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(38:22) Remember this old controversy reported by Pliny the Elder mentioned in the previous films: the twelve authors who disagreed on the function of these pyramids. History only remembers the writings of ... Herodotus ... who first said ... the Great Pyramid was the tomb of Khufu.

... unfortunately, none of the eleven other writings remain. This is another reminder that history is based on sources, and, in this case, they're no longer in existence. The result is a biased view based on the thinking of these ancient authors, an assumption that it was always thought that the Great Pyramid was a tomb: but that is now questioned by various researchers.

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The Pliny extract ... comes from book XXXVI in the Natural History entitled "Dealing with the natural history of stones". So what was it that Jacques Grimault found of particular interest in this excerpt?

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(1h 00 min 28s) Who, for example, has heard of the 2,000- year-old controversy reported by the Roman historian Pliny the Elder concerning the builders of the pyramids? Twelve leading writers of his time were unable to agree on the identity of the builders. But how many texts by those twelve authors survive today? Only one: that of Herodotus, on which Egyptology is so heavily reliant.

This passage reveals many wild surmises – read, completely unsubstantiated assumptions – on M. Grimault’s part:

– The "controversy" mentioned by Pliny the Elder concerns the names of the kings for whom the pyramids were built. Contrary to Jacques Grimault’s assertion, neither Pliny, nor any other ancient author, was in any doubt that the pyramids were built by the Egyptians ... And there is nothing in Pliny’s text referring to any "controversy", since all he says is that (XVII):

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The authors who have written about them [ … ] are not all agreed as to which kings were responsible for their construction, since chance, with the greatest justice, has caused those who inspired such a mighty display of vanity to be forgotten."

This suggests, not a disagreement between the authors cited, but simply their ignorance of the names of the kings responsible for constructing the pyramids.

– Apart from the eleven missing authors, we do have texts by other ancient authors, Greek and Roman. Besides Herodotus and Pliny, we may mention Manetho, Diodorus, Strabo, Plutarch, Ptolemy, Ammianus, Horapollo ... Even though several of them rely on Herodotus, they also use other sources that have now either completely or largely disappeared: Agatharchides of Knidos (to be discussed below), Artemidorus of Ephesus, Hecataeus of Abdera, Eudoxus of Cnidus , Chaeremon of Alexandria. Furthermore, also almost all of these authors either visited Egypt in person, or, like Ptolemy, were even born there.

– The idea that Egyptology "is heavily reliant" on Herodotus reveals a readiness to downplay, or even completely ignore, the wealth of knowledge amassed by modern Egyptology.