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April 30, 2018 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:01:58
Edition 344 - Dr Paul Harrison

This time a fresh take on Egyptology from UK based Egyptologist Dr Paul Harrison...

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Return of the Unexplained.
Well, here we are at the first show of May, and the weather has been pretty good over the last week or so, so, you know, that's not bad at all.
It means we're heading in the right direction here, which is bad news, I know, in the southern hemisphere because it's going to be getting colder for you, but the sun will come back.
Let us have it for a bit, please.
So, thank you very much for all of your emails, by the way.
You've sent me some lovely emails and some nice stories.
Can I ask, and I know this is beginning to sound a little bit like Art Bell, back in the days where he used to say, can you limit your faxes to, I think, was it one sheet of A4 or something like that?
When you send me your stories, if you can try and keep them as short as you can, I mean, if it's not possible, that's cool with me.
But I do read every email, and it just makes it easier for me to digest things.
Thank you for that.
I'm not going to do loads of shout-outs this time.
I might actually do a special shout-out show sometime soon.
But I just want to say hello to Roy, Amanda in BC Canada.
Thank you for giving me food for thought with your email.
Adam in Missouri says, I want to send you a message about Mark Sargent and the Flat Earth.
I never have listened to the Flat Earth people before.
It seems like a ridiculous idea, but I thought Mark Sargent did a great job of laying out his point of view.
Well, a lot of you saying that, but a lot of you saying, who we, and there are better people you could have spoken to.
So you pays your money and you takes your choice.
Howard Storm has generated quite a bit of reaction too.
Some people saying that they found him, as I did, enormously interesting.
Other people saying, as I suggested in the show, might this have been a dream?
Some of you taking exception to the religious aspects of this, which we did discuss in the show, but certainly generating conversation.
And that's great.
Please keep your emails coming.
Go to the website, theunexplained.tv, and you can follow the link from there and send me a message.
And on the subject of the website, designed and created by Adam from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, Adam has been working really hard lately on building the new website.
And the website is ready.
It is in beta form.
I've written the copy for it, and it should give me more control.
So I'll be able, I hope, to upload my own shows.
I'm a little behind the curve in this knowledge, but I'm going to learn.
Now, you know, this is a free podcast, of course, a free show.
And we ask, if possible, for donations to it.
But it's not like these subscription shows, some of which generate vast amounts of money.
So, you know, they can have all the bells and whistles and everything.
I've tried to keep, as far as I could up to now, this show free.
So we can sometimes move a little more slowly.
And, you know, Adam has been very kind to me by doing the things that he's done.
But he's a busy man these days, traveling the world and doing important internet stuff because he's talented, very.
But we will get the new site up and running, I promise.
And, you know, you'll see it soon.
So that's that.
And that's in response to Gene from Nova Scotia, regular emailer.
So Gene, thank you for your email, Gene Keys.
And please accept what I say about the website because that's how it is at the moment.
But, you know, we're working on it.
Thank you very much for all of your support and the lovely things that you say about the show.
Please believe me that I see every email and I don't believe I'm God's gift to broadcasting.
So I need your suggestions and thoughts about the show whenever you want to give it.
On this edition, somebody I think you're going to find very, very interesting.
He is a guy who works in academia, but he has a great way about him.
His name is Paul Harrison, and he is based at University College London in the UK.
His subject is Egyptology, which has an eternal fascination for me.
I think you're going to like him.
So let's get to him.
In London, across the other side of this great city, I'm on one side of it.
He's on the other side.
Paul Harrison, on the subject of Egyptology, thank you very much for coming on The Unexplained.
Oh, thank you for having me.
So Paul, I discovered you when I was in a little bit of downtime on a Saturday night.
In fact, I think I probably had a code like the one you told me before we started recording you've got now.
So I was just loafing back and I was flipping through the TV channels and I found on a digital channel a program that I think was called Ancient Megastructures.
And you were featured in this thing.
But these programs are always very speedily intercut.
So we didn't get very much of you.
And I thought, this guy's so fascinating and he's British.
I want to get him on my show, you know?
So that's why we made this arrangement.
And thank you for doing it.
My pleasure.
My pleasure.
Okay.
Talk to me about you then, because you are getting quite a reputation for yourself.
You're not afraid to use the media to popularize the stuff that you talk about.
But you seem to have a variety of takes on the subject of Egyptology, the iconography, the symbology of it.
You seem to be interested in all of it.
Yeah, well, my interest in Egyptology started in that kind of pre-millennial period when actually it was alternative archaeology and Egyptology that kind of drew me in.
I'd always been, I'd always had an interest in archaeology and Egyptology, but I think it was the fuhrah that surrounded the Giza Plateau at the time.
I just found it a really fascinating mystery, so to speak.
And becoming involved with that and reading lots of books and going to conferences, I realized somewhere along the line that I actually wanted to study Egyptology proper.
So I did what I could to get myself onto a foundation year at UCL.
And I had to convert because I'd originally come from a background of earth sciences and environmental studies.
And eventually I took a master's degree and a PhD at UCL and got into the more academic side of academia while still keeping that interest in everything that had become so-called fringe.
And I decided I wanted to kind of study some of the things that had been denoted as fringe from within academia itself to try and bring a new critical perspective to the things I'd found so fascinating before I'd entered academia.
Now, I was going to ask you, is that a difficult thing to do within academia?
But I know University College London and it is a very forward-thinking institution.
So I wouldn't think, but you can Tell me better, whether they, I wouldn't think that they would ever have had a problem with any of the fields you've gone into.
To be honest, I was lucky to be where I was, and I had very supportive supervisors and academic staff around me who, even when they didn't necessarily have a familiarity with or understand some of the areas I wanted to go into, encouraged me to do so anyway.
So I think I was really lucky to have the experience I had at UCL.
So how did your take on your fields of investigation, on your research, differ from what we might have called, I don't even think the term applies now, but it would have applied 10 or 15 years ago, the orthodox?
Well, that's a really good question because I think you raise a really interesting point there.
And that's, you know, how we define what Egyptology is and how Egyptology as a field defines its boundaries.
So one of the things that I became fascinated with when I was studying the material that eventually became the book Profane Egyptologists was there were these movements on the outside, so to speak, of Egyptology that were using the same sets of resources.
These were religious movements and revival and reconstructionist movements such as Kemeticism or Kemetology.
And whilst I was studying those movements, I realized, well, there's an awful lot of shared resources here.
And actually, these guys have a very kind of quote-unquote academic approach to their material.
So they're using things like primary Egyptian sources, ancient hieroglyphic texts, doing their own translations, looking at Egyptological material and using those to help them make more accurate interpretations in order to reconstruct or revive a authentic version of ancient Egyptian religion in the modern day.
And this really got me thinking about, well, how does the field define orthodoxy?
What is the limit beyond which, you know, if we step beyond this limit, we become fringe or alternative?
Like, how do we set up those boundaries around the field?
And that kind of became the second part of the research and eventually the first part of the book where I'm breaking down, you know, what is the orthodoxy and what is the academy and how do we understand its limits?
Well, I'm a little older than you, and I, as a small child, was aware of the Tutankhamun exhibition in London, and that's what got me interested in ancient Egypt and its mysteries.
But it does seem to me, as I think you were just implying, Paul, that there was one way of looking at ancient Egypt that academia had.
And until very recently, and people like yourself, it was not really willing to push beyond the boundaries of that.
Everybody seemed to more or less agree.
And it was, you know, when we were being taught about this in schools, it was just it was an ancient, ancient place.
It was yet another civilization that had been here and died out.
They had some pretty cool stuff and they had their own way of writing and how did they build those pyramids?
And that was about it.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it's fair to say that there have been, should we call them, kind of normatizing or normalizing forces within Egyptology historically.
And I think there has been, like, I'm not into creating these straw man ideas that, you know, that there is a reactionary orthodox archaeology and there is a heroic alternative truth seeker.
I think those are kind of ideologically contentious, but there definitely have been forces within academia which have kind of been, shall we say, I'm just grasping for the word, sorry, that have made the trends of the discipline act a certain way, research certain things and not step beyond certain boundaries.
And I think there's been a real change, certainly like you say, in the last 10 to 15 years.
But equally, there is a tradition within Egyptology itself that's less known about of people going outside the comfort zone.
And the problem is, is that when those works occur, they tend to get sidelined or marginalized, less so these days.
But that was kind of the force of the academy, so to speak, with its secularist kind of ideological cleansing, which was a force unto itself.
And when you, I love that phrase, secular ideological cleansing.
In other words, trying to make everybody sing from the same hymn sheet.
There's another religious reference.
Yeah, yeah, something like that.
I mean, again, you know, I don't want to paint with too broad a strokes.
What I'm talking about are trends rather than, you know, hard rules.
But there's definitely been a loosening of the boundaries of the discipline lately, whilst kind of paradoxically at the same time, Egyptology is moving more towards acting or conceiving of itself as a hard science using things like forensics or mummies.
And, you know, these are becoming popular notions which Egyptology is trying to keep up with in order to stay relevant in some ways.
So how do you think things have progressed then to where you're at now from the days, was it in the 1930s, maybe just slightly before that?
I think it was the 30s when Howard Carter opened up the tomb of Tutankhamun.
Right.
I mean, what we're looking at here is a discipline that's come out of the Napoleonic Expedition.
So we're looking at the late 18th and early 19th century where we had a very particular kind of archaeologist.
And that particular kind of archaeologist during those periods was interested in confirming the stories of the Bible because that's how we knew the ancient Near East at the time.
We knew those stories through two avenues and that was biblical scholar kind of works and classical studies.
Now, of course, a lot of the archaeologists back then, by virtue of having to study for so long, generally came from quite wealthy backgrounds and as such would have had classically, what we call classical education, that is education based around the works of the ancient Greeks.
You would study Latin.
You would come to know the Egyptians through the Greeks, through people like Herodotus.
So when people were going into ancient Egypt During the 19th and early 20th centuries, they were coming at it with a very particular lens through which they viewed Egyptian material.
And unfortunately, that lens was kind of all-encompassing in that it was from a Western, generally Christian perspective, and it processed all of the Egyptian spirituality, it processed all of the Egyptian religion through that biblical and classical lens.
Now, this caused kind of two contradictory positions for Egyptologists, and this is the thing that I think has affected the field as it's gone forward.
The one was that from the Greeks, we'd been told that Egypt was this fountainhead of knowledge, the birthplace of all wisdom, this amazing place with this fully developed sciences and mathematics and such and such.
And the Greeks themselves had a habit of lending authority to their own works by claiming that it had a connection to more ancient sources.
And nothing was more authoritative or more ancient than Egypt.
So the Greeks would say that their work had come from Egypt or been inspired from Egypt.
And this, of course, distorted the lens that we viewed the Egyptians through.
At the same time, of course, there was a, shall we call it, a sector of biblical archaeology which thought that we would find something that was akin to the primordial version of the Bible in Egyptian spiritual and religious writings.
That's kind of what they were looking for and half what they were expecting.
And by the time that Adolf Verman and Massbrow had started translating some of these texts based on the work of Champollion and the Rosetta Stone, we found that that wasn't the case at all.
And it was actually much more much more akin to a kind of zen of the Egyptian desert than it was any form of Western understanding of religion or religiosity.
And so it got dismissed.
And these archaeologists and Egyptologists who, you know, I'm not going to say they didn't do valuable work, they absolutely did, but there were certain aspects of Egyptian culture and Egyptian spirituality and identity, which were just passed over or brushed aside because they weren't understood based on the ideology of the time.
So we went out there with a set of prophecies from the West, and we expected the East to fulfill those prophecies, and we didn't look beyond that too much.
Exactly.
And when it didn't fulfill those expectations, there was kind of a crestfallenness.
There was kind of a disappointment with Egypt that it barely justified the work that it took to disentangle those texts.
So we were left in this peculiar position where there was an awful lot of curiosity about Egypt from the general public.
And people were doing things like, you know, ordering their own mummy powder, grinding up.
People would go out there, get these unscrupulous people, would go out there and they would get mummies and cadavers.
They would grind them into powder with God knows what else.
And then they would sell these as medicines and tinctures and, you know, this kind of 19th century versions of Viagra, if you will, and Aphrodisiacs.
And people had this belief that consuming ancient Egyptian bodies would somehow infer them with some kind of potency.
So there was a great general interest.
But at the same time, in the academy and in the elite, there was a disappointment with Egypt.
It had fallen from grace for quite some time because it didn't provide the answers they were looking for.
But perhaps we were not looking for the clues correctly.
Well, absolutely.
Yeah, I mean, what was happening was we were brushing aside evidence that as we've gone back to look at it, there have been new interpretations.
There's a lot of work kind of going into what Egyptian religious material meant and how we're supposed to understand that and how we're supposed to understand their wisdom literature.
And as we get deeper into it and try and understand it on its own terms, that's when its value really starts to shine through.
That's a difficult thing to do then.
How are we able to do that?
And how are you able to do that now in a way that they couldn't?
What tools are you using to be able to decode what we find?
That's a really good question.
And I think what it is, is a mixture of factors.
So I think the first thing is that our cultural lens nowadays is probably we have a different set.
Everyone has a set of biases or preoccupations, but we're more aware of our biases and preoccupations.
So we can try and overcome them by acknowledging them and working around them.
And I think a lot of Egyptologists nowadays are aware of their own quote-unquote positionality.
That's what we call it in anthropology.
So that's one thing we do.
We try and recognize our biases so that they don't affect our interpretation of the work.
Now, that's an aim.
It's never really reached.
There's no such thing as true objectivity in research.
It's a fallacy.
But it's a noble aim, so to speak.
It's something that we shoot for.
I think the other thing that's happening, and this is kind of where I was becoming inspired to talk to the people involved in this, is that we're becoming more open to other views on the past that aren't our own.
So this means we're more cognizant of people who studied Egypt before us.
There is a tradition of Egyptian or Arabic Egyptology that went ignored for several centuries, which we've become more cogent of and has led to some valuable insights.
And then in my own work and in the research that I've been doing, I'm trying to engage with people who are actually engaging with the material themselves.
So for instance, I'm looking at people who are reconstructing Egyptian religion.
Now, that leads to a whole bunch of really fascinating questions for me, such as what types of religion, what types of resources, you know, but equally from an academic perspective, one could say, well, this is actually a type of phenomenology.
And that's to say there's a practice within archaeology where one tries to reconstruct the ancient materials or experience the ancient materials for yourself to try and get a better understanding of how they work in practice and not just in theory.
But these guys Are doing it for real.
They're not one step removed like us.
They believe it and they're engaged with it.
And that to me is, you know, has the potential to yield incredible insights.
What did they believe in terms of their religious beliefs?
Where were they coming from?
The ancient Egyptians themselves.
Well, I think there are as many answers to that as there are ancient Egyptians.
However, if one were to try and paint a picture of the Egyptian religious moment, we have a fairly consistent tradition that stems back several thousand years.
And whilst the names may change in certain periods, the center of religion changed several times to different areas.
And we have different gnomes celebrating different gods in different ways.
Gnomes are districts, not garden gnomes.
And we retain this character of Egyptian religion, though, and there's only really one interruption that is notably different.
And so what we have is a pantheistic religion, which seems to stem from early pre-dynastic times, because we see evidence of that religion pretty much in situ in the very first artifacts and writings, the Nama Palate, Maharakanopolis, you know, places where we see early settlements.
We see the religion is already almost formed.
And when you say it's pantheistic, do you mean that it is all-embracing?
No, pantheistic is in they have a pantheon of gods, polytheistic in a sense, and there are a number of gods, all of whom, the netcha or neturu, all of whom exemplify or personify different aspects of the universe or different concepts, different ideas, if you will.
And these all stem from one creator god, although we shouldn't try to understand that in terms of our one creator god as we understand it in monotheistic religion now, because obviously the framework and the concept is very, very different.
What did they believe?
In a paragraph, the Egyptians believed that there were many gods who represented different aspects of nature and the universe, and that one could appeal to these gods to intercede on their behalf and would possibly one day meet them.
Now, who had access to them depends on where you were in the social strata and what period of history you're in.
But it's a deeply spiritual practice and one gets the impression the more that you study it that it was deeply felt.
And actually, there was a sense of piety there.
And this wasn't just political performance, as has been kind of, you know, said in the past by Egyptologists who believed it was just a political function of the king.
There are a number of, to coin a phrase, inconvenient truths to do with Egyptology, it seems to me.
And one of the biggest of those inconvenient truths for Egyptologists down the years has been the fact that these ancient peoples seem to have a knowledge of space and the stars that we wouldn't have expected them to have.
And that's something that it's been uncomfortable for the Orthodox people to accept up to now.
I'd have to disagree with you on that point.
I don't think that one could say that that's uncomfortable for, well, I don't think there is an Orthodox, to be honest.
I think there are forces which promote orthodoxy within the field.
But I don't think there is a collective of Egyptologists who you could kind of, who are emblematic of that stance, let's say.
Certainly not nowadays.
There may have been at one point.
I think there's a conception that there is a kind of a conservative orthodoxy which is very resistant to change.
And that conception comes from outside of the field.
It's exemplified in the kind of things like I saw you had Dr. Robert Skock on the show talking about the Giza Sphinx aging, things like that.
I mean, these arguments very much exemplify these conceptions.
On the one side, you have this painting of the orthodox reactionary Egyptologist who's very resistant to change and resents being told their own field by quote-unquote outsiders.
And on the other side, you have this conception of the alternative truth seeker who is, you know, kind of heroically following this path towards the truth of the matter, despite what these reactionary chaps say.
And I think both of those concepts are really contentious and actually not accurate of the situation.
They don't represent the reality of the situation at all.
They both seem to be then, from what you're saying, veering off the highway slightly in opposite directions and the highways in between them.
Well, yeah, that's absolutely right.
The truth is always somewhere in the middle of it.
I mean, if we look at, for instance, the argument about the Sphinx, there is a conception that there's no work being done to engage with this idea of redating the Sphinx.
And that isn't true.
There's quite a lot of reading regarding that.
But the problem with having someone come from an outsider field is expertise has its pros and its cons.
So expertise has its pros in that one understands context and where to find information.
Now, information, of course, nowadays is available at the click of a button.
So the actual knowledge of that information itself is arguably less valuable than it once would have been.
But the real strength of expertise is understanding context and being able to look at something and be objective about that.
And the downside of expertise is I think people become crystallized in their ideas about things, no matter which side, quote unquote, or camp they're from.
They get crystallized about these ideas that they have.
And as an expert, I think if you work on something for a very long time, it becomes natural to identify with your knowledge of a subject.
It becomes natural to identify with your position on a subject.
And that, of course, is very dangerous territory because then egos get involved.
And it becomes less about finding out the facts and more about defending your truth.
Why do you think the Sphinx was remodeled as we now understand it was?
Do we understand that?
I mean, the Sphinx itself, like, if we look at Scott's argument without getting too much into detail or derailing, you know, he's using the idea that centered around defining the age of the monument using geology over archaeology.
Fine.
You know, having access to other fields or the expertise of other fields is very, very valuable.
But geology alone isn't sufficient if you're looking at myriad of factors that play a role in both weathering and erosion.
So there's no single cause.
You know, it's a complex number of factors need to be taken into account when looking at something like that.
So when we talk about remodeling, we've got to look at the Sphinx in the context.
And just to disclaimer, I am not a specialist in this, but I've done some reading on it and, you know, the literature is out there.
I can send you links for the doobly-doo if you want to link those up for your listeners.
We need to look at the context of the Sphinx in that the Sphinx temple was excavated from the material around it.
So we need to understand the Sphinx with relation to the temple, with relation to the rest of the Giza Plateau, and the weathering for all those things, and the erosion for all those things.
Now, Scott's argument is in a nutshell that this is evidence of precipitation-induced weathering because it relies on the dissolution of what we call calcite in rainwater.
So rain is coming down, it's dissolving calcite, and this is quite a slow process, and it would require more rain than we've seen at the Giza Plateau for several millennia, which is why he dates it to around 7,000 to 5,000 BC, which to me at the outset seemed like a reasonable argument.
And I should be clear that I came into this thinking, there isn't necessarily a problem with the Sphinx itself being older.
It could have been, you know, it could have been an older structure, perhaps, that was there from a pre-dynastic civilization.
However, when we look at the evidence more closely, and there's lots of back and forth in this, there's a geologist chap called Colin Reeder who dates this to maybe the third or fourth millennium BC himself.
So let's be clear, geologists themselves are not singular or organized or unified on this point.
So even within geology, this is disputed.
And then you have replies from archaeology such as Vanderkroy, who looks at weathering in situ and erosion.
And he says that we'd expect to see things like the same patterns on the Sphinx that consist of the same layers of limestone as we do on the enclosure.
And we don't see even weathering all around that thing.
And so, you know, Skock is dismissing salt weathering and implying that that is not something that happened in the ancient world.
But we need to remember it's complex.
You know, this is a limestone structure.
It contains gypsum.
It contains halcite, and it absorbs moisture from morning mists from the environment, which can still dissolve it and cause, you know, in situ erosion or weathering of the material.
So with humidity, you get evaporation of these salts.
It causes the salts to crystallize.
They create something called hydrostatic pressure.
And that causes a increase in the erosion of the material in the site that doesn't require rainwater.
So this all kind of leads back to an idea of, well, actually, if we apply Occam's razor to an idea like this, and the simplest explanation is probably the correct one, it doesn't require us to redate all of Egyptian civilization to explain why the Sphinx looks like it does.
It doesn't require it at all.
The evidence in situ says that this absolutely could have happened in the 4th dynasty or from since the 4th dynasty when it happened, because we can measure the rate of degradation on that structure now and see that within, I think it was nine months, there was a recent study, this is also in Van der Croy again, I can send you the links.
Within nine months, we saw damage up to two millimeters deep today.
That's in today's environment.
So we can see how over the last 5,000 years, this weathering could have occurred without it having to be 10,000 years.
And on a very basic level, on a punter's kind of level, we have to understand that the weather there may appear to be beautiful, calm and sunny all the time, but it is a constant process that isn't exactly freeze-thaw, but it's boiling hot temperatures during the day.
It is going very cold at night.
Then it is misty in the morning.
And you subject anything to that, and it is going to weather.
It is going to erode.
It will change.
Absolutely right.
Absolutely right.
And we see similar things on, we see similar processes on materials that we've bought out of Egypt, such as the Cleopatra's needles.
If you look at the London needle and the New York needle, they are repaired at the same age.
But if you look at the New York needle, because of the different environmental factors and the different exposure to salt crystals and this kind of thing, it's far more eroded and it would look older than its twin.
So these environmental factors play a big part and it doesn't take a terribly long time for that to happen.
So what you're saying is that we don't necessarily have to throw out everything that we understood.
Certainly in terms of dating, we just need to take a more balanced view.
That's absolutely right.
I think if there's compelling evidence, and I think the value of what Dr. Robert Scock is doing is he's bringing an argument to light which provokes discussion.
And to me, that's really valuable.
And that's why I do what I do.
I want to build bridges and promote discussion.
So this causes us to take another look at the evidence at hand and say, okay, what could this mean?
And if we do look at it objectively and if we do try and take all the facts into account without attaching the weight of scholarly history to it and without attaching our egos to it, maybe we can come to a consensus where, you know, this is about finding out answers for the good of humanity, really.
This shouldn't be about being right or wrong.
This is about going on a journey together and figuring out where we come from.
So I'm all about discussion.
And I think if experts from other areas come in or even non-experts from other areas come in and they've got really interesting insights, we need to listen to those.
We need to examine those and we need to see if those kind of fruitful tensions, if you will, can provide something new.
So you sound to me as if you're of the view, I have a feeling that you are, that there is both knowledge and wisdom, and they are slightly different things existing in the work of ancient Egypt, that if we unlocked it, it would be very beneficial to us If we have a mind open enough to do that?
I think that's a fair comment.
I think that, like you say, knowledge and wisdom are very different things.
And unfortunately, the one doesn't necessarily imply the other, which is often the case in the debates that we see nowadays.
But I think that there is an increasing movement to understand the Egyptians on their own terms, both within the academic establishment and outside of it.
And I particularly saw very strong examples of this in the movements of cometicism, which I studied.
And that's why I wanted to start that conversation.
Okay.
What about the view that the ancient Egyptians were influenced pretty heavily by something above and beyond us, that they weren't just capable by themselves of amazing feats of engineering.
They may have had help from some outside agency.
That always conjures to mind the aliens guy with the hair.
Yes.
I'm sorry to say that whilst I keep an open mind, I do think that is Tosh.
It doesn't require an alien race or a super science race from the future or another galaxy to create the wonders that we see at, say, the Giza Plateau or anywhere in ancient Egypt.
It's my opinion that if you have a large enough workforce on a long enough timeline with strong enough motivation, anything they can put together will from the outside look like magic.
Especially when we're looking, you know, our position, our lives are nothing like theirs.
We do not devote ourselves 16 hours a day or more to our labors, nor do we have, at least for the time being, a tyrant whipping us into place every day.
So it's going to look like magic from the outside.
It's very, I think, easy and convenient to pass off the responsibility for our own achievements and say that someone else must have done it.
But I actually think that's a cop-out personally.
I think human beings were incredibly ingenious, resilient, and resourceful beings in ancient Egypt.
And they were capable of feats that we don't understand now because their civilization was so much harder and you had to adapt to your environment.
And they had the motivation, they had the time, and they had the manpower to do these things.
And the only reason that we don't believe that that's possible now is because we don't apply ourselves the same way necessarily.
But what about their ability, their remarkable ability to cut blocks of stone to a phenomenal accuracy by today's standards, to drill holes in ways that we would find very difficult to do today?
How did this arise?
Are you just saying that it is the application of the human spirit and the human mind in any generation at any time can produce any kind of result?
Well, I mean, if I could respond to that question with another question, if you or I, you know, I'm assuming that like me, you don't necessarily understand rocket science, were to look at that from the eyes of another civilization, we might be tempted to say, well, this is impossible.
But we know that it's possible because we come from the context of that civilization and we understand the context of the science that went into creating those things.
It doesn't require any external influence.
And I think, to be honest, you know, I don't want to cause controversy by labeling these things, but there is a feeling that it is almost anti-human and somewhat racist to assume that ancient Egyptians weren't capable of the feats that they actually did.
It robs them of their own heritage.
And I don't think that's really a very fair thing to do, given how much we know they did accomplish.
Right.
So what we need to do then, the onus is on us by the sounds of it.
We need to understand why they were so clever, rather than come up with pat explanations that suggest that aliens or some other magical power achieved it for them.
I absolutely believe that.
Yes.
I heard you say something fascinating on another interview that you did somewhere else.
I'm sounding like veteran British talk show host Michael Parkinson now.
He used to say that all the time.
I read somewhere that, but I did.
I heard somewhere that you said that the society that we're talking about actually was much more interesting and advanced than we give it credit for in so many ways.
In that, for example, it was… But actually, this was a society, I think you implied, where if somebody came in from outside with specific skills, then that person could be upwardly mobile.
Is that so?
I mean, there's some really interesting literature on the idea of class mobility.
I'm not necessarily an expert on hierarchy.
And one thing we need to bear in mind when we look at ancient Egyptian material is there's something called decorum.
So there are rules of decorum in their representations, which may obscure the truth of what we're looking at, because they are bound by decorum to represent things in certain ways.
However, that being said, the Egyptians, as we understand them, I think a lot of their philosophical outlook and cultural outlook was more advanced than we would necessarily appreciate, given that it was, you know, five, six, almost thousand years ago.
And we see some really progressive, quote unquote, ideas, which, if anything, implies that history is, you know, and progress is non-linear.
We see that gender is treated very differently.
Sexuality is treated quite differently.
And ideas and notions that we are still coming to grips with as a civilization, which is, I mean, if we're talking about ourselves, what, a millennia and a half old?
And we're still coming to grips with these ideas.
And the ancient Egyptians already had, you know, ownership of property and voting rights in certain periods for both genders.
And it's really interesting when you look at an ancient civilization with our own, again, with our own set of cultural assumptions and discover that, oh, this is actually quite interesting.
They didn't have the same ideas about ethnicity or nationality that we do.
You know, if you came into Egypt and you, like you say, you had special skills or what have you, you could become a person of note.
You became Egyptian.
That was what you were.
And even though the Egyptians are sometimes labeled as xenophobic or scared of anything un-Egyptian, the truth is they were very welcoming if you embraced Egyptian culture.
It didn't matter what your nationality was.
It didn't matter what your ethnicity was.
If you embraced Egypt, you were Egyptian and you became part of that.
And that's certainly true the later we go through Egyptian history.
And that's why it becomes such a powerful cultural melting pot by the time of the Late Kingdom and the Ptolemaic period where we see the great, great Greek influx in Alexandria.
And it really was a melting pot.
And I think it's because of those reasons, because they had, in certain instances, and this will change in, you know, by region and time period, we're talking about three to three and a half thousand years of history here.
So one doesn't want to overgeneralize, but certainly more enlightened than we might have expected.
What about the way that our modern culture, over the last, say, 50 years, maybe 100 years or so, has adopted some of the symbology iconography of ancient Egypt because it's kind of cool.
It's almost like wearing a t-shirt, which I used to do when I was a teenager, that would have maybe some foreign logo on it that I didn't understand.
But because I thought it was cool, I wore it.
Right, right.
Yeah.
I mean, that's, like you say, it kind of brings us full circle back to the beginning with the adoption of symbols and symbology.
There are a few theories on this.
And, you know, one of them is that the Egyptians were some of the, or maybe the earliest civilization to truly embody, you know, Jungian archetypes.
That's to say that there are these archetypes that Carl Jung spoke about in the mind that represent certain immutable aspects of human psychology.
And we gravitate to those things naturally because we feel that they represent us on a level somehow or we identify with them somehow.
And I think there's, you know, there's definitely something to be said for the power of Egyptian archetypes and iconography.
I mean, it's something that's managed to stay culturally relevant.
It's something that's still being appropriated to this day.
It's something that's still used in the construction of identity in various different ways, be it ethnic or religious, spiritual.
And, you know, there's definitely something to be said for the power of these icons that they have endured for five millennia or, you know, potentially a little bit longer in some cases.
So, yeah, I mean, absolutely.
We do get the kind of the pop culture use of these resources.
And, you know, you can get quite complex and dive into the works of, you know, John Fiske or Baudrillard or someone and get into literary theory and cultural theory about how these things are provided by dominant cultures and reincorporated by subordinate cultures in this never-ending cycle of symbols that come to mean nothing.
But it almost suggests, doesn't it, that those things speak to us on a level that we don't understand, that is beyond our own conscious understanding, which just doesn't have the breadth or depth.
But nevertheless, they speak to us on a level that somehow within our DNA we might get.
Well, I mean, there's something to be said for the fact that many cultures manifest certain myths.
And if you look at the work of Joseph Campbell, and I'm quite a Campbell fan when it comes down to it, he looks at the way that different cultures have manifested certain stories and certain myths, and that maybe this is the result of the human brain wanting to interact with the universe in certain set ways, because we are pre-programmed in a number of ways.
The human brain is pre-programmed in a number of ways to do certain things, to recognize certain things.
And perhaps mythology is the software that we use to interact with the hardware of the universe, in which case the ancient Egyptians came up with the, shall we say, programming language of that software very early on.
And maybe that's why it's still relevant to us.
What about the mysteries and complexities of what we find?
And I know we've discussed about how we don't understand them when we need to work harder to understand them.
But there are people who say there are symbols that appear to be almost extraterrestrial in origin.
If you go inside the pyramids, they are laid out in a way that is so staggeringly complex that we can't quite understand why that would be.
And of course, the Daily Mail newspaper here and other papers reporting within the last six months this great void within the great pyramid of Giza.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, speaking quickly on new voids, I mean, this could be anything from a natural cavity to an ancient wine cellar.
And I think until we have more information, speculation should probably stop there.
But why is it that we are so slow in discovering these things?
I mean, that's a complex question.
That comes down to the pragmatic nature of research and the practicalities of things like permissions and excavation permits and the very fact that Egypt itself has gone through major overhaul, you know, politically and culturally and structurally over the past six or seven years, you know, since the Arab Spring.
So that's one side of it.
On the other side of it, we have the idea of these mysteries.
And again, I think this comes back to the notion of this emerging movement now to try and understand the Egyptians and their culture on their own terms without bringing a load of our baggage with us.
And I think that's where we'll find the most fruitful answers to those things.
So trying to understand, for instance, Egyptian religion and spirituality as it was meant to be intended, be that a form of proto-pre-mysticism, and I use that word with caution because it has its own baggage.
We can look at these works and find almost a sense of poetry in them.
You know, there is a beauty and a totally lost my train of thought.
There's a beauty and a certain sense of symmetry to a lot of ancient Egyptian works.
So I think that it also ties into what we were just talking about with the Jungian archetypes and the way that our brains respond to certain symbols.
And that's not something I pretend to understand yet, but I think it could be a really interesting avenue of research.
But all this stuff of, you know, this particular symbol that we see in this particular place, that looks a bit like a spaceship or that looks a bit like an astronaut.
Isn't that us turning around and looking at something and projecting our own preconceptions and desires onto it, though?
I mean, I could, it's like I would liken this to, for instance, the first time someone points out a particular type of tree or car to you, your brain will naturally start to see it everywhere.
And it's the same kind of thing.
You know, we point out the shape of a quote-unquote flying saucer.
Well, first of all, that shape is based on a description that comes from a 1950s air pilot.
And that's all very interesting stuff.
But it doesn't mean that what we're seeing on a wall from 5,000 years ago is actually that thing.
Isn't it more likely, if we're again applying Occam's razor, that the simplest explanation is that that just happens to look like one of those things and we're projecting our own preconceptions and prejudices onto it?
So in other words, it's rather like those photographs that we see occasionally in the newspapers and somebody will say, I found this photograph from 1910, but if you look in the corner, there's a man with a mobile phone there.
Only because we think it's a cell phone.
Yeah, essentially.
We are, our brain has, I mean, if you look at, I find neuroscience really fascinating.
I'm by no means any kind of expert, but I read or heard something recently that said that, you know, 90% of the input that we have is pretty much made up by our brains.
And only 10% of what we see is actually factually accurate.
So if you think about your brain being this incredible mega computer that sits in total darkness all of the time, and the only information that we have is through very basic senses.
And our eyes are interpreting data.
And our brain is then reinterpreting the data from our eyes.
It becomes quite easy to understand once you start looking at that process scientifically that our brains are biased towards making pictures look the way that we understand them so that we can interpret the world accurately and quickly.
This evolved out of a need for survival and it's causing us problems the further we go with regards to making assumptions based on inaccurate data, faulty data.
So do we rule out then completely that there was anything we would regard as magical or special or way beyond the powers that we as human beings believe that we have about these people?
I think you've raised a really interesting question there, and that's something I'd like to dissect a little bit.
To say that there was nothing quote unquote magical about ancient Egypt, I think would be a misnomer because the Egyptians, to the Egyptians, to the Egyptian mindset, magic was as real as any other aspect of their culture.
So magic to them, Hecke, as the name of the god and the name for the practice, was as bound within their religious practices as it was their everyday lives.
So was magic real in an objective third-party sense that we could necessarily make it do the same things for us nowadays?
I couldn't answer that.
That's not my place to say.
Was it real for them?
Absolutely 100%.
And surely that's what matters when we're trying to understand their mindset.
When it comes to studying the way that, and of course this does kind of bleed into a lot of the things I'm studying now with people trying to reconstruct these practices, I hear tell from my participants that, you know, they reconstruct some of these magical rites and they work for them.
Maybe not in a flashbang Harry Potter kind of way, but they see differences in their lives in accordance to their will, which is of course one of the earliest modern definitions of magic.
I think that came from Alastair Crowley.
So was magic real?
It was to the ancient Egyptians.
Should we discount any outside influence?
I don't think we can ever 100% certainty, you know, say that there were no outside influences from anything else.
I think it would be hubris to do so.
However, we have to look at the balance of evidence and the most likely cause.
And the most likely thing is that the Egyptians were perfectly capable of what they did, and they had a very different way of looking at the world than us, and they sometimes drew symbols that looked to us like blank sources, but that doesn't mean that it took a spaceman to build a pyramid.
This may sound like a really stupid question, and I'm sorry if it does, but it's not the first time I've asked a stupid question, so here we go.
Stupid questions are the best questions.
Well, this one is they clearly had so many aspects to them, and I completely understand what you say when you say that we need to not look at them through our lens, which is what we've been doing for so long.
But if they were so smart, why did they die out?
And why are we having now to rediscover what they knew?
Oh, that's a very good question.
And it's a really interesting aspect of what happened.
And that what happened was almost a cultural set of cosmic coincidences that made it very difficult for the Egyptian way of living to survive into the modern age.
And these things were political changes, technological changes, environmental changes.
So, you know, if they were so clever, why did they quote unquote die out?
Well, firstly, one has to question the notion of whether they quote unquote died out.
The people themselves, their descendants, are still in Egypt.
If you go to Egypt, you see a great variety of people of all different shapes and varieties, you know, from north to south.
And they are, an awful lot of them will be at least, descendants of the natives and inhabitants.
What arguably died out was their unique cultural lens on the world and their unique practices.
Now, I think that as we look at how history influenced the end of certain practices, so we can look at the way that, for instance, Constantine decreed Christianity to be the religion, the nation's religion on his deathbed.
That meant that Christianity swept over, monotheism swept over the Roman Empire.
And of course, Egypt was part of the Roman Empire.
And you see that eventually the original Egyptian religion kind of slowly peters out over time, with, I think, the last bastion of ancient Egyptian religion being the temples of Isis at Phile.
That's the Egyptian goddess Isis, nothing to do with the modern, unfortunate terminology.
And that, I think, lasted until about the fifth century, Common Era or AD.
So we see that's a gradual change.
And that change is accompanied by the cultural change of, well, look, you had all these temples, your temples are closing by a political edict, so you've got nowhere to worship like that now.
So within a few generations, of course, those traditions and many of those oral traditions become subjugated.
And it becomes ill-advised to talk about them or practice them, which is why it became so difficult for us to understand them, looking back through all of this, you know, subjugation and repression of polytheism and pantheism after the coming of monotheism.
And that comes in a second wave, of course, when you have the seventh century Islamic occupation.
And that again changed the cultural aspect of Egypt.
And now it's an Islamic country.
So again, that is not something that's going to be compatible with the original Egyptian notions of worship.
So we have these distinct cultural and economic and political pressures, sometimes pressures that meant that your life will be very difficult to live and you may not even be able to live it if you don't convert to these certain religions.
So that's not me criticizing any of these monotheistic religions, just to be clear.
That's just me saying these were distinct political cultural changes at the time and the people living in Egypt had to deal with those in a practical way.
And their practical response was, well, we need to survive.
So we probably should adopt these new customs, adopt these new cultures, and give our children a chance to live in, you know, in our country without having to flee and try and practice our religion elsewhere.
And I think it's just political change, and it doesn't need any more explanation than that.
What do you make?
This is a completely different subject, but it's a subject that fascinates me as it applies to the ancient Egyptians and perhaps other civilizations as well.
The increasing knowledge we seem to be getting, a lot of people are theorizing on this, that ancient civilizations not only were cleverer than we give them credit for today, but were also able to travel much greater distances than we knew heretofore?
Well, I mean, it's an interesting idea, and certainly there is, okay, so if we look at the evidence of travel, there are certain things we can categorize as evidence of travel.
There are certain things we should probably categorize as evidence of trade.
And what we can't do is assume that just because a piece of Egyptian cultural artifact has ended up in Iceland somewhere, that Egyptians got to Iceland.
No, what this means is that there has been some kind of trade route that we need to understand.
And somehow these things have, I'm not saying that there's a lot of Egyptian paraphernalia in Iceland, just an example.
So we need to kind of break apart what we understand about evidence.
Now, that being said, the Egyptians did have seafaring vessels.
We don't necessarily know how much of these were depicted just for ritual use.
We don't, you know, we have a reasonably clear picture on their trade routes in the ancient world and their movements in the ancient world.
It's fair to say that, you know, the types of boats that they had, they were not necessarily sophisticated enough by our understanding of modern seamanship to take them, you know, to the Americas, for instance, or anything like that.
We need to look at the technology and we need to try and understand what the technology would have enabled and line that up with the evidence of what we see.
And that gives us, you know, probably a reasonably accurate picture somewhere in the middle of that.
But no, I mean, we don't...
It's this idea that cultures have to come into contact with other cultures in order to absorb their rituals or understand their, you know, adopt their symbols.
And it's not true.
It's quite an old model within archaeology, we call it cultural diffusionism.
And it was one of the earliest ways that early archaeologists would look at contact between cultures and try to assume that there had been travel to a certain place or influence in a certain place.
Now, the fact of the matter is, you know, an Egyptian wouldn't have had to have gone anywhere near the Persian Empire, for instance, for Egyptian artifacts to end up in Persia because there was trade between two countries.
And what about then, and we're coming to the back end of our conversation, which I have to say, Paul, I found utterly fascinating.
So I hope we can do more on this in the future.
But the idea that the pyramids somehow align with other pyramidal structures in other places, in other parts of the world, and consequently, somehow they must have known each other.
I mean, I remember reading Graham Hancock's Fingerprints of the Gods back in, I think it was about 98, 99, finding that really fascinating.
However, let's look at pyramids in turn.
So a pyramid is basically the easiest way to build up.
If you're going to build upwards in the ancient world, a pyramid is, I'm not saying it's easy by any measure, but that's the most stable way of building upwards.
So we shouldn't necessarily assume just because there are pyramids in different places around the world that there's any contact between them.
But what about the supposed alignment of pyramids around the world with each other?
Well, again, I think when you look at that more closely, you can see where there's aspects of The first is the kind of projection of modern ideas onto the ancient world that we were talking about before, and that definitely plays a part.
And the other thing to bear in mind is that, you know, these people were all kind of looking at the same sky, albeit in different periods in history.
So there doesn't really need to be any contact between them for them to look at that sky and align to certain constellations, surely.
So I think the point that we can take out of this conversation and that I will take away from it is that we must not forget that the human brain has much the same capacity.
So the human brain will come up given enough Time and enough dedication to the task in hand.
And as you said, it was a tough society where people worked hard, then people will come up with amazing ideas.
It doesn't matter which particular generation, which particular era you happen to be in.
And that is something that if we need to take research forward, and I will certainly be bearing in mind from now on, we need to think about it.
Absolutely.
I mean, to me, it comes back down to the simple task, which is not a simple task.
It should be, but it's increasingly complex, of looking at the past on its own terms, looking at cultures in their own contexts.
And just finally, this was something I think that came out of that American documentary that you were on.
It may not have been there, but I think it might have been.
Do you believe that the ancient Egyptians and other ancient people were able to cut stone using sound?
I've actually, I've read about this in a book by Andrew Collins many, many years ago, and I did find the idea really fascinating.
Unfortunately, we don't really have any evidence for it or any accounts that really are compelling in the record for that.
It's possible that there were ways of cutting stone that we haven't figured out yet, and I think it's always wise to keep an open mind.
But I think that the kind of technologies that are implied by these particular lines of inquiry are slightly more sensationalist and perhaps less likely than the fact that, well, maybe they were better with saws or better with water cutting techniques than we previously understood.
Perhaps they understood how to use physics and gravity a little bit better to break stone than we perhaps understand now.
They just had a different perspective on things.
And a lot of their responses to technological problems were really incredibly practical.
So it doesn't really take science fiction in order to do those things.
So the word that I'm coming to the end of this conversation with in my head, I can see it in my mind's eye in big neon letters, is respect.
We need to have more respect for those who went before.
Absolutely.
100%.
Okay, if my listener, and I'm sure my listener will, wants to learn more about where you're coming from and the work that you've done, is there a place online they can go pull?
Yeah, absolutely.
You can generally find me knocking about on Twitter at doc underscore Harrison.
And there's a book out at the moment called Profane Egyptologists, which will be leading into an upcoming podcast where I'll be talking to various different characters from the world of archaeology and outside, most importantly, and having more kind of interesting discussions around these types of topics, hopefully.
I enjoyed this conversation a great deal.
Let's do it again sometime.
Likewise, yeah, it was fantastic.
Thank you.
Paul Harrison, and I think you'll agree with me, he's definitely got to come back on this show because he is fascinating to talk with.
You know, some people are just gifted conversationalists, and he is one of those people, I think.
So I'll put a link to his abode, his online abode, on my website, theunexplained.tv.
More great guests coming soon here on The Unexplained.
Thank you very much to Haley for her assistance with my work.
Haley, you know that I couldn't do this without you.
Thank you to Adam from Creative Hotspot for his work for me, which is and has been for many years utterly invaluable.
And thank you above all to you for listening to this show.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London.
This has been The Unexplained.
And until next, we meet here.
Please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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