underground garage, they often hit 12,000-year-old or thereabouts remains.
02:38:31.000So there's this beautiful statue called Urfa Man, which is now in the museum in Urfa, which also houses lots of artifacts from Gobekli Tepe.
02:38:40.000And it was found right near the modern pools of Abraham when they were doing some construction project, but it represents an image of The people, supposedly,
02:38:56.000or at least it's an image of a man, a person, that gets back to Quebecli Tepe times.
02:39:55.000And in Cairo and other parts of Egypt, there were families that lived for centuries because their little huts or their community was on the top of ancient ruins.
02:40:06.000And they would dig in their basement and pull out a gold statuette or whatever, sell it, and, you know, eat for the next six months.
02:40:13.000So is this IRFA place, is there any consideration to like picking isolated spots and starting to dig and...
02:40:21.000Well, yeah, I think there's some consideration on the part of...
02:40:25.000You know, archaeologists and Turkish government, that type of thing, but you've also got a very strong religious element.
02:40:31.000See, religion plays into all of this, of course.
02:40:34.000And also, you don't necessarily want to destroy ancient Islamic temples, say an Islamic mosque.
02:40:43.000I should say a mosque that goes back to, I don't know, I'm just making this up, 800 AD or something, to excavate something that's...
02:41:04.000There's all these factors that play into it.
02:41:06.000So it gets very complicated, very messy.
02:41:09.000And then, of course, you have the situation, and this ties in, where, you know, I know Christians are more interested in the birth of Jesus and where the manger is.
02:41:21.000And we can see in Egypt, if one's interested, the supposed place where the Holy Family stayed when Jesus went to Egypt, you know, whatever.
02:41:31.000And you can see things like that in Urfa for Abraham and whatnot.
02:43:27.000If it's pre-Muslim, it's not a big deal.
02:43:30.000If it's pre-Arab, it's not a big deal because they're Arabs.
02:43:35.000They might have been in Egypt for over a thousand years, but the native Egyptians is not their culture.
02:43:44.000Well, but it's not—think about America.
02:43:48.000How many Native American mounds and graves and whatnot get bulldozed over with that maybe the most preliminary archaeological salvage to build a shopping mall or a new development?
02:44:06.000We think it's really crazy when someone like that would say that about the pyramids and sphinx, you know, because everyone knows about them.
02:44:13.000But from his perspective, if I quizzed him, he could have turned around and said, well, look what you do in your country.
02:44:19.000Well, it's almost human nature across the planet when they're inconsiderate to do something along those lines.
02:45:19.000Because I've had Egyptians say to me, in no uncertain terms, and...
02:45:26.000I'm not joking or anything, but point out that depending on how you count it, you know, 25% to 60% or more of the Egyptian economy could be based on tourism, because it's not just the direct tourism, but it's those that supply the people who deal with the tourists, etc., etc.
02:45:42.000And when you have a situation that you have something happen in the Middle East, it could be far from Egypt.
02:46:00.000No, but think if our country and our economy was dependent upon tourism solely, or, you know, not solely, but a major portion of it was tourism, and then something happens in Brazil, and all of a sudden, because something happened in Brazil,
02:46:16.000no tourists are coming to America, and it cripples our economy.
02:46:19.000I mean, I can understand that perspective.
02:46:22.000No, I can completely understand the perspective.
02:46:23.000What is the perspective in Turkey when they're dealing with Gobekli Tepe?
02:46:30.000I mean, I think in Turkey, unfortunately, from my perspective, you've got more and more rise of, should we say, radical Islam and fundamentalism that doesn't really want to worry about such things.
02:46:42.000But you also have people who see Gobekli Tepe as potentially someday Vying with the Sphinx and pyramids for tourist dollars and for a destination.
02:46:54.000I mean, Turkey is wonderful, in my opinion.
02:46:56.000I love both Turkey and Egypt, just to visit them, to travel through them, that type of thing.
02:47:02.000With any country, you have to know what you're doing, but if people travel with me, I know what I'm doing.
02:47:51.000It turns out I didn't have plastic explosives.
02:47:54.000And, you know, I'm a mild-mannered guy, and I said, you know, whatever you want.
02:47:58.000And I didn't do anything wrong, and I explained.
02:48:01.000And I was carrying, back then, little bricks, little things of oil-based clay that I guess have the texture and feel of some of the explosives they would use.
02:48:16.000We would use these when we collected fossils, and you find a bunch of fragments to prop it up and put it into position as you glue them together.
02:48:29.000And someone came from the Pakistani Geological Survey and explained that, yeah, I really was who I was.
02:48:36.000But, you know, it's a situation where people get excited.
02:48:39.000And that was back in the bad old days of, you know, well, I don't know if it's any better in Pakistan now, but...
02:48:46.000You know, they're tough situations, but if you know how to behave and you know how to deal with it and you know how to avoid it, you'll be okay.
02:48:56.000And right now I would say Egypt is very, very safe.
02:49:25.000Yeah, but I would never endanger anyone else.
02:49:29.000In fact, I always err on the side of safety when it comes to safety.
02:49:36.000Not that I want to take great risks with myself either, but you know, sometimes as a geologist, I feel I have to do what I have to do.
02:49:43.000Do you have any plans on releasing this theory of coronal mass ejections and all the things we've talked about today into something like a documentary?
02:49:52.000Something that might be a little bit more...
02:49:54.000I would love to do a documentary, something that John Anthony West and I, we're often talking about a documentary.
02:50:00.000We also would like to do a film, a full-length feature film, if we could get backing and whatnot sort of...
02:50:10.000Semi-popularized, you know, semi-fictionalized, but always based on real science, real data, real evidence.
02:50:18.000So, you know, I've seen so many films where they're about geological catastrophes, whether it's huge asteroids hitting or, you know, San Andreas Fault, and they're so faked.
02:50:33.000And what I'm saying is what has happened in the past and what really will happen in the future if we get hit again, which I hate to say this, but from a geological perspective, there is no doubt these things are unavoidable.
02:50:49.000It would be like saying we'll never have another volcanic eruption or earthquake again.
02:51:35.000The best way to get a hold of me would be through my website, www.robertschock, S-C-H-O-C-H is how the last name is spelled,.com, or if they want to email me directly, and this is on the website.
02:52:39.000People have enough, you know, if they want a private, if they have enough people that would want to come to make it viable or, you know, these things cost money.
02:52:48.000If I were independently wealthy, maybe I'd just take people for fun at my expense, but I just, I don't have that.
02:52:54.000Well, I guarantee you, you have stimulated a lot of people's imagination.
02:54:17.000And again, I'm not trying to scare anyone, but I think we have to be real and we have to be realistic and there's no point in hiding and closing your eyes to things.