“Man Fears Time – but Time Fears the Pyramids” (Egyptian Proverb) 

Everyone knows of the Egyptian pyramids, especially the famous Giza trio on the outskirts of Cairo, less known is that every ancient civilisation built monumental pyramids, most of which were “stepped” and flat-topped.  The best known are the “ziggurats” of Mesopotamia, those of Mexico and other parts of Central and South America.  The Chinese province of Shaanxi has about 250 which, for some reason, the Chinese government prohibits access to. Ancient cultures of India, Indonesia, and Cambodia built enormous temples with shapes clearly influenced by pyramids.  Less well-known are some intriguingly similar small pyramids in the Canary Islands, Sicily, and Mauritius.  Nobody knows who built them, maybe Phoenicians..?   Recently, through the research of Graham Hancock and other intrepid seekers of lost civilisations, compelling evidence of even more ancient pyramids have been located – some of which could possibly be more than 10,000 years old.    

Why did so many ancient civilisations erect pyramids..?  

And WHY PYRAMIDS..?  

The conventional answer is that the ruling classes of those ancient peoples built these giant monuments as tombs in an attempt to live on for eternity.  They therefore needed a structure they hoped would survive for thousands of years, one which natural and human forces could not easily destroy.  Structural engineers affirm that the pyramidal design distributes its weight most efficiently and, being stronger and more stable than other shapes, is more likely to survive the rigours of time, storms, earthquakes, etc.  

 And what are we to make of this mysterious Biblical passage….?  

 

Recently deciphered text from the Dead Sea Scrolls seem to suggest that Noah’s Ark was PYRAMID-shaped..!   Was it a pyramid-shaped “boat”, if that is possible, or an actual pyramid as depicted by Lorenzo Ghiberti on his famous “Doors of Paradise” in Florence?   So lets delve into speculation about another possible reason for this ancient obsession with pyramid-building.  

As I have said before….

2D OBeCITIES ARE AN UNWORTHY EXEMPLAR OF OUR CIVILISATION

The idea of cities composed of countless thousands of mostly mediocre and uninspiring buildings of many different shapes, sizes and purposes – scattered widely over vast ill-defined areas and totally lacking efficiency, esthetics, sustainability, self-sufficiency and defensibility – is an unworthy representation of a technologically advanced civilisation.  

Perhaps there were much earlier civilisations, of which no written or physical record survives, that built pyramidal arcologies..!  Plato (c.400 BC) related the legend of Atlantis, having learnt of it via Solon (c.600 BC) who heard it from Egyptian priests.  Atlantis was said to have been submerged in a great cataclysm 9,000 years before Solon’s time, i.e., about 9600BC, which co-incidentally (?) was when sea levels rose dramatically at the end of the last ice age.  Its a very compelling legend which may well be based on fact.   Perhaps the ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians found artefacts and written records (copies of copies) since lost, just as modern archaeologists have re-discovered artefacts and records of Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia?  Could those much earlier civilisations have been advanced enough to build Pyramidal Cities?   If a great civilisation had existed 12,000 years ago, it would be no surprise if all memory of it – bar a faint glimmer – had been lost by the time of the Old Kingdom of Ancient Egypt which arose 7,000 years later..!

It has been said that only about 1% of ancient Greek and Roman writings of just 2000-2500 years ago have survived, which makes one wonder what was in the 99% which has been lost..?  And this loss of 99% of our knowledge happened despite the (more or less) continuous civilisational thread since the Romans.  Before about 500 BC almost no written records have survived.    

The Ancients may have erected pyramids as a way of memorialising and paying homage to a much admired lost civilisation.