Re: mind blowing documentary about ancient egypt
Honestly, I got so bored with this documentary that I could not get past 15 parts or so. I am a little embarassed about having negative opinions, so I did not write anything.
For one thing, the idea of cycles is not in and of itself novel. Mainstream scientists have been acquainted with this idea for a long time, but for various reasons that others can discuss better then me, the idea that these cycles are gentle and uniform has dominated science. There is a massive amount of evidence that some of these cycles are sudden and catastrophic. The documentary does not really discuss at all this distinction that I noticed. And as a side note... This is is certainly a point of departure from official science for a serious truth seeker because it is indicative of the schizoid, maybe I should say ponerized, nature of modern culture that there can be this massive body of evidence of the catastophic nature of geological history that is just simply ignored or even suppressed.
There were these odd little contradictions too that would occur within like 2 minutes of each other that bothered me. For example, they made a big deal out of saying that we can not understand the Egyptians if we are thinking about them with our own ideas of how religion and science should look, but then the next few minutes are spent talking about ancient Egyptian spiritual beliefs through the lens of what seemed to be new age philosophy. Somewhere in this section they state that the ancient Egyptians had a matriarchal society and that in such a society the genders would be equal, then within 2-5 minutes, they state that women had a higher status in ancient Egypt according to artwork and the like. This implies either their ideas of a practical matriarchy are wrong or their conclusions about the Egyptians are wrong.
Another example of mistranslating egyptian artwork because of our own ideas of science is the depiction of an airplane and a helicopter in the egyptian relief sculptures. Why would a science that is so radically different from ours as to create the pyramids in the first place create airplanes and helicopters that would be recognizable as such to us? Sure... Aerodynamics would be the same for them as us, but maybe they had different ways of satisfying the role that these tools satisfy.
I did think the discussion of the underground waterways and their possible connection to the functions of the pyramids was pretty interesting. I thought it was a nice lateral confirmation of the work by that English guy who experimented heavily with pendulums. Man... I can't remember his name, but Laura has referenced him a few times. Anybody know who I am talking about?
An interesting thing was the mention of the 3 pharaohs who were scratched out of history. Maybe this wave of Egyptians had their own Kennedys!
Another thing that bugged me was how everybody in the documentary was just kind of lumped together as if everybody referenced had ideas of the same worth. We have a geologist who says that the water erosion marks on the sphinx tell a very different story about its age. We get maybe 30 seconds of him. THAT would be interesting to hear a little more about. Then we get tons of commentary from the Egyptian guy who makes no effort to express which of his ideas are lore passed to him directly from the elders of his tribe, which are ideas picked up from his training as an archaeologist, and which are ideas that represent a fusion of the two. On top of this, they mention Schwaller de Lubicz. For more on him...
http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/schwaller_de_lubicz_1.htm
Plus, Laura uses the idea in her work that the people who built the pyramids were not the same as the people who lived there later but are called the ancient Egyptians. If this is true, it is another thing that changes everything about trying to figure out the mysteries of the pyramids.
I think I am going to shut up now. For me, if I am going to define what it was like to read SHOTW as mind-blowing, then this documentary was really not that for me. However, it might be a decent introduction to some segment of the population to the idea that history is radically different from what popular culture believes it to be.