What it's April. What do you mean it's April? What happened in March?
What happen in February? There we go. Time is ticking on.
You know, I'm excited because this is the month for our Grant Egyptian Tour
number five, and we're taking a nice group of listeners to the secrets of
ancient Egypt. And you know what makes us fun is that we start off
in Cairo and we spend a day on the plateau looking at some of the
buildings there, and there's some amazing megalithic buildings, the Sphinx Temple and the
Pyramids themselves, and the surrounding area has all kinds of fascinating bits and pieces
of history that we discover we enjoy. And so that is the kickoff.
That's the twenty sixth of this month that is coming up, and wow,
exciting to go back. You know, I have to mention this that I
have been fortunate to run into some really great tour operators who aren't focused so
much on the almighty dollar. They want to give back to the tourists,
meaning that they find great locations. For the most part, our tours are
private, meaning that we get to go to these locations without the general public.
You know, we go inside the Pyramid when everyone's gone, we go
I mean they shut it down at five. We go there around seven when
it's aired out, it's been somewhat refreshed, and there's no line. There's
no line. I can't imagine going into the Great Pyramid, the Cufu Pyramid
with a line of people. That would be not only claustrophobic, but just
oh a challenge because everything's staircases and down through the subterranean chamber, which is
just a tube, basically a square tube. So yeah, it's great to
do private visits. And then we go to Abodos and we see the Osiren
unusual building, We go to the Serapim, we go to a number of
museums. Oh, it's just just an amazing time of year ago and we're
looking forward to it. I want to mention this real quickly. I found
out a couple of months ago that doctor Ed Barhard, our own doctor Ed,
has been to and taking groups to Easter Island Jesus. And when he
showed me some photographs, I was like, oh, I got to do
that. And so I don't know how many people we can take I think
it's gonna be maxing at twenty five, but we want to do this in
twenty twenty five. We want to do this next year. So if you're
interested in joining us in the Easter Island and Ed's tour is in some areas
that don't typically get a tourism, come out and join us. Send me
an email to Earth Ancients for you at gmail dot com. Let me know
if you want to go. I think I got fourteen people so far,
so that's like, what's that it's almost a little more than half. Well
take twenty five us less than half, and that's gonna be amazing because I've
been wanting to go there for years. So check that out. Check out
out all of our tours at earth Ancients dot com forward slash tours Egypt this
month, we're gonna be in Turkey in August, and then we do our
the Mexico Yucatan Temples on November eighth through the seventeenth, So Earth Ancient you
want to see it all, They're all listed on Earth ancients dot com,
forward slash tours Hey. Today is the beginning of our programming with Cosmic Summit
Conference, which is June fifteenth, and sixteenth. They have an amazing lineup
of guests speakers from around the world, people like Randall Carlson, Robert Schock,
Scott Walter from Unearth America, our own favorite Praven Mohan, Hugh Newman,
and a whole bunch of other people including today's guest Ben Van Kirkwick from
Uncharted X. This is a very very good program, great conference. If
you can get out to North Carolina, consider it. For more information on
all the details, go to cosmicsummit dot com, forward slash Earth Ancients.
We are our media sponsor, and if you can't get out there, consider
doing the streaming. You can see these guys live from the comfort of your
computer, your TV, wherever you are. And I gotta tell you the
reason I love this is the price fifty bucks to do the streaming for the
Saturday the fifteenth of June or Sunday the sixteenth. Fifty bucks is nothing.
It's so cheap. And we're gonna have George Howard on next week to talk
about this. These a listers from the world of anomalist Discoveries. Always fun
to have. Rendal Carlson. By the way, Randall will be on the
show as well as most of these other people throughout the next two and a
half months, so we'll get a chance to discuss what they're talking about.
But Cosmicsummit dot com stream it. You know, I've always telling people,
if you can get to these conferences, sit down and see what is going
on. Most of them have exhibits of their material, some of them have
artifacts. Really get a sense of what's happening, where the whole industry is
heading, and lots of new discoveries. So it's always fun to be a
media sponsor because not only do we have great people to talk with, we
get a chance to promote these worthy conferences. And I got to tell you
there's a lot that are not worthy. I shouldn't say that everyone's doing their
best, but you know, there's so many conferences on UFOs, on aliens
and stuff like that. It's really rare to have a conference that has actual
scientists and really top of the line research investigators giving us a sense of the
ancient past. And this is what Cosmic Summit is all about. So again
for the details on the tickets on the lineup, go to Cosmicsummit dot com,
forward slash Earth Ancients and check it out. My guest today is going
to be Ben vn Kirkwick from Uncharted x and he is got a lot to
say about not only the Egyptian ruins that he's visited. He just came back,
I think a couple of weeks ago, after a six week tour of
many of the ruins, and of course he is doing research there and so
we're gonna hear about what he discovered, what's some of the what are some
of the interests that he is pursuing. And we finished this interview with new
highlights on these unusual vases that have been found at Sakara that apparently our machine
was some unknown technology and they don't really know if they were used as everyday
household fases, plates, bowls, whatever, but it's it's a it's evident
that these things were uh carved using some technology we don't know and they're really,
really, really a great fascination. So so again the program is the
Unknown History of Egypt, and my guest today is Ben Van Kirkwick from Uncharted
x H. This week we start our support of the conference Cosmic Summit.
It's going to be held in North Carolina June fifteenth to the sixteenth, and
one of the feature presenters is a gentleman who I haven't met, but I've
heard a hell of a lot from about and that's Ben van Kirkwick. He
is the Uncharted ex Promoter author and he's a research and investigator who's done a
hell of a lot of good work. And it's funny because it's a small
world. We know a lot of the same people out there, and so
we want to get into it pretty quickly. Can see Ben at the conference,
and they do have streaming media, which I think is fantastic. So
if you can't get yourself out to North Carolina, check out Ben. You
can go to a cosmicsummit dot com forward slash Earth Ancients and see the detail.
They're charge gen fifty bucks for two days of streaming, and I got
to tell you people, that is unheard of. Usually it's about one hundred
and fifty a day and there's all kinds of side gigs and things they want
to do, So fifty bucks for two days is excellent. So, hey,
Ben, welcome to Earth Ancient. It's great to see you, Cliff,
thanks so much. Yeah, it's great to finally meet. Yeah,
I've like you say we're running similar circles, but we've never actually had the
chance to chat before. Been looking forward to it. Yeah, okay,
let's get down to it. When did you you have this? You have
a background in engineering, but yeah, this whole phenomenon. I mean,
I started traveling to Egypt in twenty eighteen, and I had heard about it,
and I'd read Chris's book, and I've known Chris for years. Blown
away by the by the pyramid, blown away by buildings like the Ossyrian,
blown away by just so much. What is what is your interest? I
mean, is it the same or are you taking it a step further and
drilling down into I try to character. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's
a route to the name. But yes, so my interest. I've always
been interested, I would say, just the whole history topic. I did
get started in technology and engineering. I have a computer science degree. I
started an engineering I switched over to computer science, but I had a twenty
year career in that, working for Hewlett Packard more or less the whole time.
But I had always been interested, and I was always and this is
a similar story to a lot of people, but I was always a fan
of Graham Hancock and his work Fingerprints of the Gods was a fantastic read for
me, and it revitalized a lot of that interest, I guess in the
early two thousands for me, and then I had the chance to travel with
him. I was following him pretty closely, and I think I was back
in twenty thirteen. I spent a couple of weeks with him in Peru and
Bolivia, which is another one of those spots on the world that's just full
of these mysteries and this incredible stuff work and these giant deltas in technology that
are very obvious once you see it between what the Inca were capable of and
then this older sort of mysterious megalithic stone work. And then a year or
two after that, I went to Egypt also with Graham on a tour with
him. I think that was twenty fifteen, and you know, it was
really on that trip to Egypt, my first time in Egypt, but I
was just like, man, there's there's absolutely something here. It was during
those two weeks where I met a very good friend of mine and a teacher
of mine for many years now, usef Awen, who's the son of a
chem Laonen and he you know, he has that a similar mindset to me
in terms of he's drilling down into these engineering details. I wouldn't say the
two drills and the analysis of toolworks, and he's a stonemason. That's not
really a topic that you know, Graham goes super heavy into, but it's
certainly one that I'm particularly interested in. So that really I was like,
man, there's something here. I've got to go and pursue this in more
detail. So after that, I just kept going back to Egypt and back
to Egypt and other places around the world and diving into it and then learning
about guys like Chris done the work. You know, you started reading Flinta's
Petrie and getting into that engineering aspect of it. And I typically do focus
a lot on the evidence for what I'd call like a lost ancient technology,
which is literally I think the title of one of Chris's books has, you
know, lost lost, lost Egyptian technology, whatever it is, lost technology
of ancient Egypt. I'm sorry, and yeah, and that's that's my focus,
and that's just I like to dive into those details and try and look
at the history of discovery of these things. What were the controversy that they've
that some of these different bits of evidence have been generating, and in some
cases you're talking about debates that have been going on for one hundred and fifty
plus years, when you know, from Petrie's time right up until modern day,
and I've never really found any of the standard model explanations for it to
be sufficient. And and yes, by doing that, it's it's led us
to where we are today with and it's something I was super pleased to hear
from, you know, Chris Dunn, and I became friends with Chris Dunn
also his son Alex, and just to find out that then they had actually
been doing something that I'd been calling for for years without the capability to do
it, I guess, but the idea that we can apply our modern technology,
apply all of our efforts in an open minded fashion to investigate some of
these mysteries and these objects and artifacts and try to peel back that onion and
learn a bit more about how they've been made. And we started, you
know, they were doing that with the vases, and then I started to
cover it and came in and and and that was that whole project, I
guess, And that the videos that came out from that led to this open
source, crowd sourcing nature of a lot of other people piling in and with
various expertises in different areas, whered cryptographers and other even investors who then went
out and purchased more vas for more analysis. And it's just we've learned a
tremendous amount in the last the last year or so on some of these artifacts,
and I think it's it represents kind of one of the largest leaps forwards
in our understanding of some of these precise objects in many decades. I got
to mention that your YouTube channel unshuted x as a monster. It's almost at
half a million people. Bravo to you to do that, and you have
good, very high production standards, and I really enjoy watching your program,
So you got you've got a good following. Why do you think the orthodoxy,
if you want to call it, the academia is so disconnected from this
obvious what we see as super anomalies. It's yeah, I mean I think
there's a few reasons for it. The first one I'd say is that and
this is something that I hope in the future a little bit, and that
is that I wouldn't describe euroclassic Egyptology, or I mean archaeology in general as
being particularly engineering focused, Like I think, there, you know it is.
It's a science, but it's probably more closely related to like cultural studies.
A lot of archaeology and egyptology is looking at what daily life like,
how did their society work, what was their structure, what were they saying,
what were they writing. That's what they're interested in. There's generally not
a huge amount of interest in how things are manufactured, or what level of
precision is shown in particular artifacts, or know how they achieved some of the
things that they obviously did. Who I mean, the evidence is right there
and in front of us that these things were achieved, So that's the first
thing. So but at the same time, they do try to address these
problems, and they I find that it's an interesting fact that they do claim
dominion over ancient artifacts. It's something I say often is like you wouldn't ask
an archaeologist to to design the chair that he's sitting on, but if it's
an ancient chair, he's going to claim sort of authority over it. So
that's that's been one problem. Because a lot of the new data and new
these new things that are I think affecting that story of history are coming from
fields outside of archaeology, adjacent fields of science. You've got there's all sorts
of things now in you know, climate science and DNA and genetic evidence along
with the engineering aspects of it. So I think ultimately i'd like to I'd
hope that archaeology itself becomes a bit more multidisciplinary and the other the other aspect
to this, I think is and this is something that is the case in
many sciences that have a have it established or just like an establishment which it's
by its own nature is sort of going to resist change. You have people
that have their authority I think, and their positions that are derived from their
their sense of personal power, and their authority is derived from their position as
an expert in this particular interpretation of it. So I think there's been a
strong defense of that standard model of history, which really hasn't changed much in
the last one hundred years. We've had that similar story of civilization started six
thousand years ago, et cetera, and it was very much a primitive build
up from you know, Stone age to a Bronze Age, then you know,
on to where we are today, and that's you know, that's that's
something that may may be only shifted through generational change. I certainly remain hopeful
at that because I do get contacted by students that are going to be the
academics of tomorrow, and they, I think have no choice but to deal
with some of the evidence that independent researchers and other fields of science are presenting,
and they seem and certainly there's I think it there's going to be a
bit more of an open minded approach in the future. But I think that's
one of the challenges and one of the reasons why I think the academics in
this field have such a strong response and pushing back. It's because the nature
of the discourse has changed too like it used to be. That's why I'm
such a fan of guys like Flinder's Petrie, because if you read their work,
some of these old sort of Victorian era or turn of the nineteenth century
explorers, I mean, they're a bit more open minded. I mean Petrie
was would tell you when there's something he couldn't explain. But those discussions he
was having with his peers happened in those you know, in those society groups
or in the university halls of residents and things, and that's shifted now like
that's in you know, fifty so years ago. We see the rise of
alternative, independent researchers publishing books that are doing an end run around there's university
systems that the conversation started to get broadened out. And then you have the
Internet and you have YouTube, and you have you know, punters like me
can somehow get a voice in a platform and present their ideas, and it's
I think in some ways it's probably a little threatening to that establishment. If
you look at the reaction to Graham Hancock show, you know, Engine Apocalypse,
that's evident that I think guys like John Hoops and the Society of American
Archeology, they're desperate to be able to figure out how they can get into
social media and popular media and podcasts and things like that. So I think
I think it's just forced a bit more of a visceral reaction given that the
now there's a lot of this discussion and a lot of these topics are being
talked about outside of those just purely academic domains. I think you're right.
I think that there is a need to present history in some kind of a
logical manner, even though it isn't always logical when you look at the artifacts,
and these these guys are threatened by people like Graham Hancock. So I'm
curious Ben on your take on the unusual artifacts and buildings like the Osirian and
Serrapium, the Gigantic boxes. We're told that you know, from an an
novelist point of view, that there's a prehistory, an unknown history. But
there's also a group of Egyptologists and even people that I hang with, like
Mohammed Embriam, who does our tours I know my pretty well, who believes
that perhaps in the Middle Kingdom there was a Renaissance period where maybe there was
a discovery of this high tech. But what do you say about that,
because you know, the problem when you're dealing with any ancient culture is there's
so little documentation. Yeah, it's all guesswork. Yeah it's tough, and
he's you know, you're right, there is this is in the nuance of
kind of ancient Egyptian history. But there is definitely there seems to be almost
a high quality or high and the Middle Kingdom is quite short relative to the
other periods. There is this seems to be a little an uptick in quality
of work. There's the subtle differences between say, Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom,
and the Middle Kingdom stuff seems to be often superior in terms of stone
work. It's possible. I do think that a lot of I mean,
it's something Use also says a lot and I agree with him as you can't
ever underestimate the dynastic Egyptians. I mean, so, for example, I
think some of the statues at Luxe or there's a subtle difference between what is
what is achievable, and what isn't And some of those statues there I think
were done during those periods, potentially in the Middle Kingdom as well, and
then they were overwritten later on by Ramsy's a second in the New Kingdom and
had his name put on them. But you know, it's there's evidence for
I think these the real significant tools and stone work that goes back to the
very earliest periods of time as well. And these are you know, Old
Kingdom things that are in the pyramids. You've got tube driels something that I
kind of term on the trips and stuff is like pyramid builder technology. So
to me, it's it seems clear that there was certainly something going on before
the dynastic Egyptians sort of rose and had their civilization as we know it,
which is also something that they themselves say, like they have their own history
in their books, and there's several sources for this, the Turin Papyrus Manato
that goes back some forty two thousand years, I think, And they talk
about themselves as a legacy civilization and refer to times like Zeptepi, when the
gods themselves walk to the earth. So it does this idea that there was
a precursor civilization and that they are the legacy of that. They are still
connected to, they have cultural memories of it, if not their technology.
I think that matches with what they say and it it does, to my
mind, matches some of the evidence we see on the ground. But it's
also possible that some of that may there may have been either groups or like
sex or certain parts of ancient Egypt during that they might have had some some
of this capability. I'm not entirely convinced that that's the case. I do
think you can explain a lot of this with the idea that there's been and
you know, it's the result of just generation after generation after generation of particular
trades, and they became very skilled at working in stone. But there are
differences, like there are even I think the Middle Kingdom statues the good ones
at lux Or, if you look closer, there's there's a real difference between
in the stone finishing, the tool marks, the details, the depth of
cuts, things like that that I think that separate even the best work that
comes from the Middle Kingdom from stuff that I just don't think you can explain
with any Bronze Age tools or technology. And then of course the dating of
all of this gets really mixed up. It's one of the reasons why I
think the vases are such a smoking gun in this argument, because the vases
go back fifteen thousand years plus, right, they well and truly proceed the
Egyptian civilization. You see the same technology on the vases that you see on
things like statues, box of slabs, and architecture. But those are massive
objects that you can't have buried with you. They can't be buried in a
tomb that then gets dated later on through carbon dating or whatever. These things
are massive objects that sit on sites, so the sites get inherited, they
get renovated, reused, and then some pharaoh with hubris and self importance puts
his name on it later on, and then therefore that's how it gets dated.
That's like the bedrock of Egyptology is like whatever's written on it is kind
of the authoritative. I want to touch on that point real quickly. Ben.
You highlight an issue that I have come to recognize, where these pharaohs
have tremendous egos, and Ramsey is the second is credited with a huge building
pyramid, but looking more and more like he may have just decided to reuse
temples, pyramids and even statuary. And this is not something that Egyptology is
recognizing or even considering, even in the face where you a cartouche which is
very roughly cut into a statue and then you have a beautiful piece of statue.
Whey, that's gorgeous. In fact, it's it's it's really high level
stuff. Yeah, well it's it. They do actually acknowledge it. It's
it's not often, it's not often talked about, but they do. It
is even Petrie. Petrie called Ramses the great usurper, and he did,
Yeah, he called him Ramses they instead of the great He'd called him the
great usurper because he would was notorious for doing this, and it is,
it's somewhat it's like quietly acknowledged. They don't often talk about it. They
just they just look if his name is on it, then it gets dated
and related to him. But there's tremendous evidence that that's that he was overriding.
He wasn't the only one. There was a number of pharaohs. His
son, like Marion Petar even said he the first was doing some of it.
So these these nineteenth dynasty kings were particularly notorious for it. But you
know, I personally think there was recycling and reuse of of stuff going on
as far back as the Old Kingdom and Ramsey's I mean, look that there
are there's some artifacts that have the name of three or four different pharaohs on
them, like cartouosh is carved into it that span a thousand year time period,
so it's it becomes very hard to date and relate that stuff. And
then there's other, as you say, other evidence where there's there's clear obvious
evidence that cartoushes have been added later. I mean not only the quality of
the cartouche relative to the rest of the stonework. That's a huge point.
But also where you have cartoushes that have been added over pre existing features of
a statue. So it's a really good example I'd like to show people at
lux Or. Again it's it's like a cartouche that's been added over the belt
line of one of these statues, and they have that like a dagger and
this kilt that they're wearing, and you can still see the dagger, like
the lines of the dagger and the kilt behind the cartous Now, of course,
if you were designing that statue to have a cartoushe on it in the
first place, you would you wouldn't go to the effort of of actually,
you know, carving those delicate features on it, only to then eraise it
and hammer over it roughly with these glyphs. So yeah, it's it's tough
to say. I mean he was he was taking stone from the Middle Pyramid.
I mean he was taking granite stone from the Middle Pyramid. I think
the sites themselves that are mostly attributed to him, places like karnak Ye and
Luxor. I mean there's obvious levels and multiple periods of building to those that
there's lower levels, there's you know, these these sites often feature a granite
core that show very sophisticated stone work, and then clear imitation of that in
the sandstone work that Ramses likely did. I mean he did have. They
were extremely wealthy and powerful during his time, so he probably did do an
awful lot of building, But I don't think he had the capability to do
some of that granite work that we see, and he was imitating it.
Like there's if you ever look at like those palm shaped or lotus shaped,
massive single piece granite columns, there are incredible pieces of art work, but
then you put one of those and you look at and right next to it,
there'd be a sandstone column that's oftentime is larger, but it's made up
of these round blocks of sandstone that have been stacked up on top of each
other, and it's imitating that shape. And even though it's a bigger column,
it's exponentially easier to do that in sandstone than it is to carve this
one single piece of granite. So I think in the case of a lot
of these sites and a lot of these artifacts, their history is probably far
older and more complex than we're led to believe by kind of the orthodox story
that you get when you go there with a regular tour guide and or you
read the history books and say, you know, Ramsey's built Karnak or Ramsey's
built lux or even the highs, Like there's literally names of Middle Kingdom and
even Old Kingdom pharaohs on those sites, so we know those sites were there
well and truly before the New Kingdom. You know, we get into the
problem with the King's List and it goes back tens of thousands of years,
and yet the the uh, how does it be only recognize dates that seem
to fall into the hunter gatherer period and then beyond that it's all myth?
That's right, Well, it's it's a I like to think of this,
it's like a so, yeah, you have the King's List, and particularly
there's more than one source for this, but it's generally broken up into three
periods. You have ZEPTEPI, which is the oldest period where they say the
gods themselves walked to the earth and that's I think it was almost like thirty
something thousand years and then or twenty eight thousand years, and then you have
the shemsu Hare, the time of the followers of Horus, who are these
semi divine mystical beings also described as having mystical powers. And I like to
always think of like, well, if you are a primitive culture or any
culture really that is seeing the evidence or seeing technology that they can't explain,
it's just that's magic, right, That's that's what magic is. That's we
or science. That's just science you haven't discovered yet. But the period of
zeb Tepi is about sixteen thousand years. It's it's about it. It's a
similar period to sorry, shemsu Whore is about sixteen thousand years. And then
that's a that follows zep Tepi, and then you then you end up with
Menes, the first pharaoh of the First Dynasty, and then off we go,
and the Egyptians describe all of this as their history, like they didn't.
They made no distinction between like, well, this is myth and legend
and this is our history. But it's our modern scholars and academics who decide,
well, no, it's it starts it with Menes in the you know,
the first the first phaar of the First dynasty, the Old Kingdom,
and everything before that is just myth and legend like that's this arbitrary line in
the sand that's been made by our our scholars today. Is zep Tepi's what
like eighty thousand years ago or something? What depends that there's a couple of
different sorts. I think it's I think it's it's forty forty thousand. I
think it's okay, Yeah, yeah, it's I think the whole thing spans
like forty six or forty eight thousand years. I have to look it up,
but there's it's in that realm. Yeah. The interesting thing to point
out, though, is if they kept the same traditional clothing or costume and
you know, design themes from forty thousand to yeah, you know a few
thousand years ago, that's open for interpretation. You can get confused. And
if there was a high art which you identify in your work, then the
only thing we can think of is comparative study. You compare one period to
another. One of these areas that I'm curious about. Have you been to
Abu Sabil? Yes, Simbel, yes, I have you. I think
when they attribute that to a Ramsey second, I think that's one of those
places where he just put his cartoons on or yeah. Do you know the
story of one of his engineers. He asked one of his engineers to fix
the one body of the torso on the head that had been broken down.
It's in the lais in front. And the story goes that Ramsey asked his
engineers to fix this, and the engineers say, we have no way of
doing and you have no way of fixing it. We don't know how,
we don't know how it was. I have to find that that's a good
story. I'd like to like to hear that Abison Bell is interesting. I
you know, I'm not. I don't know. I suspect it's I think
Abison Bell is a possible it's possibly dynastic, just my opinion, because it's
it's one thing. It's it's sandstone. It is I mean it's massive,
right, it's it's it's the biggest carving, isn't it one of the biggest
not free standings. So Abison Bell is carved into a sandstone. I mean,
yeah, it's cuffed into the Yeah, so nobody had to move anything
like that's one thing. So nobody had to move anything. It's it's not
the biggest statue there. There are bigger there's evidence for bigger single piece of
granite statues well and truly in excess of a thousand tons in Egypt, several
of them. And this is the difference to me, This is I think
Ramses was probably trying to emulate. If he did that, I think he
was trying to emulate these statues, because as amazing as Abison bell is,
I just I don't quale the proportions are a little off. I just looking
at it, and I've only been there that once, I feel like it's
just he might have just had that carved into a sandstone hillside, and there's
no none of the logistic, logistic challenges that you would have when you're talking
about say a thousand or twelve hundred ton statue made from granite. And we
have evidence for several of these, like there's one of these, the one,
probably the best preserved one is that the Ramesseum on the West Bank.
Of course it's the Ramesseum because it's attributed to Ramseys. But there's a giant
the shoulders and knee but torso of this and the head of this thing,
and it's laying on its side. It's one of the most massive pieces of
granite you'll see just the pedestal that it sits on is seven hundred tons,
and that's an individual block of granite, just the just the block that they
statue was lifted up and put on as seven hundred tons. And you know
that's still one hundred and fifty miles from Aswine, where the granite came from.
But what's even more remarkable is we have evidence for this type of a
statue. There's a giant foot up in Tannis in the delta way up in
the north, and that's I think it's like a thousand kilometers if not,
I think it's a thousand kilometers from as One the foot this granite foot,
and Petree found this as well. This is it's about the same size as
the foot of the statue of Liberty. So you can draw a comparison statue.
It's huge. Yeah, you can't. My hand, my spread hand
doesn't fit. I mean it's the toenail is bigger than my outspread hand.
And all that's left of it is this foot, which was repurposed as a
block in the wall. But you can clearly see it's a foot, and
there's some other pieces of it laying around. And this was a single piece
granite statue that would have weighed easily in excess of one thousand tons, that's
found at least a thousand kilometers from the ry location for that stone. You
know, that's that's an insane logistical achievement. It's and you've got evidence for
at least half a dozen of these statues that I know of, between Karanak
and the Rameseum and up up in the up in the delta, and I
think that's it's a hugely different level of achievement to carving something out of a
sandstone hillside. We don't have to move anything. You also raise an interesting
point when you started here, and this is it's one that I often get
asked. It's like, because I think some of these statues, particularly these
thousand plus ton granite statues, it's beyond the logistical capabilities of a Bronze Age
culture. Certainly what we know about the Donastic Egyptians, who didn't use pulleys
or capstans, they didn't use force multipliers as far as we can tell from
everything that they drew on the walls, and they did describe how they moved
stuff around. You know, they had dudes with ropes and maybe some wooden
levers and they drag stuff on sleds. I think this is unachievable. I
mean, you might be able to move one hundred tons that way, but
you're not move a thousand. And Some people would say, well, okay,
if you think the statues are so old, how come they look like
dynastic Egyptians. I actually think it's the other way around. I think it's
I think the dynastic Egyptians are connected to this what you might call a builder
culture, and if they have inherited these statues, can you imagine like like
a ninety foot tall, thousand ton granite statue that's in that iconic pharonic Egyptian
style. I mean, these are your gods. These are you would see
this and think it's a god, and you would one hundred percent be modeling
your culture. And you were connected to this culture just through through generations,
and you have some cultural memory of it. This is the iconic look that
you are then seeking to emulate. And it's if you ever go and look
as across a three thousand years of Egyptian history, if you go look in
all the terms from Old Kingdom terms to New Kingdom and Tolemaic era. Look
at how the pharaohs are depicted. They're always showing them as being amongst the
gods. There was try to position themselves as a god, as being given
gifts by the gods and being accepted into godhood in the afterlife. And they
always that iconic look, that dress, that that it gets a bit more
elaborate in later periods, but it's the same style. It's the same look.
And I kind of look at ancient Egypt as potentially the world's most sophisticated
cargo cult. You know, have you ever seen that gods must be crazy?
You know, they get the coke bottle to that tribe in Africa and
it just causes all these problems and they're emulating and whatever. I think,
I think there's a chance that that's I think that's an explanation that is,
that does make a lot of sense of some of these artifacts and sites and
that iconic look of ancient Egypt. Will you make a good point where a
later periods trying to emulate a column, a granite column, and they do
it very poorly. The original granted may have been spun on a lathe of
some kind with technology and then the Newerwan hand carbon. It's just nate and
de difference. You see the same thing. You see that. You see
the concept of imitation across almost all the categories of ancient Gypan artifacts. You
see it in vases, you see it in boxes, statues, architecture like
columns. I mean, there's I love taking people to the Egyptian Museum because
you'll see stuff that's pre dynastic. You'll see like a beautiful, like obviously
precision formed like hard stone vase might be granite might be you know, diar
ride or some other even harder stone, and then right next to it is
a pottery imitation of it that's hand like, hand thrown, you know,
it's it's the pinched method. It's not even made on a potter's wheel.
And then they paint it to look like granite, you know they do,
and it's like, well these they just say, well, these are found
in the same burial, so the same person must have made them. And
it's just there's they're worlds apart technologically speaking, it's it's insane. And you
see the same thing with boxes. There's lots of like limestone and even granite
boxes that are very rough obviously hand hammered, handmade, and they're just a
I think it's an imitation of some of these other boxes that they have.
And the same thing applies to statues. You can see the handmade statues.
You can see the result of the hand tools, the handwork, the tools
and technology and techniques that we know the ancient Egyptians had because we found the
tools. They drew on the walls, They drew the scenes on the walls
of how they did stuff, and there's a whole category of artifacts that match
that capability and tool set. Then you have this I call it the tail
of two industries. There's one industry that matches what we know about them and
all the evidence we've collected about Dynastic Egypt and their tools and techniques, and
then there's this other category of stuff like the hardstone vases, the precision card
boxes, the giant statues, the columns, things like that that really don't
match it. And there's just there's simply no evidence that the Dynastic Egyptians had
the capability to do any of this stuff, which is odd to me,
because they were very you can find scenes on the walls they show you how
they worked on stone how they worked in wood. We found the tools that
they used, and you just simply can't use those things to explain this other
class of artifact. We're going to take a short commercial break to allow our
sponsors to identify themselves, and we will be right back with our guest today,
Ben van Kirkwick, coming to us from northern California and his discoveries of
ancient Egypt. Will be right back. My guest today is Ben van Kirkwick,
who is a field of research investigator who has spent a considerable amount of
time in Egypt, in Peru, in Mexico, and a number of other
locations where there is evidence for not only very very old civilizations, but forgotten
civilizations. Have you been to Memphis and seeing the Outdoor Museum. Yes,
I saw that the Ramsey to sculpture on his back for the first time last
year and it's impressive, very impressive. Yeah, that's a great statue,
like one hundred and fifty tons thereabouts. I think, well, I wonder
what the original block was was, because that thing looks like it's early dynastic
because it's just beautifully carved. And then it was pointed out to us that
there's more recent cartouches placed on the shoulder, which are hack jobs. Yep,
uh, what do you say about that? That's one hundred percent agree,
it's it's it's painfully at times obvious that a lot of these statues have
essentially been vandalized in in in the later later years in the New Kingdom,
used typically by Ramseys. That's the that's the one cartoons. She you get
very good at recognizing his name because it's everywhere. But yeah, they it's
if you look at and and this also actually applies to the other even biggest
statues, the ones that are probably ten times that size, where the stone
works perfect like it's you know it is. It is a great example of
a of a giant hand and a thumb that's at Karnak and it's made from
composite quartzite, which is even a harder stone than grantit it's got flint in
it. It's insane, it's it's like a nightmare for stone carvers. But
if you look at this thumb that's sticking out like he's it's holding it.
It's the same thing as that statue at Memphis where it's holding this scroll or
something in the hand right, it's like, and they often put a cartouche
on the top of that little scroll or whatever it is that's that's in the
hand, and you can you can look at the details of the thumbnail and
these fine details you see the cuticle, you know, carved and polished,
beautiful stone work. And then you look at this cartoushe and you can literally
see these hammer and chisel marks from where they just packed this thing in there.
I mean, some people have said to me like, oh, well,
you know, there's a different guy doing the cartoushes, you know,
the scribes doing it. I'm like, that's nonsense. That if you can
be great at calligraphy, try and do calligraphy in stone. It's an entirely
different skill set. So even if you probably had scribes that came and they
drew the cartoosh, they pould have painted it in red oak, paine or
something. But then it's the stone carver's job to come along and carve it.
And presumably if the statues made at the same time the cartouoshes has done,
then this stone carve is going to be of the same school. He's
going to have the same tools, he's going to have the same technology.
Is the guy who made the statue. But that's not what we see.
We see this there's a massive difference in the carving of the riding in the
cartouches, obviously handmade, done with hammers and chisels, flint chisels or whatever,
and there's a you know, they're not polished, they're not they're not
you don't see these fine details. Obviously they whoever made the statues could polish
very uneven and fine pieces of stone. You see it all over these statues,
from large to small, but you never see that in these cartouoshes.
And to me, that's a very strong indication that there's a massive technological gap
between whoever was riding on them and whoever made the statue. And it I
think that the statues were there first, and it's not like it had The
statues had to be there first for then someone to come along and write on
them later. And I suspect there was a huge time gap between those two
things occurring. Christin highlights this in his first book that it's the precision that
is so telling. Yeah, it's just off the charts precision when you are
dealing with statuary. And you brought up a good example when you go to
Karnak, some of those big fifty eighty ton seated statues, they're machined in
some manner that we just don't understand. We don't know because and what he
uses as the mirror effect. You look at one side, you flip that
over, it's and it's the exact same eyes, nose, mouth, chin.
Yeah. The symmetry, symmetry is an aspect of precision. Yeah,
and yeah, he uses a reverse transparency overlay, which is, yeah,
you take a photo, make it fifty percent transparent, copy it, take
one copy, flip it horizontally, then overlay them and you can you can
see the differences. It's a wonderful technique for showing symmetry because it is perfect.
When you look at that face from that front on angle, it's like
it lines up perfectly. And you know, symmetry is not not it's not
a human feature. It's like everyone's nostrils and eyeballs are a bit different.
This isn't like a feature of humans. And it's also not something that gets
Symmetry is not a thing that happens in sculpture either, like even I've seen
Michelangelo, Oh sorry, Michelangelo's David. You know, in where is it
up in Florence and you know you don't. It's amazing statue and it's very
lifelike, but it's not symmetrical. And symmetrical is an aspect of precision,
which to my mind also speaks to design. Like it probably the most efficient
way to maybe design this thing was to design half of it and then mirror
image it on the other side, and then now you've got you know,
you can then put that through whatever manufacturing process created it. And symmetry to
that detail is really not achievable by hand, particularly when you're talking about a
three dimensional object. You know, it's not just symmetrical just front on,
it's symmetrical from left to right like around it as well. A very complex
shapes and artifacts. And I would hope that we can apply a similar technique
that we've that has started to be applied to artifacts like the vases, where
you can scan them with modern technology like structured light scanning, where you can
create an extremely detailed and high resolution model of it and then analyze this these
these artifacts in you know, g D and T software where and start to
really drill down on just how precise is this Because we've started to do that
with these vases, and the numbers that are coming back are just remarkable.
I mean, they're they're I think it should be a huge, a huge
paradigm shifting event really, because there's just simply no way you can reach these
levels of precision that we've we've demonstrated exists in a lot of artifacts like the
vases with any hand method, certainly not with the very primitive methods that they
say we used in the Old Kingdom or even the pre Dynastic times, which
is literally dudes banging on them with sticks and rocks and sand like. That's
no spinning tools, no nothing, it's it's just nonsense to suggest that that's
how some of these artifacts were made. But that's literally what people insist happened.
Let's let's get into that. You were part of a team that what
did you call it, the Stoneware analysis or something like they scan Yeah,
bay scan. Yeah. And before we started we mentioned our mutual friend Adam
Young, who introduced me to these was a vice. They don't know the
date, they know it's ancient. They I believe he found it in Socara
or it was listed at being found in Sacara. Yeah, it's not his
vase. I mean it's pre dynastic, it's and then the reason you would
classify it as pre dynastic is is it matches very very closely in form and
stone type to other artifacts that were found in pre dynastic burials. It's one
of the it's it is. One of the questions that's come back on the
vay scan project is is, well, what's the provenance of these vases?
How do we know their ancient Egyptian or what how do we know their age?
And when you're dealing with artifacts that come from you know, the antiquities
market, that's it's it gets a little murky at times because the more providence
that the more expensive it is. And also if it's too much providence,
then you know, museums and countries might even be like asking for them back.
And a lot of this stuff is I'm sure there's a lot of stuff
that's that hasn't necessarily come out of Egypt in the proper fashion, I'll say,
but there's tons of stuff that has like these these sort of artifacts have
been given as gifts to ambassadors and diplomats and governors and people that have been
there, and and lots of these you know Victorian era and European Egyptologists have
taken that stuff from Egypt. And I mean I've seen them on Southerby's too.
Oh yeah, they come up all they come up on auction. They
are in a lot of there's a lot of the there's like probably up to
one hundred thousand of these things floating around, I mean, or at least
parts of it. There was forty to fifty thousand of them were found in
one location beneath the step pyramid at Sakara, but they've been found in Gizer
and all sorts of other places as well. And the crazy thing about the
vases is they do stretch back in time to like truly pre dynastic times.
Like the oldest site that I've seen, there's a fantastic display in the Nubian
Museum at Aswan that looks at a lot of these predynastic sites going back fifteen
sixteen thousand years, and they've they've you can see from the photographs there are
stone vases on these sites and some of these these these places, these vases
are attributed to sites that have all carbon dated is going back in that time.
Interesting thing about the vases though, is that they essentially disappear from the
dynastic records. So you have the vast majority of the found were found underneath
the Step Pyramid, which is the third dynasty of the Old Kingdom. Really
like sixty thousand that were found. Yeah, number forty to fifty thousand beneath
the Step Pyramid, and that's the doge You're pyramid, right, Josi,
Yeah, Josea. And that do we know because I saw a video of
you. Is it like in the third layer underneath the second layer or something.
Yeah, it's like there's like two or three miles of tunnels beneath that
thing. It's actually amazing. I go down there now. They opened it
up for special permission. So I love to take people down there because it's
an adventure going down there. First of all, what's down there is super
interesting. There's a huge shaft beneath that pyram's like forty five feet wide and
ninety hundred feet tall, and there's this massive thirty two piece granite box that's
in there. And then below that you sort of shoot off in the corners
and there's all these catacombs and chambers and three or four levels at least of
chambers and tunnels beneath that. In fact, we don't know where it goes
or how deep it goes. I've been down to the deepest layer, which
they typically don't allow, even on special permissions. They don't really want people
going down there. But you open this trap door that's got a padlock on
it, you go down another twenty foot ladder, and there's even there's big
chambers down there, and then there's there's these passages that go off into the
ground that they've not excavated yet. It probably keeps going. But yeah,
in those galleries and in those chambers, who was that Jean Feliployer found between
forty and fifty thousand of these hardstone vases. And this is the archaeological This
is not controversial at all. This is this is what you know he reported
and what they say in the Sacara Museum even and so there's we know there's
a lot of these exist, and you know Petrie found them at Geezer as
well, which he kind of attributes to the fourth dynasty. But after that
period, after that time, they they sort of disappear. It's funny that
the vase industry in Egypt shifts to this alabaster industry and you can see these
beautiful alabastera vases this much softer stone. Right, it's white calcite. It's
like a three three and a half on the most scale of hardness versus you
know, these hardstone vessels, which is like six seven. Even there's even
a a corundum vase in the museum that's a nine on the most skeats.
It's amazing, but they disappear, and that this is a real telling thing
to me. It's you know, after that, there's this industry of alabasta
vass which do not reflect the same levels of precision. They're obviously handmade,
they do reach a high level of craftsmanship. They're beautiful pieces. But that's
that's the vase industry after that. And I think that actually gets kind of
explained in the in the Imhotep Museum at Sakara, they say, well,
there's a there was a vase industry before im Hotep or Imhotep was Jose's architect.
That's the famous guy is not the bad guy in the mummy movies,
is actually a venerated figure in ancient Egypt. They were still writing about him
in the New Kingdom. He's a genius and a polymath. But I think
what happened is he came up with a method to try and best imitate these
hardstone vases as best he could. And there's a scene on a wall,
it's literally in the museum, and it shows them working on what I think
we're ALABASTERA vass with these bent sticks with weights on them and flint tips and
they're turning them. And then there's a the pictures the guy's rubbing on them
with rocks and polishing them. And you can look at the ALABASTERA vases and
see exactly how they were made that way. And in fact, if you
go to one of the Alabasta factories over on the West Bank, I seen
them. They're still they're doing it. They do it exactly the same way,
the handmade stuff. They just use steel tools today, and it's it's
it's I think. So what I think we're looking at is you had these
vastly ancient objects. Who knows how old they are? The vases they're small
enough that and you know, if you're in if you're a pre dynastic culture
or primitive culture and you're making pottery vases or vessels, and you find one
of these hardstone vessels. You're immediately going to recognize that it's something special,
like it's made from granite. You're like, holy crap, how do they
do? This becomes precious. You then collect them and you keep them and
you bury them with you because it's your precious artifacts. And then that that
builds up to eventually jose that comes along, he's a king in the third
dynasty. He sends his boys out to to basically raid all the tomb they
can find, collect as many vases as they can, bury them with him
beneath the step pyramid, like which is what seems to have happened, and
they and even in that museum, this is I love this because they acknowledge
there that a lot of these artifacts are inherited heirlooms, because on some of
these vases there are very crudely scratched inscriptions that match the names of First and
second dynasty rulers, So they know that some of these vases came out of
the tombs of first and second first and second dynasty rulers that Joseph then had
inherited them. But after that, I think they basically collected as many as
they could, and they pretty much disappear from the record, which tells you
that that technology disappears. But those vases reflect the same technology that we see
on these other artifacts, like the statues, the big stuff, the stuff
that can't be buried with a guy. So it's like, that's why they
think the vases are so important, because they tell you a story of there
was a technology that existed long ago, and the Nastic Egyptians obviously didn't have
it, because otherwise they would have kept making these vases and using that technology.
But it's the same technology we see in all these other precision artifacts that
are much larger. You can't move them, you can't be buried with them.
They stay on these sites. The sites grow up over time, they
get renovated, reused, and then this stuff gets rebadged and a guy writes
his name on it, and today we interpret that as like, well,
he must have built it. I mean, it's the same thing. Imagine
imagine Adam Young touchwood. You know, when Adam Young passes away, he
wants to be buried in his mausoleum with his granite vase. Our civilization ends.
Yeah, five thousand years later, the archaeologists of the future dig up
Adam's mausoleum and they see his name on it, and they see this vase
and go, Adam Young must have had this vase made. I mean,
it's yeah, it's we're doing the exact same thing when we say that about
ancient Egypt. We have no we don't know when these things were made.
So talk a bit about the technology you're using to analyze these these vases and
plates. I think it's just a viase, is what you're doing. But
I heard a rumor a few months ago that now the feeling is from the
group, and that's part of your area, is that they weren't necessarily used
as jars. They may have had another more advanced use. YEP, so
I do. Yeah, So I'll hit that bit first. I do think
these were functional. I think the boxes were functional. I think a lot
of the stuff we're looking at and Engineergypt was functional. It had a purpose.
We just don't know what it is. We might not have. We
lack the context to view it correctly at this point, which is one of
the reasons I think we should be open minded about approaching it. They were
certainly used as vases by the dynastic Egyptians. I mean some of these aren't
vases like they literally you can't. You have to stand them upside down.
If you know, they have to come to a pointed tip. Some of
them that you know, like a narrow pointed tip that they won't you have
to put them upside down. But but what happened, and I really have
to also credit Adam Young again for being the driving force behind this to make
He's been wanting to do this for years and when he he got a hold
of you know, Alex and Nick who were metrologists who work in the aerospace
industry. If you have the Alex Dunn is Alex dun Chris Dun's son and
Nix Sierra, I don't know this other case engineer at the area of work
work. Yeah, it works with with Alex okay, and so they're metrologists,
I mean literally their job is to analyze precision and and and use the
techniques that we're using to to basically analyze these vases. So they scanned that
first phase. They scanned it with a process called structured light scanning, which
is like a laser scanning process that basically maps the artifact down to within a
thousands of an inch or a little little under that and it does that by
you know, just basically creating a point cloud of you know, millions and
millions of points and creates this artifact that then you can create, you know,
an object in a in software in and then you can start to analyze
it with what's GD and T tools are geometric distancing and tolancing tools. These
are industry standard tools and a technique that's used to basically look at you know,
precision parts for jet engines and rocket engines. And we literally use this
to in order for us to fly across the country in planes like it's the
same and that the crazy thing that came out of this is that we're seeing
precision on the same level as parts that we put into jet engines. It's
it's stuff that where you see you see tolerances and and levels like a single
thousandth of an inch, like you know, parts being perpendicular or with roundness,
concentricity. Just just absolutely amazing results coming back from it that are really
only achievable today on some of our very best kind of machinery like lathes and
see and see mills and things like that. Certainly, no one's ever demonstrated
that you can hit these sort of tolerances on complex oblate objects like these by
hand. It's it's not no one. And now all the machinists and people
that see there's these results, and people that understand machining and manufacturing, they
understand this immediately. So one of my challenges has been trying to explain this
to every to people that aren't in those fields, and explain what it means.
But it's been truly remarkable results came out of this first phase. And
then we've through guys like Matt Bell and his acquisitions of vases, We've we've
had access to many more vases he's now he's got a huge collection now and
we've seen we've seen vases of similar precision and even better like there's there's I
think he has at this point one where I think the average the average deviation
across all of the measurements that they've taken on that vases between one and two
thousands of an inch, which is remarkable. I think your average on that
on that original vase from Adam might be between five and six or seven thousands.
Some measurements are very low, some are a little higher, but this
we see some we've seen some remarkable artifacts. And the really cool thing about
this is that you know, there's garnded some attention, and there's been some
interest from universities in Egypt who have engineers and egyptologists on stuff, and they
have access to museums. They're already doing photogrammetry and light out scanning of artifacts
for like virtual reality, so you can look at an object on the web
or whatever. And they're interested in this process and this technique, and I'm
very hopeful that they'll be able to get into some museums and start to expand
that data set looking at artifacts that are in museums. Similar story with the
Petrie Museum. I'm hopeful to get into the Flinder's Petrie Museum that's on the
University College of London. I saw it yet two years ago. It's got
a few really good pieces. But hey, my point on this precision,
ben is are we looking at houseware or are these parts to a machine?
Yeah? I don't think they're houseware. I don't think these are just made
to be vases. I don't think you need so there's a relationship between precision
and function. You don't develop precision unless you're chasing function. However, once
you have a manufacturing system that delivers precision, then that's kind of what you
get. It's the reason why our toasters are so well made today, our
car panels fit so much better together than they did in the nineteen sixties.
Our manufacturing systems just deliver precision. But the reason that precision was developed was
to chase a particular function. I think these vases were something else that potentially
parts of larger machines. I think one of the concept that they might have
been resonators is an interesting one, and actually I know there's some testing underway
to sort of test resonance in these vases. My intuition about them is that
they're functional. I look at them, a lot of them with lug handles.
I mean, I look at those things that they seem to represent like
a camlock to me, so you can imagine putting that thing in and turning
it and it locks in. A lot of them really wouldn't perform well as
as vases. I mean the vases. They you know, they span in
scale from the size of my thumbnail up to vases. And yeah, that's
the other thing. They're tiny, functional for well, maybe for small flowers,
but I don't know. Well, they say they're for perfumes and oils,
right, this is what they Okay, standard models, you know,
perfumes and oils, which they say, well, well those were more valuable
than the vases themselves, which I didn't. I think is nonsense. Well,
did you guys find a residue of anything like that? No, I've
not. I've not heard of anything like that. Look, I think the
Dynastic Egyptians when they had them, they probably used them that way. They
may well have used them as vases. You can see even some of them
have. Yeah, I actually think it's it's sort of complex, but I
think that the there's lots of most, in fact, the majority of vases
with lug handles that stick out on the sides. Most of them they're not
effect of handles. You couldn't even the angles on them wouldn't make them effective
for holding up. And then most of them, there's certainly a lot of
them that have holes through the lug handles. But these holes are very imprecise.
They don't match up, they're offset, you know, they're like they've
been drilled from either end. And I think that was probably done by the
Dynastic Egyptians. They ground these holes through them so they could put metal in
there. And you even have a couple of vases with metal handles that are
stuck through there. So I just I think this is a reuse and a
repurposing of them that happened later. My intuition about the vases is that they
were were probably functional, either parts of a larger machine or they had some
function. I don't know what that is. That's I think we need to
approach it with an open mind and maybe we'll learn more about it in the
future. But it kind of fits that category of these boxes the same thing.
To me, it's like the serapeum and this phenomena of you know,
precision stone boxes that are either in pyramids or they're under the ground that they
went to just readible lengths to make as as massive and as precise as they
are. I don't think that was done simply to just bury a ball in
or anything like that. They went I mean, the boxes are crazy,
like they they wanted them to be solid, Like the lengths they went to
in the therapeum to scoop out cracks and to just maintain solidity of those boxes
is astonishing. And if you just you're talking about a single use box.
You stick a bull carcascent and you put the lid on it. Who cares
if it's got a crack in the surface. But but but man, the
length they went to to scoop out cracks and then to polish those surfaces.
It's it's astronomical amount of work there is. I think a lot of this
stuff is functional. There's a group of alternative academics, I guess you could
call them, who are saying that there was a period in Egyptian history where
there was high art and I can't remember what the name was, but it's
like, I don't want to name names, but it's like they're they're attributing
these precision boxes and sculptural reliefs and things like that to this period of time,
and it's like you can't They're so desperate to keep it on the ground
and say, hey, no, there's no way there was an unknown civilization
you're going, you know. And the funny thing about it is, and
I'm glad that I've never met you, but this is the first time.
I'm glad. You're not very often going, well, this is ancient aliens.
No, No, you know, because that really drives me nuts.
Whatever you can, I can't explain this agian alien. Well that trust me.
People levy that that one at me all the time. I'm sure it
happens to you too. But yeah, it's like, yeah, it's that's
the trope, right, that's the standard responses. Well, if you don't
think they did it, you must think aliens did it. And I'm like,
no, You look at the span of human history like this is one
of the other factors that really should be affecting the story of history is we
are while than we thought we were, like as a species, we've been
around and when we are the last humans left, there were other types of
humans here too that also lived for millions of years longer than we did.
So and you know Neanderthals, for example, bigger brains than us. I
thought for the longest time they couldn't talk, but the latest research shows that
no, no, they could. They have the vocal cord structure to communicate,
which is a basis for civilization, and you know, lovely singing voices
by all accounts, and you know it's we used to think we were fifty
thousand years old, then we went to one hundred and ninety five thousand years
old, and they found a jawbone in Morocco that pushed it out to three
hundred thousand years old. Now, the latest studies into you know, our
split with a common ancestor and you know, teeth morphology rates puts the date
at like eight to nine hundred thousand years old. So this idea that civilization
only ever emerged in the last six thousand years is patently ridiculous. At this
point. It's you know, you're talking a span of time that goes back
to you know, the other side of the last glacial maximum into more.
I mean, not that the last glacial maximum was a problem everywhere. It
was just it was literally like there were still temperate areas of the world.
Giza would have been fine, that whole area would have been completely livable,
but we existed for hundreds of thousands of years ago. And there's the other
huge part of this is cataclysm, right, the younger, driest cataclysm.
This we know there was just an absolute civilization ending event that occurred only thirteen
thousand years ago. It changed the surface of the earth, that rose sea
levels four hundred feet, completely basically destroyed the world. And we've built our
world on the remains of the old world, and this should be all these
things should be factoring into this story of history, but they're generally ignored.
And this is all new evidence that's turned up in the last twenty years,
and I hope that someday soon it'll have a significant effect on that story of
history. But yeah, at some point that it's going to become an I
have a whelming amount of evidence and we just need to re examine this idea
that where the only advanced civilization to have ever existed. I guess is Ben
van Kirkwick. He is from Uncharted X And as we close, Chris Dunn,
in his most recent book, believes that the people who built the pyramid
this is the Kufu Pyramid and Serpieme and some of the anomalies were Earth based
scientists, and he defines that as using Earth's natural geomagnetic fields. You know
light sound when Earth, you know birth Earth based compositions. What do you
say, you say, that's close or it looks like whoever were? These
people were not into nuclear energy? Obviously we would see their reactors, but
they were what to you, what do you say, well, how did
they evolve? Well? I think that earth based scientist is a very good
one. It's very apt they whoever did this work, I mean, they
certainly seemed capable of working in this material in a much easier fashion than we
would find it today. It could we build the Great Pyramid again, Yes,
I think we could, but it would be so astronomically expensive that nobody's
got the stomach or the budget to do it. They were. And if
you're going to build in its like I do like the idea, if you
actually extend technology out far enough, it's like, let's project our technology today
a little bit like and go, all right, so we make spaceships today,
and we're concerned we use lightweight composite materials, titanium and all these other
advanced alloys because we need them to be light and strong because we've got to
overcome gravity and get out of the gravity. Well, but if you extend
technology far enough and you say, well, eventually, you know, you
gain control over those fundamental forces of nature, gravity itself. What does a
spaceship start to look like if that, if those things are no longer a
concern for you, Well, spaceships might start to look like a small planet
or a moon something that has its own gravity, so it contains its own
atmosphere even like that's it's that's it's just projecting science out there. And if
so, if you if you don't, if you have no need to use
advanced alloys or metals in some of your construction projects. And the best material
we have available on this planet least is stone, granite, things like that,
they'd last forever. It's you can't, you know it's it's it's extremely
sturdy and nothing lasts longer than it. Like it's it's literally you know that
most of the hardiest, strongest material you could build with, and and the
evidence is right there that that's what happened. So yeah, I suspect that
whoever did this stuff had the ability to work in that material in a much
easier fashion than we find today. And I think that's only only achievable through
the use of probably advanced sciences and uh and technology that we don't yet understand.
And I always find it a little bit arrogant potentially to suggest that everything
from the past it has to be a subset of what we know. We
tend to look at the past as this subset of everything that we know.
But all you have to do is look at the last fifty years to know
that, Okay, technology is moving forward. We're going to know more about
fundamental sciences and technology in ten years and one hundred years and a thousand years
than we do now. And from that you can say that there are totally
there are whole realms of science and technology that we have no clue about.
Like we're only just starting to explore some of these realms now, resonance and
frequency and vibrations and things like this. So what if they had the ability
to control some of those things. I think it's a case of looking at
it with an open mind. I really do believe that there was some science
and technology involved in what we're looking at. I think a lot of the
stuff we're looking at was functional. It's we just lack the context to understand
it. It's a similar idea to say, take an iPhone back in time.
It's one hundred years ago or a thousand years ago. I mean that
it's just going to look like a shiny piece of glass to those people.
But you and I know what a touchscreen is, or a cell phone,
camera and microphone, the Internet, all these Wi Fi signals, So we
have the context to look at it and understand its capabilities. But without that
context, it just looks like a shiny piece of glass or a piece of
rock. Maybe we're in a similar situation when we're looking at some of these
complex stone artifacts and these weird alignments of structures that we see at places like
Abusir and whatnot. And yeah, I applaud Chris. I love his new
book, The Tesla Connection as well, because it explores the possibility that the
pyramid might be an electron harvester, and that's all based on new science that's
come out of NASA in the last couple of years, some incredible new work.
It's highly recommended read for anyone out there looking for something to blow your
mind. But yeah, I think we just need to approach this with an
open mind. If we can do that and we can use our technology to
its limits to investigate this sort of stuff, we might actually end up learning
something. I'm curious. We're about ready to close here, but I've been
to Egypt enough times to realize that there is some form of a cover up
going on by the officials. And I say that not as a conspiracy theorist,
because I don't care about that, but I've had people on the show,
and in fact, we have an engineer coming on in a couple of
weeks who has written a very important white paper on the ground penetrating radar that
he has done on the Giza Plateau. It is an underground lethra of canals,
tunnels and rooms, and people like Zahi Owas have known about it.
They don't talk about it. It's the evidence is everywhere, and we see
this all through Egypt. It's like, why aren't we getting the details?
Why are we being pushed back into the dark age. Yeah, I don't
know why. I mean, I suspect it's a similar story to what we
talked about before, where it's sort of protecting positions of authority and whatnot.
There's certainly a lot that happens there that we don't know anything about. I've
heard a lot of stories and rumors about this too. I did an investigation
into all of the works you talk about grand penetrating radar. I mean,
there's been at at least two studies that I know of, Robert Shock and
John Anthony West, and then later during the shore expedition in the mid nineties
That'sahi was involved in at least two of these are using grand penetrating radar as
well as other seismic techniques that mapped out chambers and tunnels beneath the Sphinx.
I mean, one hundred percent it's there, and I haven't heard about I'm
very interested. I'm going to definitely tune into your next episode because I want
to hear about any further GPR studies that have been done there. But yeah,
one hundred percent, there's been stuff done. I mean there's a long
history of excavations and drilling at the Sphinx. That's secret. It's been going
on since the seventies. This is you know, it's a UAS and the
Edgar Casey Foundation. I mean, he's been enabling them to go look for
the Hall of Records. Literally, their stated goal is to find Atlantis and
the Hall of Records. He's been enabling them to do that since the seventies.
And there's been four or five different drilling experiments that have happened. There
only one that's been publicly acknowledged, which was supposedly to look at for groundwater
and the quality of the bedrock, and that was done at the body of
the Sphinx, not at the pause, but yeah. I mean it's there's
a ton that goes on that we don't know about. And I see the
evidence for every time I going to the Great Pyramid, there's things happening in
there. They're doing all sorts of work. They're up in the relieving chambers
above the King's Chamber at the moment doing who knows what. I suspect they're
drilling and trying to find that big void that's shown to exist through that.
So they're doing that when you were just there, Let's say they've definitely been
up there. So I was there last year as well, in October November,
and I saw a I saw a cable like this, power cable running
up. So the entrance to those relieving chambers is in the top left corner
of the Grand Gallery. It's way up in the corner, but there's a
cable running up in there, power cable. And then this last time,
there's the ladder that they were using to get in and out of there was
strapped to the rails in the Grand Gallery. I asked the guy, Hey,
can we get this ladder out and go up in there? No,
no, no, you can't do that, but I tried. I really
want I'm like, let me in there, bro, I want to see
what's up there. But yeah, this stuff happens. I don't know why.
I mean, honestly, even in the last trip, which was like
six weeks, I went to sites, I went like, Abby grew up.
Great example they had the first trip was there they had excavated the floor.
They've been excavating at that site, and they had dug up the floor
and there was an archaeologist there's walking around taking photos of it. And then
and then a month later when I came back on the second tour, they'd
reburied it all. It's just like, okay, so where's that data?
Is that ever going to be publicly available? I mean who, I mean,
it's just this. I think this sort of stuff happens all the time.
I know it does, and it's just it's just crazy that we just
don't they don't publish it. My big frustration is is a hath Or temple
where we now know that there is an earlier temple underneath, right, and
the authorities will not do ground penetrating radar anywhere near that, And I'm like,
why, wh what's your story? I'm the same, I'm like why
hasn't someone maybe this guy has that you're going to talk to a But why
hasn't someone dragged a GPR so I up and down the causeway of the Middle
Pyramid complex. I mean you go down the Asar shaft, it's three levels
deep, it's one hundred and fifty feet down. There literally passages going up
and down the causeway beneath there that we've never explored. According to Zahi,
they've never explored. You know, for sure, there's there's passages and rooms
and chambers. I just can't tell. There's a like a world to discover
and we're just still working on. Instead of saying flat out there's no tunnels,
there's nothing underneath the sphinx. Well, I mean it's like, come
on, guy, who's who's peeing you off? Dude? It gets it
gets him? What he just lasting, I'll says that is he in the
nineties as part of this the Shaw Expedition. So this is all so connected
to the edgu Casey Foundation. Yeah, and he made an announcement in the
Egyptian papers. It was in Arabic, but he said, hey, we've
made a momentous discovery. It's going to change everything we think we know about
the history of civilization, and then nothing. He never said another word about
it, and shortly after that he changed his tune entirely. And he's been
a champion of what you would call the standard model. And you know,
we noticed Sphinx is related to Kafra, and it's all the Egyptians did it.
It's not old at all. But he literally said that they'd made this
momentous discovery and then it was just like, never another word said about it.
It's just And this was right around the time of the show expedition,
which was he granted those guys, the Ari people, Joseph saw Joseph Jehodah
Boris said, a five year unlimited permit to do whatever they wanted on the
giar A plateau. And there wasn't a single archaeologist amongst them. And they
did stuff, and I Boris aid, and these guys went on art bell
and you can dig up some of the interesting things they said about it.
But yeah, they did stuff in the Great Pyramid, up and down the
causeway at the Spheing, So we're doing stuff all over the place. Nobody
knows what happened or what they found. Ben we could talk about this forever.
It's a fascinating subject and I really appreciate your time. What day at
the Cosmic Semmino are you speaking and can you give us the title of your
talk? Yes, it's June fifteenth and sixteenth. I believe I'm speaking on
the sixteenth from the agenda that I saw Sunday, it's Sunday. Yeah,
I'll be on the main stage. I am going to be talking about where
I think the opportunities are for future discovery. I think there's a bright future
ahead of us in terms of possibilities for future works like where is this going?
And I also would like to talk about some of the other forms of
technology and how they relate to the Pyramids. So it's like I think there's
a whole story around the two drills and then how they connect to the pyramids
and how all that technology actually is. I think that that's going to be
what I get into. I think Adam is talking there also, he's going
to talk about the visis. So I wasn't going to do the vises at
this I heard the rumor that somebody was going to bring some one or two
pieces to show off I have. Yeah, maybe Adam, Maybe Adam will
bring his vice. I don't know if and if Matt turns up he might
bring his that'd be wonderful. Yeah, but that's I'm looking forward to that.
That's yeah, Ashville fifteenth and sixteenth. All right. So for more
information and information on what Ben's talking about, as well as the others,
you can go to Cosmicsummit dot com, Forward slash Earth Ancients and you can
buy your tickets. If you can get there in person, that's great.
But they will be doing streaming and I got to tell you, fifty bucks
for two days is outrageous, so check that out. Hey, Ben,
really a pleasure speaking with you, and love what you're doing. And keep
it up man, you run. Yes, Thanks, thanks Cliff. Great
great speaking with h Man. The production on his YouTube channel Uncharted X is
excellent and he edits them beautifully and that's why he's got a pretty concise following.
And you know, it's a great channel to really see some of these
amazing sites. Years ago he was with Graham and Peru. He goes through
some of the big sites there. He's all over Egypt, Mexico and a
lot of other places too. So good to have met him, Good to
have him on the program. I hope, I hope you enjoyed that as
always. Catch him and the other presenters, the A listers, and there's
you know, I think in total there's maybe twenty five, maybe twenty speakers
in total. So your streaming media fee of fifty bucks is great. The
other thing I didn't mention is the fact that you get to keep the files
when you pay for the streaming media for the Cosmic Summit conference, you get
the live feed. But if you don't, if you're not able to catch
you know, everybody at the time because you're living in a different country or
a different time zone, you can just store it and come back to it.
It's yours to keep. For more information on streaming or to get yourself
there live, go to Cosmicsummit dot com, Forward slash Earth Ancients. You
can see everything there. We'll be there in heart and soul. I'll be
traveling and just recently come back, so I can't get to that one this
year, but I plan to go to the twenty twenty five and see the
lineup. Then, great conference, good people. We'll speak to the producer
next week, that's George how and we will be featuring a few of the
main people in the future. We're gonna speak with grand old Carlson, Pravene
Mohan No. I haven't spoken to Pravene in probably four years, and I
miss chatting with him. He's having I mean, he's got so much to
cover. And you know, it's funny because Hugh Newman was just in Bangalore,
India and was with Provene and covered some of the temples there. But
you know, there's so much to see there, and in the back of
my mind, I'm thinking, Okay, tour time, tour time, tour
time. So okay, we'll see what happens. Anyhow, check it out,
great lineup, fantastic price, streaming, live conference material, you get
to keep it. For more information, go to Cosmic Summit dot com.
Forward Slash Earth Agents. Hey, if you're enjoying Earth Answers, please consider
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Slash Earth Ancient. All right, that's it for this week. I want
to thank my guest today, Ben van Kirkhoick, coming to us from northern
California. As always, the team of Gil Tour, Mark Foster and everyone
who makes this thing happen. You guys rock all right, take care of
you well and we will talk to you next time. Man