As the late, lamented Amy Winehouse once sang, what kind of fuckery is this?

You remember how I have been saying for over a decade that the so-called ‘workers’ village’ at Giza is anything but?

And how the guy who found it, Wormtongue to Hawass’s Saruman, has been insisting it is?

Well, now he isn’t.

Now, just as Gordon always said, he’s decided the site was accommodation for high born folk, possibly even international visitors.

We are going to go through this piece by piece, because I want you all to know what the world’s leading authority on the Sphinx and the Giza pyramids thinks happened.

From the article linked above:

Where there is a port there are sailors. At the city the archaeologists found evidence that a series of long buildings called “galleries” held troops who could have participated in voyages to the Levant and possibly guarded VIPs while at Giza. These galleries were about 23 feet (7 meters) high and each set was at least 113 feet (34.5 meters) long, north to south.

Archaeologists once assumed galleries like these held pyramid workers, something that recent discoveries call into question; in recent excavations of the galleries Lehner’s team found charcoal remains from wood, particularly cedar, that was originally from the Levant.

Possibly, probably, assumed. Science in action, right there. You better believe we’ll be returning to these ‘VIP visitors from the Levant’, but first onto the village formerly known as workers.

“What was all this cedar from the Levant doing in a common workers barracks?” Lehner asked. In fact, these troops are represented in the tombs of highly placed officials and in pyramid temples. “You have representations of these gangs, these troops, repeated over and over again,” he said, adding that the word for them can be translated as “escort” or “the following.” Each individual gallery could hold about 40 people comfortably, which is a unit these troops could be organized into, Lehner said.

“I wonder if we are basically seeing barracks not of the workers, but of elite crews of ships,” Lehner said. A pharaoh named Sahure had images in his valley temple (part of his pyramid complex) of troops near the king’s “ship of state,” he noted.

Let’s unpack this, then. They found an entire port they previously didn’t know was there. Now, while Lehner scientifically “wonders if maybe” he’s looking at elite barracks, I’m unscientifically wondering why rich people from Lebanon would cross the ancient world to see some asshole’s half-built ‘tomb’ while he was still alive.

Unless, of course, it wasn’t (just?) a tomb and the site had already been sacred for more than five thousand years, as the hard scientific data on at least some parts of the Giza complex show.

The complete inability to have a mature discussion about the woeful shortcomings of the official Egyptological story as espoused by notorious Anti-Semites, without someone assuming you’re about to say “aliens” is so fucking convenient for mainstream academics that you would be forgiven for thinking it was a deliberate conspiracy.

It’s like someone labelling you a truther because you dare to suspect that a bloodthirsty shadow state with a seventy year history of lying may have lied to you in its thirst for blood. This is known as ‘shaping’ or ‘framing’ and it is the last resort of morons who know they are in the wrong and hope you’ll just go away.

Be that as it may, this means I have to pin certain colours to the wall before we get back to whatever it is Lehner has stapled to a frisbee and flung over a rainbow today.

Some, and probably most, of the Great Pyramid was constructed in the Fourth Dynasty. Onsite evidence connecting it to Khufu is largely non-existent, but then you’re faced with a situation of kings on either side of him for several generations building pyramids, so where is his? It’s unavoidably true that no mummy has ever been found in a royal pyramid anywhere, not just the Great Pyramid. They may have been tombs, but they certainly weren’t just tombs. (They were immortality machines.) Putting point one and two together, I strongly suspect they were part of a larger, multi-generational building project that diminished in importance with the rise of the more heliocentric/Ra priesthood at Heliopolis in subsequent dynasties. We see repeated changes in sacred construction priorities right across the dynastic era, and I think this is one of them. The incontrovertible, hard scientific data in the form of water erosion pushes the use of the site back five thousand years before the Fourth Dynasty. The fact that there is now a port involved, that received high born foreign visitors is further evidence that Giza was a famous, sacred site for a very, very long time. In fact, it would almost be weirder if we didn’t find evidence for this, as most other sacred sites in Egypt -and around the entire world- show layer after layer after layer of occupation and development. The Isis/Satis temple at Elephantine sits atop a predynastic Isis temple. Dendera’s Isis/Hathor complex sits atop a site that is at least early Dynastic. Otherwise… seriously explain to me why foreigners are visiting a half-built tomb, and bringing a private army with them? These are travel plans that even Senator McCain would consider ridiculous. You see how we don’t need aliens? To be sure, the chronology still breaks the mainstream view of history but Dr Schoch and two hundred other geologists broke it more than twenty years ago. What we have is a large-scale sacred building project on a site that the Egyptians knew had been sacred for thousands of years, stretching back to Zep Tepi. This provides the best explanation for why the layout of the pyramids is aligned to Orion’s Belt at 10,500 BC (just as the Sphinx matched the heliacal rising of Leo at the same time), but the star shafts in the Pyramid point to Sirius and Pole Stars circa 2,500 BC. Any ritual magician can easily see what they’re doing here.

Back to the story:

Lehner’s suspicions that the galleries were meant for troops were reinforced in 2012 when the archaeologists discovered a broken hippo hip. In ancient Egypt, hippos were considered nuisances, as the animals ate crops at night. “The young troops go out and they harpoon them and spear them,” he told the Toronto audience.

There’s actually a ritual in which a captured and bound hippo is harpooned to death. This ritual could have taken place at Giza at a public place such as the harbor, the hippo meat (apparently quite tasty) being consumed afterwards by the troops in the galleries.

These troops didn’t always get the best food. The hippo meat would have been a nice respite from their everyday diet. The bones the archaeologists found in the galleries indicate they consumed lots of goat and sheep as well as oily, bony, catfish, said Richard Redding, chief research officer at Ancient Egypt Research Associates, in another symposium presentation. The troops didn’t get as much cattle or Nile perch, which were considered the more desirable forms of meat and fish.

Wow. It’s amazing how much ‘science’ you can get out of a single hippo bone. Just imagine what would happen if he turned his erudite mind to the fucking ice age temple right next door! I’m looking forward to the carbon dates for this hippo bone. (Ha! In all seriousness, we will never hear of it again.)

Actually, I’m more interested in the why of finding bodies in these ‘galleries’. What the shit happened? Were the bodies just left where they fell in these ‘holding areas’? That seems quite unhygenic. The story stinks like last week’s tasty hippo.

I still maintain that the pieces are a better fit for some kind of healing sanctuary for rich jerks. Consider Lourdes: pagan, then Catholic, and still a sanctuary that people visit from right across the earth. Whatever… give it another ten years for them to work it out.

Now that ‘the workers’ village’ is a hippo Arby’s for deathly-ill foreign soldiers, Egyptology has a problem. Where is the evidence of the workers who built the great pyramid? Nowhere, literally nowhere.

His solution? they lived on the pyramid while building it.

The recent discoveries at Giza leave a mystery in their wake: Where were the dwellings of the pyramid builders, the regular workers, located?

The answer may be on the pyramids themselves. “We could probably be correct imagining workers staying on the immense ramps, on the unfinished pyramid as it rose,” said Lehner in an email to LiveScience, adding that they could also have been living in the quarries in simple dwellings akin to “lean-to’s.”

*Blink.*

You know how I’ve just told you that it’s vanishingly, vanishingly unlikely that aliens built the pyramids? The alien theory genuinely makes more sense than this magnificent fiction. At least we have some circumstantial evidence that aliens exist somewhere in the universe. This ‘ramp’ that thousands of workers were camping out on? Not so much.

People who know how to count have been dismissing the ramp theory for over a hundred years now.

Firstly, a ramp without any corners would end up with a bigger volume than the pyramid itself, or else the gradient would be too steep at the top. There is no evidence at all for such a ramp.

A ‘wraparound’ ramp would also be enormous, but would have the additional complication of many 90 degree turns, where the blocks would need to be levered. Remember that these blocks had to be placed at a speed of one per minute to have the construction completed in the mainstream timelines.

The remaining ramp theories are refuted here.

As for actually living on a construction site while you are building it? Only an Egyptologist would come up with something so ignorant. I don’t have much construction experience, but I do have some… if you count multi-day setups for Missy Elliot concerts and such as construction. Even then, you don’t live on the construction site because you would be in the way.

Conveniently for me, I happen to know the general manager of a construction company. I best manned his wedding last year. Even more conveniently, he is currently running a large scale, on-site project; he is setting up for the Commonwealth Empire Games in Glasgow later this year.

So I asked him and he agreed it was impossible. We aren’t talking about sleeping bags under the stars here. You need latrines, kitchens, triage facilities. It’s absurd. Because Lehner can’t find the builders and can’t explain how it was built he has decided the builders lived in the sky. It couldn’t be more Ancient Aliens if it tried, ironically enough.

Yet he still expects everyone to swallow the idea that they placed one giant stone per minute and packed up an entire village each morning to boot? Actually, I’m not that sure he does expect us to swallow it. The tone of his email makes it sound like he’s trying to see if he can get away with it without people throwing eggs and rotten fruit at him: “We could probably be correct imagining…”

Conclusion

The thing with Ancient Egypt is that we actually know quite a bit about it.

We know about the role of women, we know how much scribes were paid, we know what kind of toys the kids played with, and so on. Once the dynastic period -or the Middle Kingdom, anyway- begins in earnest, Egyptologists more or less do valuable, laudable, diligent work.

However Egyptology has reached a similar barrier to the one scientific materialism has reached. In an effort to maintain the faith-based position that ‘mind equals brain’, scientific materialists are contorting themselves into absurd, fantastical yoga poses of bullshit that have no basis in reality or experimental data: there is no such thing as consciousness, or consciousness is generated by vibrating quantum tubules something something the TARDIS.

This is because their fundamental underlying position has turned out to be wrong. Neuroscience has much to offer living patients, but its foundational myth is completely in error. So it is with Egyptology. The story of Egypt is wrong… it is much, much older than we are being told to believe.

And you know what? This should be okay. This is how science is supposed to go. Have a theory. See if it’s right. If it isn’t, have a theory that better matches the new data.

The implications of these new(ish) historical data, however, are so far-reaching that that last bit about having a better theory hasn’t happened.

And by the looks of it, villages will fly before it ever does.