Anthony Wrote:
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> There is most likely a meaning behind the pyramids
> of Egypt though. Although people new to the
> subject seem to focus on just one of the pyramids,
> there were another hundred or more that were all
> built. The pyramid was not a "one off" item in
> history.
>
Indeed, indeed - it is this general over-precoccupation specifically with the Giza pyramids that lends itself to the dangerous temptation to view them in a cultural and chronological vaccuum with no tempering or contextual references as - as you say - a "one off" item, which we know they were not.
As for meaning, there are two types as I see it.
There is the original contemporary, intentional meaning - cultural, religious, symbolic - actually built into the structures by their creators, which we piece together bit by bit by painstaking empirical method against a backdrop of what we know about the culture which produced them.
And then there is "meaning" in the greater sense, the kind of higher, nobler motive that it is always tempting to look for in large ancient projects when we look back at them through the foreshortening telescope of history - we see them as a completed whole, and we want them to "mean" something more, something greater than just the products of insular religious custom or large scale human vanity. We flatter ourselves that they are a "message" to us, or a designed or implied mechanism that speaks to the technology or science of our age, simply waiting all these eons for people like us who are smart enough to interpret them.
The search for the latter type of meaning says far more about us than it does the AEs, and I think for some people it is hard to accept that the mundane former type of meaning is all there is. Unravelling history in my view - if I can steal a quote from Edison - is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. There's a lot of dull, worthy ground to be covered, but if you want to find the truth you must be prepared to follow it out into the dry places. That's the price, but ultimately you appreciate the real rewards.
There will always be those who come along and set the cat amongst the pigeons with theories that are 99% inspiration - but I actually think that this is healthy in terms of debate - these theories and ideas are all grist to the mill, and ultimately they serve to remind us that we should always have solid ground beneath our feet before we even think of taking the next step.