<HTML>Hello Jim -
I sincerely hope I've never called anyone here an idiot.
> I think all historical speculation is valid until irrefutable
> (OJ-type) evidence suggest otherwise.
OK, Jim, let's go to it:
I speculate that hob-goblins and unicorns from Lithuania, wearing yellow underpants and saying the word "ping" repeatedly, built the pyramids using the psychic power of their massively developed right frontal lobes.
There's my speculation. By your standards, this is true until irrefutably disproven. Now don't start with "hob-goblins and unicorns don't exist." How can you <i>prove</i>, irrefutably, that they don't? Because there is no evidence for them? But they lived in small nomadic bands, leaving not a stitch of evidence ...
Do you <i>really</i> think this is how we should be writing history? If so, I wish you well ...
>Additionally, academia's tendency to want to hear
> about a persons credentials before their assertions/evidence
> is completely baseless in every walk of life/experience I've
> had in life.
Well I do put some small store in expertise. I usually don't go to a mechanic when I have stomach pains or a lawyer when my engine blows a gasket. If I want to know about German history, I don't consult an geophysicist, and when I want to know about Egypt, I don't go to a journalist or an amateur tour-guide. Of course, experts aren't infallible, but years of study and credentials in a subject surely stand for <i>something</i>?
> I'll give you any amount of money if you can apply the same
> type of Tompkins logic to any ancient structure and have it
> pass some semblance of group opinion. Why has this been done
> mostly with the Giza pyramid? Why? Think about it? If it
> WAS so cut-and-dry a simple structure as many make it out to
> be, are the people like Tompkins just wingnuts with too much
> time on their hands?
I was not good at mathematics in school and still have trouble balancing my checkbook (how come there always seems to <i>less</i> than you calculate there is in there?), so I respectfully decline this offer. But I'd bet some of my dwindling money that, given enough time and patience, a skilled mathematician could compile just such a collection of "meaningful" numbers about an ancient monument of your choice. A similar "discovery" of numbers was used in the 17th century to prove that Stonehenge was a Roman temple. And remember pyramid numerology has been on the go since Piazzi Smith in the 1850s -- that's dozens of patient brains working out "significant" numbers over a period of 150 years.
> ... if one looks at GW Masonic Temple, for example, the
> freemasons (and their predecessors) were famous for endoding
> certain numbers into their buildings.
Were the Egyptians freemasons?
> A resounding no. See my post to Katherine about how a small
> group (aliens in my example) can have a dramatic affect on
> another planet's culture but leave not a stitch of evidence.
> Is it fair to say that the knowledge we see encoded in the
> Giza pyramid doesn't have the hallmark of a fairly large
> civilization (such as Egypt) or we might expect to assume
> much more of the same type of structure's symbolism?
Having dramatic effects without leaving a stitch of evidence seems awfully like special pleading to me. For instance, the Spanish had a dramatic effect on the Americas (to all intents and purposes, another planet from what they knew) but they left a few things lying about, such as their language. The notion of massively-affective-but-unattested intercessions in history is truly the stuff of fantasy.
Put simply, if the massive intercession took place but left absolutely no evidence, how do you know the massive intercession took place?
> I could argue that BECAUSE we don't see a large LC presence
> at any Egyptian sites that that would tend to favor the
> nomadic-peoples theory.
And with the same argument, you could defend my "Lithuanian hob-goblins and unicorns" theory, outlined above.
Best,
Garrett</HTML>
