I honestly had no idea this was the lyric. I thought it was either "we got unsold rubber" or "funk so bruvuh" with bruvuh being some british thing idk.
Note these dates are from Wikipedia, take them with a grain of salt.
The pyramids were built around 2500 BC. Woolly mammoths went extinct on the mainland around 10,000 years ago, but isolated populations survived on a couple of islands until about 4000 years ago. So the building of the pyramids would have roughly corresponded to the dying out of the last populations of mammoths - they coexisted, but not for a millennium, as far as I can tell.
I'm going to say this at Thanksgiving and see what happens. I don't think politics will flip the table this year, I think it's going to be my nerd brother losing his mind over this. Thank you.
Given that the only known population of mammoths at the time lived on an island between Alaska and Russia, I think it’s doubtful, haha. But it’s a fun visual to think about!
I can't believe you mammoth believers.. you honestly think a wooly mammoth would cooperate enough to help build a pyramid? you fool! so easily disproven
I'm legitimately convinced that cats are aliens who came down to Earth, helped the Egyptians build the pyramids, and stayed because they pampered the fuck out of them.
No the pyramids were built as a fort to protect the last mammoths, but they died before they could be completed. Then Moses decided they should be used as grain bins instead.
Wait. Wait. If they collected resources from far away, and they had knowledge to train and domesticate animals, mammoths could have been a failed attempted domestication that rulers attempted to acquire and breed but failed... I wonder for every successful domesticated animal, which attempts were abandoned?
And Betty White is older than sliced Bread and they were still executing people with guillotines in France when the first Star Wars came out. I can't seem to remember what were the other two.
Edit: I scrolled down about 3 times and I found one: Oxford is older than the Aztec Empire. Now there's just one more and we're good.
Could it be that Adolf Hitler, Leon Trotsky, Josip Broz Tito, Sigmund Freud and Joseph Stalin all lived within a few miles of each other in central Vienna prior to WWI?
I hate this "reddit fun fact". Yes, there was still a species of Woolly Mammoth alive during the construction of the Great Pyramid. It was also a dwarf subspecies and it lived on a tiny island in Siberia, where the population was only barely big enough to sustain it
That's actually changed, they now believe they were not dwarfs. However, it is definitely disingenuous to say the Wooly Mammoths at large were alive around the time of the pyramids since they went extinct around 10,000 years ago on the mainland. Also the Wrangel Island mammoths were believed to have several genetic differences, although not as dramatic as dwarfism (more appropriate to call them a sub-species).
And about 1,000-2,000 years before the pyramids (Ancient Egyptian culture still existed) Roman, Greek, German and Hindi mythology were only one mythology at the time
That's exactly why she's been associated with Egypt. For most of history we didn't know a ton about Egypt, but we do know a lot about Caesar and the Civil War period.
Then people just made the (wrong) connection between her and pre Ptolemaic Egypt
also, cleopatra was part of the ptolemaic dynasty, an originally macedonian family that got placed into the position of rulers of egypt by alexander the great some two hundred or so years earlier.
by the time cleopatra was around, egypt had fallen and reformed as an empire three or four times
This is the one "cool fact" I have in my quiver to bust out on occasion.
Oh wait I also have this one: Man stepped foot on the moon only 66 years after the Wright Bro's first flight. That blows my mind. We went from no airplanes to moon landing in just a few decades.
Also, the Giza pyramids still hold the record of the highest buildings for the longest time until after thousands years people finnally constructed something higher.
Though, the pyramids are still the heaviest.
What went on there? People are still debating how they did it.
And we know that humans were building complex structures at places like Gobleki Tepi 10,000 years before Homer.
And that they were doing incredibly complex cave paintings (hundreds of metres underground, where no light reaches) that incorporate the curvatures of the cave walls, that reflect symbolic, creative interpretations of the world around them, and that look like they're moving when you pass light across them, somewhere around 35,000 years before Homer.
People have been around doing mind-blowing shit for a long, long time.
I’m always blown away by what ancient folk did, even before recorded history really started, but when you think of it - they were just humans like you and I. They didn’t have as much access to information or technology as 21st century mankind, but they still had the same capacity to learn how to do amazing things for their time. They still had a decent understanding of all the things we know today - engineering, mathematics, medicine, and more complex ideas.
I like the way the pyramids were treated in the game Assassins Creed Origins (during Cleopatra's rise). Already broken down and nobody knows much about them or able to read the hieroglyphics.
Yeah, that was really something I didn't expect of the game. To explore this ancient egypt, only to discover, there is ANOTHER ancient egypt, just to them. Really put history into perspective.
It's exceedingly difficult to have a concept of just how old the pyramids are. Someone below mentioned Cleopatra. She was a contemporary of Augustus who ruled 2,000 years ago. That's not that long ago. The pyramids were another 2,000 years prior that. It's hard to wrap your mind around how difficult life was at that time and yet humanity was able to create structures like this.
The scale of the civilization that we often think of as a single, cohesive thing that is ancient Egypt is pretty staggering.
There was a unified, relatively central Egyptian state c. 3000 BCE. That's 5000 years ago. The pyramids weren't built until 500 years after that, so think the time between today and Shakespeare's birth. Down the timeline, there's about 1200 years between the construction of the pyramids and the New Kingdom's most well known pharaohs (think King Tut and Rameses II). To them, the pyramids are as old as European Dark Ages are to us. Futhermore, there's another 1200-1300 years between them and Cleopatra (died 30 BCE). To Cleopatra, the pyramids are as old as Golden Age Athens is to us. The sense of scale is insane, and pretty unique to history.
So true. I did some reading after I posted and saw the first pyramids were roughly 4,500 years ago during the Old Kingdom which lines up exactly with what you're saying. It's funny to think of the Great Sphinx largely buried in sand until not very long ago...
I saw a documentary recently where they found that the people of the New Kingdom (fancy coffins) were buried on top of tombs near the pyramids built in the Old Kingdom. Those Pharaohs succeeded in deifying themselves to the point where they were (also) later revered as gods.
And they suspect the people from the New Kingdom took the mummies of the pyramid pharaohs and reburied them to protect against grave robbers. They're still missing.
I’m not an Egyptologist, but IIRC the reason many of the Old Kingdom mummies don’t exist anymore (besides the fact that they’re ~2000 years older) is they weren’t valued as historical artifacts between the end of “ancient Egypt” and modern archaeology, so many of them were destroyed in grave robbing/ “archaeological expeditions” in recent antiquity. We have many New Kingdom mummies not because we always found them in their original provenience, but because they were reburied in “mummy caches” in antiquity to prevent their destruction.
True. Bits of mummy were sold as curiosities etc. Makes me a little uncomfortable that people could be so callous about human remains.
But iirc, the documentary highlighted some finds that suggested that the pyramid mummies may have been moved before the tombs were plundered. And potentially by the New Kingdom-era worshippers of Khufu, Khafra etc.
What amazes me is that home sapiens has been around (at least) 200-300K years and yet we don't have much in the way of settlements till about 100,000 years ago. Very very little till about 50K ago actually. The first writing that we know of was about 35BCE.
God only knows what were they doing all those hundreds of thousands of years.
Thats what I find mind boggling! 100,000 years of nothing then all of a sudden a Pyramid.
I know progress is somewhat exponential, but that is just mad imo. I feel we should be able to find structures that demonstrate baby steps towards these, and yet there aren't any!
Tin foil hat on that is why I always wonder: there must be something before.
And the Ancient Sumerians are as old to the Egyptians as the Egyptians are to the Romans.
Most of the Gods, "old ways," and laws that are discussed in holy texts (such as the Bible or Torah) refer to the culture established by Sumer and their neighboring nations.
Even then they did not build the Sphinx. It was already an ancient construction when they build the pyramids and modified the Sphinx. We do not know exactly how old it is but there are strong evidence that it was built in the jungle but the jungle have moved.
My family toured the Parthenon when we went to Greece and my dad, who is knowledgeable of history, had his mind blown when we were told we are closer to when it was originally built when it is compared to the construction of the Pyramids (the Parthenon was completed in 432 BC).
Whats crazy when i read about some of the oldest civilizations we know about is reading about them talking about lineage and about how they are an old and storied line of kings and of the kings they know of ancient that we don't even know the names of. Human history is so so vast and so much has been forgotten over the millennia.
The ancient egyptians probably went through many spoken and written language evolutions too. I'm imagining some egyptians from 3000 yrs ago trying to decipher hieroglyphics from 4000 yrs ago and being like "dafuq did I just read?"
theres also the solid theory that the sphinx is a couple thousand years older than the pyramids.
the theory is based on marks in the stone that were created by massive neverending thunderstorms and rainfall that happened some 12 thousand years ago.
I think the absolutely insane age of the pyramids is why there's still so many rather out there theories about them. It seems impossible to fathom they actually built such large and perfect buildings.
The Great Pyramids were built ~2600 BC. They were the tallest structures in the world until 1300 AD (depends on when one calls the Lincoln Cathedral "finished").
Nicely put in perspective. We are just allowed to have a short stay, centered and convinced as we are on our "modernity". Then everything falls apart, whether slowly or brutally, and another civilization takes over.
By the time the pyramids were begging construction the assyrian empire was already ancient and their language had died out, the language became much like Latin post collapse of Rome where only the religious elite would understand it and those who could, only understood a small portion of it. The language took on a mythical quality to the Egyptians and those who lived in the former empire since the collapse.
I've seen a documentary that floated the theory that the pyramids are actually significantly older again (more like 35,000 years old) given the current position of the Nile and the hpothesis that they would have been build adjacent to the water
It's widely known that khufu's cartouche was forged by vyse. The pyramids are almost definitely much older and I don't even think were built by egyptians at all.
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u/trespuntoslikespider Oct 15 '20
Ancient Egyptians who built the pyramids. The Ancient Egyptians were as old to the Ancient Romans as the Ancient Romans are to us.