<HTML>Howdy All,
I went over to IAB's site to see how he was holding up and saw this question by that fella named Bent, looked like a good question so I thought I'd see what you all thought .............
Subject: Age of the pyramids
Egyptologists date the Giza pyramids to around 2400 B.C.. This means they were already 1200 year old when Menelaus, the Greek hero of the Trojan war came to Egypt with, or in search of, his troublesome spouse, Helen.
They would have been a thousand years old when the Jews made their exodus from Egypt. Situated as they are at the apex of the Nile Delta, it would have been impossible for travellers on their way to Thebes, whence Menelaus and Helen,wh ether in the imagination of a poet or in reality, travelled, not to have seen them as they sailed by.
Pliny the Elder (c.50 B.C.) in whose day the Great Pyramid was still clad in gleaming, white limestone, wrote of the pyramids at Giza that they were world renowned and "were conspicious from every quarter to persons navigating the river." Yet there is no mention of these pyramids, any pyramids, in either the Odyssey or the Iliad.
Apparently, Homer, whether a mythologist or a historian, had never heard of them. Neither had the authors of the Bible. Even though the pyramids of Giza had had 2000 years to impress themeselves on the collective consciousness of the Ancient World, no extant writer prior to Herodotus saw fit to mention them.
Yet, Homer does mention Thebes ".....the thousand gated whence sally forth 200 men, each with horses and chariot....and where lie in treasure houses the greates wealth." The battle scenes carved into the walls of Egyptian temples that depict the kings of ancient Egypt
leading their armies into battle on chariots support the poetical truth, at least, of the first part of this quote from Homer's Odyssey, while the treasures found in the Valley of the Kings in the 20th century support the literal truth of the last part of the quote.
Certainly, the writer of these lines had been to Thebes, or had, at least, heard of it. How could it be he had not heard of, or seen, the pyramids of Giza? Neither Jew nor Greek seemed to have aware of their existence. Why was the greatest and most enduring wonder of the Ancien World ignored by those whose task it was to make great fable of much smaller acomplishments?
Bent
KRs,
Will T.</HTML>
