Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

Jan. 24, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:03:53

Edition 512 - Robert M Schoch

A catchup with world famous archaeologist Robert M Schoch on the latest findings in Egyptology and the search for civilizations that preceded ours...

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	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 Unexplained.
	As ever, thank you very much for all of your emails, some of you telling me that these podcasts are keeping you going through these uncertain and very odd times.
	Let me tell you, your communications with me are keeping me going too.
	Sometimes I think when you're kind of in isolation, you start to lose a sense of reality?
	I don't know whether I'm slipping that far, but sometimes you lose a sense of connection, that's better.
	And just to know that there are real people beyond my four walls and the areas that I go and exercise in during lockdown is a marvelous boost to me.
	And I think for the reason, very simply, that it tells me that there is going to be a resurgence one day, and we'll be able to go back to something like normality, and we'll be able to travel and do all of the things that we did.
	There's just been a government briefing on the latest state of play with vaccinations and coronavirus, all the rest of it here.
	And I have to say, I listened to the beginning of it, and then I turned it off.
	I think you reach a saturation point with all of this.
	And sometimes, even if you're somebody like me and I've been in the news business all of my life, you just have to swerve it, I think, for a while.
	So that's exactly what I'm doing.
	And I'm going to get immersed in the topic that we're going to discuss on this edition of The Unexplained, a return visit to a man I find endlessly fascinating.
	Robert Schock.
	He's a maverick, I think, a pioneer, a man who was a researcher in and expert on ancient civilizations, in particular Egypt.
	Let me just give you a little bit from his biography here.
	Robert Schock has got a PhD in geology and geophysics from Yale.
	He's been working in Egypt, focusing on the Great Sphinx and Great Pyramid for 31 years, off and on.
	He's a tenured full-time faculty member of the College of General Studies at Boston University.
	And he believes, crucially, that the origins of the Sphinx go back to pre-dynastic times, thousands of years older than we previously thought.
	Now, look, when I was a kid, when you were a kid, we were taught an awful lot of stuff in school.
	And there was always a fascination, especially when I was growing up, because there were things like the traveling Tutankhamun exhibition.
	Fascination in its entirety with ancient Egypt.
	Who were these people?
	What did they know?
	What secrets had they unlocked that maybe we still have to find?
	And how was it that they built the pyramids and they built constructions that venerated people and things that they thought were important?
	How could that be in an era that was before television, that was before all the modern tools, all of the bells and whistles and gadgets and gizmos that we have today?
	As an 11-year-old, 10-year-old, 9-year-old, all of those things used to fascinate me.
	And I would read about them in the annuals, you know, the annuals that kids would get every year in their stocking.
	I'd get a couple from popular TV series, whatever they may be.
	When I was older, maybe a celebrity one or two of those.
	And there'd always be something that was general knowledge, the amazing world out there.
	And it would talk about science and ancient history.
	And I would be, as maybe you were, fascinated by ancient Egypt.
	And I had had the thought over decades, could our knowledge be as completely tied down and as complete as we thought it would be or could be?
	Or is there more to know?
	Well, Robert Schock is one of those people who believes there's a heck of a lot more to know, so we're going to catch up with him in just a moment in the United States.
	Thank you very much for the emails.
	Keep them coming.
	If you want to get in touch with me, go to the website theunexplained.tv.
	Follow the link and you can send me an email from there.
	And thank you to Adam for getting the shows out to you and maintaining the website, theunexplained.tv, by the way.
	And also thank you to Haley for booking the guests, including this one, Robert Schock.
	Like I say, the emails are very good.
	And a lot of people asking me for shout-outs on the radio show and this show.
	And I always endeavor to do those.
	And I do get to see all of the emails, even if I don't get to reply immediately to all of them.
	If you send me an email, by the way, if you could possibly, and I know Art Bell used to say this, and I never have until now, if you could maybe keep it to a couple of paragraphs, that would be fantastic.
	And that would help us all move along, as they say.
	All right, let's get to the United States of America now, returning to Robert Schock, and we're going to talk about ancient civilizations, in particular, ancient Egypt.
	Robert, nice to have you back on my show.
	Thank you.
	How are you getting by?
	Are you able to do your work and your research and everything else?
	It's really difficult, actually, with the pandemic.
	We are on continued, you know, sort of informal lockdown.
	They have curfews, etc.
	And I had planned a lot of research for this past year, 2020, which has now come and gone.
	And everything was shut down because of the pandemic in the sense of couldn't travel, couldn't go overseas.
	I was going to be in Egypt for some of my research, Turkey.
	I was going to be working on filming a documentary with the Organization for the Research of Ancient Cultures, the nonprofit.
	So, yeah, it has really put a damper on things.
	Do you think we'll get to the stage, and I didn't think I'd be asking you this at this stage in our conversation, but do you think we're going to get to the stage where people who do the kind of explorations and excavations that you do might have to do it virtually, that you might have to use drones and robots and do it all by remote control?
	I think that that is becoming more and more popular, should I say that?
	And I don't mean popular in sort of some kind of colloquial sense, but becoming more useful.
	I'll put it that way, using drones, using aerial photography, using satellite imagery.
	And yes, more and more emphasis is being put on that, certainly because of the situation with the current pandemic and it's not getting any better, at least not in the U.S. and from what I follow around the world.
	I mean, you've got major problems in London and the U.K., correct?
	So, yes, it's becoming more utilized.
	I'll put it that way.
	The problem I see is that you have a lot of things that you can detect, and it's very good.
	You can detect things through remote means, through everything from drones to satellite images and between using different types like LIDAR and different types of radar, etc.
	The problem is that it can be misleading.
	It can be very, very misleading.
	So my rule of procedure is that it's fine to use such techniques, but you ultimately have to confirm it with on-the-ground excavations, with on-the-ground exploration.
	And I have seen too many cases over the last 30-plus years where people think they are finding something incredibly exciting.
	In some cases, it is incredibly exciting, but it's not necessarily what they think it is from drones and aerial reconnaissance.
	In some cases, I've seen situations where people got all excited about things, and it turned out to be something totally different.
	In some cases, they thought they found an ancient site.
	It turned out to be a modern military complex.
	In the sense, I remember one case where it was basically an old abandoned bombing area where they had been testing bombs.
	And it gave signatures that you saw from the air that looked like it might be ancient constructions.
	So one has to be very careful.
	The same with underwater.
	And underwater for a long time now, when I say a long time, the last 10 to 20 years, people have used radars, side scan radar, that type of thing, because it's very hard to explore underwater at any depth when you're beyond easily divable depths, say 30 meters or so.
	It gets progressively more difficult, very difficult to excavate at depth underwater.
	So people use these other techniques, but they can give great results in some cases.
	They can give misleading results.
	It's really a matter of interpretation.
	So they have to be, from what you're saying, it sounds like they have to be confirmatory.
	They cannot be the sole and first primary source of information.
	That is right.
	That is right.
	Well, I would say in some cases, what people will do is they will use it as a quick reconnaissance or even not so quick reconnaissance, but you have to get out there on the ground in my assessment, ultimately to look at what's happening.
	I'll give you another example, which is my field.
	I'm a geophysicist in part.
	I have a degree in geology and geophysics.
	So you can use all kinds of ground-penetrating radar.
	You can use low-energy seismic.
	You can use high-energy seismic to look under the surface, to look under the dirt, to look under the rock.
	You can get all kinds of information, but that information is subject to interpretation.
	And a lot of times it's really the interpretation that is a critical issue.
	And in many cases, you can't interpret it clearly, I'll put it that way, without having some actual physical data.
	So with that, you may have to do a couple of drill holes and bore holes to see exactly what you're looking at and what kind of signals they're giving.
	And from that, you can extrapolate.
	But the more you extrapolate, the less first-hand physical knowledge you have, the more iffy I'll put that way it becomes.
	So they're wonderful techniques, but I get frustrated sometimes when both professionals and amateurs try to overdraw conclusions from such, we'll call it remote sensing.
	They're really all versions of remote sensing.
	And before we leave this topic, just another thought occurred to me.
	Doing it remotely would seem to me to allow those who are the gatekeepers of the information, the gatekeepers of the sites.
	You talk about ancient Egypt.
	The Egyptian government has very much control over who gets to see what and when and precisely what they get to see.
	Doing it remotely gives the gatekeepers more control, and that doesn't sound to me like a good thing.
	Yes, yes, exactly.
	You have to really worry about the gatekeepers and who controls the information, who controls the access, the ability, and what agendas they have.
	Because right now, as we all know, there's all kinds of political agendas, religious agendas, economic agendas as to who is getting access to what, who's making money off it, to put it very crudely.
	Tourism, I think of Egypt, and you and I have talked about this before.
	They want tourists to return, which is not super realistic maybe in the current situation.
	So they will control information.
	They will control what comes out, is made public.
	So yeah, there's a lot of issues involved.
	And of course, there's also the gatekeepers who want to control the information because they don't want their cherished theories overturned.
	And you've had an awful lot of that to contend with.
	The word that I used about you at the beginning of this when I was doing a little intro, trying to sum up your life, which is never really a fair thing to do because you can't sum people up in two or three lines.
	But I described you as a maverick, and you have had a lot of opposition.
	That is correct.
	I think that's fair to say.
	Yes, I'm happy with that.
	I'm fine with that title of a maverick.
	I don't know if I'd use that for myself just because I don't want to be egotistical.
	Well, you see, I'm a journalist, so hyperbole comes very naturally to me.
	There you go.
	Well, you're in a position where you can say things truthfully that someone like myself might not want to say about myself or other people.
	But I have had a lot of opposition, and that I think stems from my unwillingness to cave in when I feel that I have evidence that demonstrates whatever.
	For instance, demonstrates that civilization goes back much earlier, starting with my work on the Sphinx and redating the Sphinx some 30 years ago now, which I believe that, yes, it's taken a long time, but we now have lots of confirmatory evidence, so I feel comfortable and good about that.
	And actually, a lot of the things I've been maybe considered a maverick for, I was, this is the way I want to say it, not that I ever did things that I didn't believe in or didn't believe I had evidence for, but now reflecting back, I feel even more strongly about many of the assertions I was making early on.
	Because over time, and I think this is logical, we've built up more evidence demonstrating that, you know, the world is, the worldview we have or had, so let's just say 30 years ago when I began seriously in this business of ancient history,
	studying ancient history, the worldview then really needed to be changed and is changing now as to how we view ancient civilizations and how far back they go, how sophisticated they were, etc.
	But there's been a lot of resistance.
	People don't want to hear new ideas, at least not in academia generally.
	I saw a photograph only last night.
	I was doing a little bit of research and I found an old photograph I'd never seen before of the Sphinx in the process of being uncovered.
	And, you know, look, when I was a kid, the Sphinx was something that stood there.
	The pyramids, they stood there and they were illustrated in kids' annuals and books and that was it.
	I never really thought until I saw this photograph that the Sphinx was something that had to be discovered and it had to be effectively unearthed.
	But that process went on and bit by bit we've learned over the years and the decades more and more about it, yeah?
	Oh, yes, absolutely.
	The Sphinx early on, okay, so let's say it depends on what you want to consider early on, but even as late as the early 20th century, the Sphinx was heavily buried in sand.
	Only the head was sticking up, that type of thing.
	The Sphinx that people think about now really dates from the late 1920s because in the late 1920s through the middle of the 20th century, it was re-excavated, was excavated numerous times before that.
	It was re-excavated.
	It was, quote, repaired, unquote.
	What I mean by that is it was heavily cemented in.
	Gashes in the headdress were filled in with cement.
	When people look at the Sphinx now, under the headdress, there's all kinds of cement and buildup that dates from the 1920s.
	So the image that we have now of the Sphinx is really a composite, and I hate to say it this way, but I think it's truthful.
	It's a composite of a sculpture that was initiated based on my work long before dynastic times.
	In dynastic times, it was heavily repaired and the head was recarved.
	The head was recarved to look like a sphinx.
	Originally, it was a lioness.
	We now have evidence for that.
	And during dynastic times, it was repaired and restored numerous times.
	So we're talking thousands of years ago.
	And then it was allowed to get buried in sand with only the head emerging.
	Herodotus, for instance, doesn't even talk about the Sphinx.
	It was so minor compared to the pyramids and also buried in sand.
	And it wasn't until the 19th century that it was initially uncovered, then allowed to be reburied.
	The Sphinx's body will get covered in sand in just a few decades if it's left alone, just because of the sand that blows in, etc.
	So the final modern excavations were really starting in the 1920s with a lot of restoration.
	So what we look at now is sort of a composite of modern restorations, ancient restorations, ancient recarvings on a much older, older sculpture.
	It's sort of like, to use a quick analogy, Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper, which started to decay very quickly after he painted it, and it's been heavily restored so many times.
	What we're looking at in both cases, his Last Supper and the Sphinx is really a composite of different periods.
	And all those people would have had through history who've done the repairs right up to more modern times, you know, all they have is what they assume should be there.
	When they put something back, they assume that this was the thing that was there.
	And when it comes to their head, then it looks like they got their head completely wrong.
	What I'm fascinated by, before we talk about the obvious question to do with the Sphinx, and that question is what do you think it's for and who do you think built it, before we get to that one.
	Those who did the ancient repairs in dynastic times, they must have realized that this thing was important.
	Why do you think that was?
	Why did they bother to do repairs on it?
	Oh, there's no question in my mind now.
	And I would have had less, and this ties in with what we're talking about, 20 years ago I wouldn't have been so definitive about it.
	Now, I am much more definitive because we have so much more evidence, including inscriptions that go to at least 3000 BC that mention the Sphinx.
	And it was not a Sphinx at that time.
	It was a lioness.
	We now, I think, can document this very well, that the original sculpture was a lioness that represented the goddess Mahit or Mahit.
	We really don't know how to pronounce the ancient Egyptian names people, because they didn't indicate vowels the way we do, so we don't know what the vowels were in particular.
	But it was this lioness, this goddess, and she was a guardian goddess.
	And there is evidence from the inscriptions that she was guarding some kind of chamber or archive or in New Age parlance, hall of records that is close to or under her.
	This is from the ancient inscriptions.
	This now ties in with work that I did with Thomas DeBecky, Dr. Thomas DeBecki, a geophysicist, back in the 90s when I first began working on the Sphinx.
	We did seismic work, so looking at what's in the subsurface around the Sphinx, and we found a major chamber, man-carved chamber, human-carved chamber, under the left paw of the Sphinx.
	And I believe putting everything together, and I'm summarizing very quickly now, is that that chamber is some kind of archive or some kind of like a bank vault in modern terms that the Sphinx is guarding.
	And this is what the ancient Egyptians are essentially saying in their hieroglyphs that go back to about 3,000 BC, and we don't have any record earlier.
	But I do want to point out that even then, they were referring to this structure, and I'll call it the archive or chamber, as being very ancient at that time, 5,000 years old.
	So I think they were recognizing in dynastic times that this was a much older structure guarding something important.
	But would they have known?
	Sorry to jump in.
	Would they have known what it was guarding, do you think?
	Sorry to jump in.
	Oh, we don't know exactly what.
	I don't know what it was guarding.
	I suspect it was some kind of archive, some kind of records, some kind of we'll call it, I'm thinking in terms of America.
	In the U.S. here, we have the National Archives.
	You in the U.K. have the equivalent types of things.
	So I think it was some kind of archive or record.
	But those who did the repairs, that's what fascinates me.
	Those who did the first lot of repairs, if we could go back that far, they must have had a sense, maybe better than the sense that we've got, of what this was for.
	I think they probably did.
	I think they probably did.
	But what we also have indicated is that in dynastic times, and I'm now talking third, fourth dynasty, so early in dynastic times, and to put that in modern terms, 25, 2,600, 3,000.
	So this period BC.
	So let's just say 4,500 to 5,000 years ago.
	And for them, it was very ancient.
	And they designated someone was very high up, just under the Pharaoh, who literally had the title that we could translate loosely to the keeper of the key or the keeper of the records that pertained to Mahit, or we would now say under the Sphinx.
	But I think they were purposefully vague, or we have just not found the inscriptions and the texts.
	They did not say exactly what those records were.
	Okay, and now we come to the big question, the $64 one.
	Probably $64,000 these days.
	Originally, who built this?
	When did they build it?
	And what is it that they knew that they needed to preserve?
	Okay, who built it?
	When did they build it?
	And what did they need to preserve?
	Those are three questions.
	I can answer one based on my evidence fairly definitively.
	I can speculate on the other two.
	The one I can answer is when was it built?
	And we should say carved because it was carved out of the bedrock.
	They had to cut down into the bedrock to carve the initial, what we now call sphinx.
	So I'll call it the proto-sphinx or the lioness.
	And I am now convinced, based on all the data, based on all the evidence, that we are talking before the end of the last ice age, which is incredibly old.
	I realize that.
	This still upsets a lot of Egyptologists, but we're talking before the end of the last ice age.
	The ice age ended 9,700 BC.
	So essentially, we're talking in crude terms, 10,000 BC, 12,000 years ago.
	And that would have been totally unbelievable 20 years ago, for instance.
	But we now have evidence of different sites, another site, and that's Gebekli Tepe in Turkey, which I've been spending a lot of time working on and studying also, which dates to the same early period, about 12,000 years ago,
	10,000 BC, and is also in its own way different, but in its own way, equivalently sophisticated with megalithic carvings, beautiful sophistication that was not supposed to have occurred for another 6,000 or so years until that site was found.
	Just like the Sphinx or the Proto-Sphinx was not supposed to have occurred.
	When I started talking about the age of the Sphinx back 30 years ago and redating it, I was putting at maybe 5,000 BC to 7,000 BC, not 10,000 BC.
	And even those conservative dates of 5,000 to 7,000 BC, the Egyptologists and the prehistorians and the historians, they were saying that's absolutely impossible.
	Nothing like that could have been carved before about 2,500 to 3,000 BC.
	It couldn't be thousands of years older than the, quote, beginning of civilization.
	We now know that's not the case because we have independent evidence that people, yes, were really sophisticated before the end of the last ice age.
	So I'm not basing it just on analogy with Kebekli Tepe, but I'm basing my deity of the Sphinx based on actual in situ aspects of the geology and the seismic, etc., without going into great detail on that right now, which we could spend hours on if you wanted to.
	I'm now convinced that's before the end of the last ice age, 9700 BC.
	So that's the timeframe.
	Who built it?
	All I can say is the people who were there.
	I really don't know because this gets into a tricky point.
	Some of the Egyptologists have criticized me as saying, well, I'm stealing it from the Egyptians.
	Well, no, I'm not stealing it from the Egyptians.
	They didn't build the Sphinx somewhere else and move it to the Giza Plateau.
	Whoever was there, I assume, were, quote, Egyptians, but they weren't necessarily dynastic Egyptians.
	And were they someone, were they people that came from some other place, migrated into the area?
	I don't know.
	I just really don't know who they were, if they had been living there for already thousands of years, if they were descendants of people who had, for all practical purposes, always lived there.
	I just don't know.
	So I think we can speculate, but when there's not a lot of basis to speculate as to who exactly they were, it seems a little futile.
	But I'm not trying to steal anything from the Egyptians.
	I mean, they were Egyptians from a modern sense, living in what is now modern Egypt, what was dynastic Egyptian territory.
	But there is a break between those early people and the later dynastic Egyptians.
	But I want to point out that the later dynastic Egyptians, the evidence is now falling into place, they spoke about what was known as Zeptepi.
	Zeptepi for them was a very, very, very ancient period.
	It was for them an earlier civilization, sort of the equivalent in the West to Atlantis, if you want to make that analogy.
	Zeptepi for the ancient dynastic Egyptians 5,000 years ago was their predecessor civilization, which they even had myths about how it was destroyed but left a legacy for them and that they were building on that legacy and all the best things, if you would, they traced back to Zeptepi, which you could also see as a golden age, a primordial golden age.
	Egyptologists always assumed this was just total myth and fantasy.
	I now think with the Sphinx and other evidence, we can start to consider that the ancient dynastic Egyptians 4,000 or 5,000 years ago actually knew what they were talking about, that there was an earlier legacy, an earlier civilization.
	And I often use, because people can understand it, the concept of the Renaissance and that going back to Greco-Roman times, and of course you had the Dark Ages in between.
	But yeah, the Greco-Roman times and the fantastic sculptures and achievements, those are all real, and the Renaissance was building on it.
	The ancient dynastic Egyptians had essentially the same concept, that they were building on something earlier.
	And I believe they recognized the Sphinx itself, what we now call the Sphinx, as a physical monument and legacy from that earlier period.
	So in that sense, there is a continuity between those earlier people and the dynastic Egyptians.
	And then I think to the last question, or part of the last question, why did they build it and have the archive?
	I don't know if they knew what was coming, but at 9,700 BC, you have incredible catastrophes and cataclysms naturally occurring around the Earth.
	This is the end of the last ice age.
	Dramatic climate changes.
	You have increased volcanic activity, earthquakes, etc.
	This is well documented in the geological record.
	You have mass extinctions of large mammals.
	You have extinctions of human populations, etc.
	And this is very much my research and work over the last 10 years or so.
	I've really focused on this aspect of what happened to these ancient people.
	And it ties in, I believe, based on the evidence, with these calamities at the end of the last ice age, which ultimately I think all go back to an agitated sun, solar outbursts, which caused incredible climate change and ramifications on the surface of Earth and literally caused the demise of that earlier, what I call cycle of civilization.
	So do you think that these very ancients, the people who were that far back, their existence was disrupted by perhaps a solar event, which of course we're very mindful.
	We're very mindful of now.
	In fact, there was an MP in the House of Commons in the UK, I think, six weeks ago, eight weeks ago, who raised a question about what would we do now were we to be faced with something like this.
	And I don't think, you know, like a lot of things, the situation we're in now might be one of them.
	We're not prepared.
	They weren't prepared.
	But what it shows us is that these people may indeed have been very clever and had a lot that they needed to preserve.
	And the one thing that they couldn't buck or cheat or swerve was the natural cycles of the way things happen.
	So, you know, you can't stop the sun doing something that will disrupt your way of life.
	All you can do is batten down, try to survive, and save what you know.
	I think that is very true.
	I think you just summarized it very nicely, and I think that may well have been.
	In fact, I do think that was probably the case.
	And this ties in with some of my latest research, that you had A period that culminated with the catastrophes in 9700 BC.
	When I say a period, I'm now talking solar activity and whatnot.
	And there is indications that that was really in 9700 BC, the culmination, if I could put it that way, with a major solar outburst of a period of agitated solar activity.
	I'm being anthropomorphic, but the sun had been having unusual events.
	And there may have been another major unusual event, solar outburst, in about 10,900 BC, which a lot of people have been attributing to a comet, a comet hitting Earth or exploding over the Earth.
	But the evidence is not holding up for a comet, but it is holding up, in my assessment, looking at very carefully now for a number of years, to what you would expect from a major solar outburst.
	And we're finding now that other stars that are similar to the Sun actually go through cycles of increased activity, decreased activity, even on about 12,000, 13,000, 10,000 to 13,000 year cycle.
	So it's becoming more apparent to some of us that what's happening with our star, the sun, or what happened in the past and will happen in the future, is not that unusual for the type of star it is.
	We sort of live in blissful oblivion.
	How do I want to say?
	We sort of live in blissful ignorance if we think that the sun is always going to be absolutely as stable as it has been for the last few hundred years.
	And that's why NASA is studying it now.
	Absolutely.
	And we are finding, I want to make this point too, that this, I was talking about this 10 years ago, and there was lot, much less evidence for activity like this.
	In the last 10 years, there have been lots of studies now, more and more studies, which are building up of activity of the sun, looking at solar activity over the last 8,000 years or so, because that's the easiest to look at with tree rings, because we now have tree rings, et cetera, that go back 8,000, 10,000 years.
	So not all the way back to the end of the last ice age.
	We also have lots of, as you get more recent geologically, you have exponentially more data, more refined data.
	I think that's sort of logical to people.
	And what's being found is that the sun, even in the last few thousand years, has gone through a lot of periods of high activity, low activity, high activity, low activity.
	So for instance, as recently as Charlemagne, the time of Charlemagne, just 8th century AD, there was an incredible solar event that's documented in the record that if that happened today with all our high technology and whatnot, I mean, we'd be devastated.
	Our civilization would be...
	I mean, we think this little pandemic is something.
	All our communications would be knocked out.
	Our electricity would be knocked out.
	So we would be technological toast.
	Yes, exactly.
	Actually, I hate to be even the bearer of worst news.
	There was a much smaller event in 1859 known as the Carrington event.
	So this is recorded historically, 1859, middle of the 19th century.
	At that time, telegraph lines were fried, etc.
	Even a small event like the Carrington event in 1859 would make us technological toast.
	The Charlemagne event, as it's known, a thousand years earlier, was much larger.
	I mean, that would really devastate us.
	And that was small compared to what happened at the end of the last ice age in 9,700 BC.
	So, you know, all of this, our civilization, our modern technological civilization is really in the last century or two, really the last century.
	And it's been a time when we've been in sort of blissful ignorance generally of outside natural influences such as the sun, because the sun has been very calm.
	I think on the basis of your work, we need to be very concerned.
	And it's interesting that all of those conclusions, many of those conclusions, have arisen because you combine not only archaeology, but also geology.
	And the two of these things are often independent.
	But you see them very much as being connected for all the reasons that we've just discussed.
	Yeah, exactly, exactly.
	I think one of the problems with modern, I don't want to say problems, but one of the issues with modern academia and modern science is the disciplines not crossing over, not interacting with each other.
	Compartmentalized, yeah.
	The compartmentalized.
	And that's one thing I've tried to do is to decompartmentalize, to say, no, we have to look at the evidence from different disciplines and combine it together.
	No, you talked about Gobekli Tepe, which everybody's getting very excited about now.
	That's in Turkey.
	The distance, geographically, I'm not that great, but I think is it 1,000 kilometers thereabouts, 1,000 miles maybe between Turkey, Gobekli Tepe, and the pyramids?
	So are we saying that there was some kind of civilization that was international, that spread across a vast area?
	I don't know.
	See, this gets into the issue, not to be too technical, what do you call civilization?
	How do you use that term?
	I think the people were probably distinct and had their own culture, et cetera, in what is now modern Egypt versus what is now modern Turkey.
	On the other hand, were they communicating with each other?
	Were they exchanging ideas?
	I have no doubt that they would have.
	And in fact, we have evidence at Gabekli Tepe that people were coming to Gabekli Tepe from literally hundreds of kilometers away, and we can't preclude that they were coming from even further distances.
	And something I think we've underestimated when I say we, not me personally, but my academic colleagues, is how much communication there was between ancient peoples in very ancient times.
	So I have no doubt that the builders of Gabekli Tepe, the residents of what we now call Gabekli Tepe, were communicating with what we would refer to as residents and builders of the structures involved with the Great Sphinx, the Proto-Sphinx.
	So I have no doubt that there was communication between them.
	If you want to view them as sort of a larger level civilization, just like we can talk about world civilization today, even though we can still distinguish between Germany and the UK and the America and Japan, you see the distinction I'm making?
	So we, in a broad sense, yeah, I think one could talk about a more global or at least non-localized level of sophistication civilization even 12,000 years ago.
	But we're not necessarily talking about a kingdom.
	We're talking about a sophisticated, potentially very slick trading business.
	Yes, exactly.
	I think it's probably more in terms of trading, communication, that type of thing, not a single kingdom.
	Because when you get a single kingdom, and I have looked at this in some detail, when you get a single kingdom, for instance, the Roman Empire is a good example, you find iconography and motifs and whatnot that are readily recognized across the area.
	When you look at dynastic Egypt, for instance, you find that at certain points during dynastic Egypt, you know, there was control in Syria, etc.
	And so it really, you know, you get these motifs and you get this evidence.
	I don't see that so far between what is modern Egypt and modern Turkey.
	I do see our conceived of interchange of ideas and trading and that type of thing.
	Now, this is all very preliminary, and one has to remember that we have ultimately very little data.
	I think we have good data to say, to come draw the conclusions I'm drawing, but I don't want to go too far because these are sites where, you know, we're talking 12,000 years ago, so there's a lot we don't know.
	Right.
	So back at the Sphinx, sounding like Peyton Place for a moment here, but, you know, meanwhile, back at the Sphinx, there are a ton of answers then, you would think, somewhere underneath the Sphinx.
	So all we have to do, sounds simple, doesn't it, is go there and get them?
	Oh, like, for instance, in the chamber.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	Oh, yeah.
	Sounds simple, doesn't it?
	If the world were simple, it would make my life much easier.
	It's simple in the sense of politics.
	It's very, very political.
	To do anything in Egypt is very political at this point.
	I'm not in any way, I want to be careful here.
	I'm not criticizing.
	I understand it's complex politics.
	There's a lot of politics and religious aspects, etc.
	It's the same in Turkey, honestly.
	So, for instance, in Turkey, we have Kebekli Tepe, but we also have Urfa, the city of Urfa.
	It's a modern city.
	It's known as the City of Prophets.
	And whenever they do excavations in Urfa, when I say excavations, I'm not talking archaeological now.
	I'm talking about excavation to put in a new parking lot or underground garage or a new building, urban renewal.
	They often hit upon ancient archaeological remains, some going back to the time of Kebekli Tepe.
	So who knows what's under Urfa.
	Going back to Egypt, we have Giza, and there's a lot of people living in Giza, and we know that there are archaeological remains under habitation, places where people have been living for the last 2,000 years.
	So what is under there?
	Game back to the Sphinx.
	The Sphinx is, of course, World Heritage and Monument and major tourist attraction.
	And the Egyptian authorities at this point throughout Egypt are very hesitant to open up any new, I'll use the term, can of worms, very hesitant to want to stir up anything, especially now with the pandemic, et cetera.
	They'd like to just solidify what they have and get more tourists in there.
	Right.
	So we're going to have to wait, which seems to me to be a shame because, you know, time is finite for all of us, isn't it?
	It's finite for all of us.
	And I'm even more concerned because waiting can cause destruction.
	Waiting in this case, with the Sphinx specifically, we have, and I was just talking about Giza and Cairo.
	I mean, Cairo is a huge city.
	Giza, which is essentially part of Creator Cairo, is huge unto itself.
	You have more and more people living there.
	What does this mean?
	I'm a geologist.
	You have more and more people disposing of waste, sewer water, etc.
	There is every indication that the chamber under the Sphinx could be flooded, frankly, with modern sewer water, etc.
	It's not a good situation.
	That presumably would be acidic and would harm whatever's in there.
	Yes, exactly.
	So I have real concerns.
	And again, I don't want to be overdramatic.
	I'm not criticizing anyone per se.
	I'm not criticizing anyone at all, But, you know, we see in every country how the sort of the gears of politics go very slowly and things move very slowly.
	But physical parameters like rising water tables, they don't slow down because the politicians slow down.
	They wait for no man.
	Now, you have a book coming out.
	It's called Forgotten Civilization.
	It's going to cover a lot of the things we've just discussed.
	Coming out, I think, in March, isn't it?
	Okay, so I've got Forgotten Civilization coming out in March of this year.
	Yeah, just a couple of months.
	It should be out.
	And I do want to point out that that is a new edition of my earlier book with the same title, Forgotten Civilization.
	But the new edition has, I expanded it, I revised it.
	It's got over 150 new pages of text.
	It's got over 40 new photographs in it, plus everything that was in the original.
	And something that I found very interesting in doing this, and it's one of the things I did while, you know, hunkered down because of the pandemic, was to revise it and How much evidence has come out, which I talk about in the new edition, that supports my contentions initially back a decade ago when I did the first edition of the book.
	How much evidence has come out where I felt like I was speculating a decade ago, and now we have really strong evidence to support the contentions I was making.
	So I'm very excited about it, and I hope that even people who read the first edition will want to have the new updated expanded edition.
	Essentially, there's a second book in the book.
	And one of the principal things you say is what we were discussing, that there have been edit points in our history, which goes back a very long way, and those edit points are often connected with things that the sun does.
	Correct, correct.
	I think we need to pay, we have paid woefully little attention to the sun historically.
	We have really neglected the sun.
	The sun was was always considered until very recently being this essentially big bright thing in the sky that you could always count on.
	It was unchanging.
	It was the one thing that was a constant, if you would.
	And we're finding that's not the case.
	It undergoes cycles.
	It undergoes disruptions.
	It undergoes solar outbursts.
	It undergoes a term that's being used now, and I mentioned this in the new edition of the book, is the concept of a micronova.
	That the sun, we used to think of stars, they would nova, and when they nova, they would explode completely, they destroy any planets around them, etc.
	What we're now finding is that there are numerous stars that undergo what are essentially little novas or little micronovas where they spew out material.
	They essentially do this astrophysically because they get into a point of disequilibrium and they recalibrate.
	But in the meantime, they give off these solar outbursts that can affect, it will affect planets that are orbiting around them.
	And we're seeing this.
	Some of the earliest evidence of this actually came from the lunar missions, the American lunar missions, when they brought back samples and collected data on the moon.
	And it was discovered that something had happened to the moon at the end of the last ice age, that there was vitrification, there were glassy surfaces from melting, etc.
	But no one made a whole lot of issue about.
	They didn't really understand what they were looking at.
	Now we realize it's because the Earth and the Moon, the Moon can't get out of the way and the Earth can't get out of the way.
	They both are so small relative to the Sun.
	They were hit by a solar outburst at that time.
	I wonder if Artemis, the new project from NASA that's going to go back to the moon, is going to look at that again.
	Oh, there is a lot of speculation outside of NASA that one of the reasons NASA is doing that is very specifically for these reasons to look at these types of things because they realize the implications.
	And I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I can understand that on the one hand, if you're in a governmental position, a position of authority, you don't want to overly excite people about possibilities.
	On the other hand, you want to research them.
	And I think this is what a lot of the agencies and whatnot are doing right now.
	They're terming it often in terms of space weather and that we have to be careful about space weather and monitor space weather more than we have in the past.
	So you've got the lunar missions.
	You've got more and more evidence and more and more studies by major scientific organizations, be it NASA, European Space Agency, et cetera, really focusing on solar behavior, past and present.
	And I think there's more and more acknowledgement that this is really critical to us, our society, our civilization, our collective civilizations.
	So we've got to think, again, when we think of ancient people as being in the main, not everywhere, some were more sophisticated, but in the main, you know, people with rudimentary implements who tilled the soil, made a basic living, didn't know much about anything, and the sun was something benign up in the sky that made the crops grow.
	Actually, there's much more to it than that.
	There's much more to it than that.
	And I want to point out a couple of things just quickly.
	I think that some of these ancient people, especially when you go back before the end of the last ice age, so we'll call it the Proto-Sphinx people, the Gabekli Tepe people, they were living during times when the sun was much more active.
	So I think they were actually seeing the sun undergo periods of activity, and they were paying attention to that.
	One thing we get with ancient cultures is that they kept apparently long-term records, much more than we do now.
	And there's a lot of evidence.
	I just want to mention one thing.
	I talked about this in the new edition of the book, too.
	There's a lot of evidence, for instance, that geological activity on Earth that was never connected with the sun is now being demonstrated to be, it's influenced by the sun.
	So earthquake activity, volcanic activity, etc.
	It seems that in many cases, what you have, it's not that the sun causes earthquakes per se, but it triggers earthquakes because you have built-up stress and whatnot, and then changes in electrical charges.
	I'm being very colloquial here, essentially trigger earthquakes, set off earthquakes.
	So there have been some very sophisticated studies now and very comprehensive studies correlating earthquake activity with unusual or extreme solar activity.
	So it's more than just climate.
	It's more than just what was essentially lightning or what have looked like lightning, but non-atmospheric lightning in the sky and affecting things on Earth.
	There's a lot of ramifications that have not been realized in the past and are only now being realized.
	But I wanted to say with the ancient cultures, it has often been underestimated their ability to keep records and to pay attention to things in nature, that they were incredibly sophisticated, much more sophisticated than people have thought previously.
	It was always the concept, and I remember learning this or being indoctrinated in this when I was in college, in graduate school, that, oh, the further you go back in time, the more primitive people were.
	And we're finding that's not the case at all.
	In some cases, I think during certain periods, they were much more sophisticated than during later periods.
	So it's been more, I see a sort of an up and down cycle of knowledge and then lost knowledge, regained knowledge, etc.
	I wanted to give one quick example just because I like as a geologist.
	It's been found that in Australia, which is a very much oral culture, things are passed down by the spoken word, mythologies and whatnot, that in some cases they were talking about things having occurred thousands and thousands of years ago in islands that no longer exist, etc.
	And for so long, anthropologists and historians thought this was all total make-believe, just stories, myths in the most derogatory sense.
	And with geological analysis, it's been found that in many cases, they have passed down good information, solid information in their traditions that goes back to before the end of the last ice age.
	So where they said there was an island, there really was an island 12,000 years ago.
	When they said that certain animals lived there, which are now extinct, it turns out we now have physical evidence that they were absolutely right.
	So knowledge can be passed down.
	And indeed, we've tended to ignore that.
	And we've tended to think of, as you say, ancient people as being primitive.
	And that's not them.
	They might have been better at maintaining their culture, maintaining their secrets, their knowledge is a better word than secrets, than we are.
	If you think about the way that we store data now, there's no guarantee that all that stuff we've got up in the cloud and we've got stored on our computers and all the rest of it, that that's going to last more than like 100 years or so.
	You know, unless we keep replicating it or find a different way to copy it, we could lose a lot of our knowledge.
	So maybe they were better.
	Oh, I actually have come to the conclusion, absolutely, that they probably were better in many ways because, yeah, we store all this stuff electronically.
	You know, everything that's stored electronically could be gone with one relatively minor solar outburst.
	It could just literally wipe it out.
	You have what are known as electromagnetic pulses, et cetera, proton events where you've got, I don't want to go into a lot of details, but we are so vulnerable keeping all this stuff electronically.
	The best way to keep it, if you're going to keep it electronically, is deep down in caves that provide some protection for the equipment and for the, I'll call it supports, whatever is supporting the database, whether it's old-fashioned, now they're old-fashioned CDs or flash drives, et cetera.
	But all of this stuff is vulnerable.
	It also breaks down spontaneously over time.
	A lot of people don't realize that.
	No, a trivial example of this, and it's really shocked me to my core, is that I'd been keeping some programs and some things that I'd done.
	They're stored on flash memory cards.
	Recently, I've gone to a couple of those cards and there's nothing on them.
	So these things degenerate.
	Deteriorate.
	That is correct.
	They absolutely degenerate.
	And people don't realize that.
	Most people don't realize that.
	You have to sort of use them and back them up and back them up again.
	And even in that process, there is always loss.
	It's not a perfect replication, transmission.
	I mean, we I hate to say it this way.
	We collectively are boxing ourselves into a very tight corner.
	No, listen, I'm with you on that.
	I think we are.
	And I think we're being very myopic in the way that we regard these things.
	Just finally, on your website, there is reference to a documentary called Civilization Before Civilization.
	I don't know whether that's out at the moment or it's still being prepared.
	What's going on?
	No, it's being prepared.
	I was hoping to really make a lot.
	When I say I, we, we collectively working on it, we had planned out all kinds of interviews and travel and whatnot for 2020 to wrap that up.
	And it all came to naught because of the pandemic and unable to travel, etc.
	So no, that's very much in the process.
	It's called civilization before civilization.
	And what's referring to is the civilization before civilization.
	The second civilization is our civilization.
	The earlier one before our civilization is just what we were talking about before the end of the last ice age.
	These sophisticated people, this, I'm convinced, true civilization, or civilizations, if we want to say it that way, that occurred and that we need to learn from because they were decimated by natural events that we have no control over.
	And I'm actually convinced that we are even more vulnerable, more vulnerable, more at risk today than we have ever been.
	I agree.
	That is ever been.
	We think we're so clever and we're so fab to catch the beetles.
	Maybe we ain't at all.
	Last question.
	Can I put a plug in?
	I hate to sound crude, but to do a documentary, we're looking for donations, monitoring and otherwise, because it's not-for-profit.
	It's a genuine not-for-profit organization that's producing this, the documentary.
	And we're doing it for educational purposes to really bring these issues to the forefront, we hope, to get people thinking about for the good of humanity.
	So this is the Organization for the Research of Ancient Cultures, or Oracle.
	They are the people who are behind this.
	As you say, it's a not-for-profit.
	So if people want to know about it, do they just go to your robertshock.com website?
	Go to my website, robertshock.com, and there are little tabs on the front page, and they'll see one for the civilization before civilization.
	They can watch a trailer.
	That tab will take them right to the not-for-profit website, the Oracle website.
	And as you said, it's Organization for the Research of Ancient Cultures.
	So yeah, go for my website, dubbed Robert Schock.
	And hopefully everyone knows how to spell my name, but if I could, it's S-C-H-O-C-H.
	So robertshock.com.
	Right, last question.
	And this is just one that we have to deal with fairly quickly, but I think it's worth asking.
	If there are administrative and other problems in doing proper research in Turkey and in Egypt, all sorts of difficulties at the moment, especially, is there anywhere else we can look?
	Yes.
	Actually, there's another place, and that's in Indonesia, that really needs a lot more research.
	It's actually known as Gununpadung.
	I don't want to talk about too much because it's really in the preliminary stages, but that's another interesting place.
	What we're finding, actually, is that a lot of these sites around the world, ancient sites, when I say ancient sites going back in the last 5,000 years, are built on older structures, older sites themselves.
	So I think of some of the sites in South America, in Peru and Bolivia and Mesoamerica.
	I think there's a lot of opportunities there also for going back in time.
	Easter Island actually plays a big role in it.
	We might be including that in future research.
	So, yeah, there's a lot of areas I think that we can potentially take advantage of.
	Of course, with the pandemic, there's the practical thing right now of essentially no travel.
	But we can make plans.
	I think that's also a problem.
	We can make plans.
	We can make plans.
	And I'm actually hopeful.
	I always try to remain very positive and hopeful that especially once we get beyond the current health crisis, that maybe it will help in the research in the sense that certain governments and countries will want to reinvigorate their tourism, their own national pride, etc., and maybe allow more research.
	And indeed, just at a very basic level, away from governments, but at the level of all of us, maybe, and it's a maybe, but I hope it's a significant maybe, we're going to be thinking differently about important things at the back end of this, because a lot of us have had the time to do that thinking.
	Let's hope that happens.
	Robert, it's always a pleasure to speak with you.
	It's a pleasure, and I agree with you there.
	But thank you.
	Robert Schock, I'll put a link on my website to his work, and we will speak with him again, I'm sure, because the pace of developments in this field, as in so many others, seems to be, here's a word that Art Bell used to use a lot, quickening.
	One day we're going to have to talk about the quickening, I think, and pick up some of that work, too.
	Thank you very much for being part of my show.
	Theunexplained.tv is my website.
	It's also the way to contact me.
	We have more great guests in the pipeline here.
	So until next, we meet here on The Unexplained online.
	My name is Howard Hughes.
	This has been The Unexplained.
	And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

▲