The Unfinished Obelisk at Aswan

Here is an image of the famous Unfinished Obelisk, lying in the Aswan Quarry in Egypt.

It is the largest ancient obelisk we known of in the world, and would have been about 137 feet when finished (by way of comparison, the Statue of Liberty from base to the top of the torch is 151 feet, not counting the brick pedestal).

The entire obelisk would have been a single piece, and would have weighed nearly 1,200 tons. This is almost unbelievably massive for a single block of stone intended to be moved around and stood upright.

The three enormous stones known as the "trilithon" in the base of the Temple of Jupiter at Baalbek are three of the largest stones ever incorporated into a building, and each of them weighs about 800 tons. Two stones near that temple but not incorporated into it for some reason (the so-called "Stone of the Pregnant Woman" and one other) weigh over 1,000 tons each, with the "other" stone being judged to be just over 1,200 tons as well. These are among the largest known single blocks ever quarried.

How anyone would move stones of such tremendous mass remains a mystery. Even moving such stones today with modern equipment would pose a complex engineering challenge. In their book, Keeper of Genesis: A Quest for the Hidden Legacy of Mankind, Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock provide some perspective on the difficulty of moving such stones. Speaking of the massive stones in the megalithic Valley Temple and Sphinx Temple at Giza*, which weigh around 200 tons each the authors write:

Such loads simply cannot be hoisted by the typical tower and hydraulic cranes that we are familiar with from building sites in our cities. These cranes, which are pieces of advanced technology, can generally 'pick' a maximum load of 20 tons at what is called 'minimum span' -- i.e. at the closest distance to the tower along the 'boom' or 'arm' of the crane. The longer the span the smaller the load and at 'maximum span' the limit is around 5 tons.

Loads exceeding 50 tons require special cranes. Furthermore, there are few cranes in the world today that would be capable of picking 200-ton blocks of quarried limestone. Such cranes would normally have to be of the 'bridge' or 'gantry' type, often seen in factories and at major industrial ports where they are used to move large pieces of equipment and machinery such as bulldozers, military tanks, or steel shipping containers. Built with structural steel members and powered with massive electric motors, the majority of these cranes have a load limit of under 100 tons. In short, a commission to put together a temple out of 200-ton blocks would be a most unusual and very taxing job, even for modern heavy-load and crane specialists. 28.

Modern academia is generally united around the consensus that the Unfinished Obelisk was discarded when a crack was found (or developed) in the obelisk. In a recent interview on Red Ice Radio from June 12 of this year, Christopher Dunn, author of the Giza Power Plant and Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt, observes that this explanation poses some logical problems. Beginning at about the 47:50 minute mark in the second hour of the interview, he notes that at least some of the worked stone could certainly have been salvaged, either for a smaller obelisk or for other construction purposes.

He notes that the builders had already dug channels eleven feet deep all the way around the stone, and created edges and faces, all of which represented an enormous cost of labor that could have been at least partly recuperated. Dropping all of that on account of a single crack seems a laughable theory. He suggests that the abandonment of the entire obelisk suggests something more ominous, although exactly what happened to cause its abandonment is still open to investigation.

Christopher Dunn: Along with the Unfinished Obelisk, and then at Abu Rawash near Giza where you have an unfinished pyramid, and you have unfinished blocks of granite that are stored near this unfinished pyramid at Abu Rawash, it seems to me that work was proceeding, but then it came to a sudden halt, and the work was abandoned, but not because --
Interviewer Henrik Palmgren: the shift was over?
Christopher Dunn: Yes. Something else happened. Exactly. But as far as that obelisk goes, the conventional theory of the obelisk being crafted by workers in the trenches beating the rock with dolorite pounders -- everybody I know, engineers particularly, who travel to Egypt and go to the Unfinished Obelisk, they don't consider that theory for very long.

The Unfinished Obelisk strongly resembles another famous unfinished work, the massive unfinished moai in the Raro Ranaku quarry on Easter Island (Rapa Nui). An image of that moai taken around 1921 can be seen on the web here.

Like the Unfinished Obelisk at Aswan, this moai would have been the largest we know of on the island. Also like the Unfinished Obelisk, its abandonment suggests an interruption, possibly of a violent nature. In the case of the moai of Easter Island, hand tools were found near the site (as they were at Aswan in fact), and there are many other moai that were apparently abandoned prior to their final intended destination.

We have previously discussed the evidence that the moai-builders were slaughtered in a violent massacre by invaders from another island, possibly in conjunction with a different tribe or class of people who were already on the island with them. Is it possible that such a violent struggle between different groups took place in Egypt's ancient past as well?

If so, it is yet another clue that one of the most dangerous threats to civilization and human achievement is the instigation of grievances between groups, tribes, or classes -- the attitude that people of another tribe or type have fewer rights, or even that they do not have the right to live at all. There are those who can be seen stoking such attitudes even today, promoting the grievances suffered by one group at the hands of another group, and fostering resentment and hatred over these grievances.

As we approach the celebration of the Declaration of Independence in the United States, when in 1776 the signers pledged their sacred honor and their lives to defend the idea the all men are created equal -- as individuals -- and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights -- not rights that are bestowed by a government, or by virtue of membership in one privileged class or tribe or group versus another group or tribe -- we should consider these things, and consider the possibility that the opposite view, which can still be seen gnawing at the foundation of civilization today, may have been responsible for the overthrow of advanced civilizations in the past.



* In this post on his Message Board portion of his website, Graham Hancock notes that the blocks in the Valley Temple approach 100 tons but do not exceed 100 tons. He notes, however, that blocks in the Mortuary Temple attributed to Menkaure at Giza do reach 200 tons (and perhaps 220 tons).

A Memorial Day meditation on the mystery of Easter Island

Easter Island of late has become a popular analogy to support a certain narrative about resource depletion.

According to this narrative, which can be found in many articles including this one from PBS Nova and this one from National Geographic, the inhabitants of Easter Island lived for several centuries "in harmony with their environment" but then depleted all their resources and collapsed into violence and perhaps cannibalism. Often, the famous Easter Island statues or moai (sometimes thought of as Easter Island "heads," although they actually have full torsos but many are buried up to the neck, such as those pictured above) are blamed as the impetus for the depletion.

As Jared Diamond, the author of Guns, Germs and Steel, speculates in this 1995 article about Easter Island's depletion of resources:

With passing years, the statues and platforms became larger and larger, and the statues began sporting ten-ton red crowns -- probably in an escalating spiral of one-upmanship, as rival clans tried to surpass each other with shows of wealth and power. (In the same way, successive Egyptian pharaohs built ever-larger pyramids. Today Hollywood movie moguls near my home in Los Angeles are displaying their wealth and power by building ever more ostentatious mansions. [. . .] All that those buildings lack to make the message explicit are ten-ton red crowns).

In the article, Diamond articulates a theory that the Easter Islanders chopped down all the large trees to build canoes for hunting dolphins for food instead of farming, and for logs to roll their ever-larger and more-ostentatious moai around (he has since included this theory in his 2004 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, which has popularized this view of Easter Island's past history).

The Nova article linked above quotes UCLA archaeologist Jo Anne Van Tilburg as saying: "The price they paid for the way they chose to articulate their spiritual and political ideas was an island world which came to be, in many ways, but a shadow of its former natural self."

All of this moralizing fits a certain politically-acceptable narrative current today, and it may be that we should be careful that our own modern biases and assumptions are not influencing the historical conclusions that we draw. We have discussed the danger of doing this, and how difficult it is for the "fish" to perceive the "water" that it is swimming in, in this previous post. Is it possible that later historians will look back at the narrative some are crafting today for Easter Island's history and realize that certain ardently-held beliefs about environmental depletion (which have reached an almost-religious fervor among some members of the intellectual class) colored the historical conclusions in the same way that certain ardently-held beliefs about eugenics colored the conclusions of some intellectuals during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as discussed in that blog post?

Diamond's 1995 article mentions the work of Thor Heyerdahl, who in his 1953 work American Indians in the Pacific: The Theory behind the Kon-Tiki Expedition argued that Easter Island was settled by exiles from the high civilization that predated the Incas in the Andes and the coast of modern Peru. Like many other modern scholars for whom this theory is unappealing for various reasons, Diamond dismisses Heyerdahl's theory, lumping it with Erich von Daeniken's alien astronaut theory, saying: "Heyerdahl and von Daeniken both brushed aside overwhelming evidence that the Easter Islanders were typical Polynesians derived from Asia rather than the Americas and that their culture (including their statues) grew out of Polynesian culture."

This statement displays unfamiliarity with the arguments that Heyerdahl put forward in his well-documented and extensively-researched treatise (the first edition is 821 pages, in a 7" x 9" large-page format). Saying that the Easter Islanders were Polynesian does not contradict Heyerdahl, who argues that the Polynesians themselves originated from the Americas and moved west, with later contact with peoples from Asia and the Malaysian and Indonesian islands. He argues that Easter Island and the Hawaiian Islands would have been the first islands encountered by such a migration, and points to extensive evidence including the Easter Islander's own genealogies and oral histories that this is exactly what took place.

Far from "brushing aside overwhelming evidence," Heyerdahl provides extensive evidence that supports his thesis while discouraging the theory of Asian origins, including prevailing blood types, physical characteristics such as stature, nasal shape, and the presence of beards, the extensive practice of the medical procedure of trepanning which is found in the Americas and throughout Polynesia, the tradition of nose-rubbing as a greeting, fishing techniques and food types which are similar or identical to those of the Americas but different from those common in Asia and Malaysia, and the absence of fermented alcoholic beverages among the Polynesians prior to European contact in the 1600s and 1700s despite their presence in Asia and Malaysia (just to name a few among hundreds of other forms of evidence Heyerdahl examines in his book).

Indeed, if anyone can be said to have "brushed aside overwhelming evidence" it is not Heyerdahl but Diamond and the other modern researchers who dismiss his arguments.

In fact, as we have seen, there is extensive evidence that an ancient high civilization interacted with the populations of the Americas, and that the Polynesians were at least partly descended from people who created the impressive monuments that are found in Peru and around Lake Titicaca which spans Peru and Bolivia. This theory is distasteful to certain modern biases and political agendas, but it may be correct.

In such matters, the open-minded proposals with which Heyerdahl begins his 1953 work are more true than ever today. He states, "as long as there still are unsolved problems in the Pacific, we should at least give an open mind to the consideration of any solution however unimpressive it may at first seem to be" (3). Later, he approvingly cites "the following wise comment by [Edward Smith Craighill] Handy [1892 - 1980]" in a paper entitled "The Problem of Polynesian Origins," who said "there is only one sure way of being in the wrong, and that is by asserting dogmatically what is not true" (8). The italics are in Handy's original.

By asserting dogmatically that Heyerdahl's theory (or von Daeniken's for that matter) cannot be true, modern scholars appear to be falling into the trap that Handy and Heyerdahl himself are warning us against. This warning applies more generally to the entire subject of mankind's ancient past (and that of the earth's geology as well). We have discussed this subject previously using the analogy of the cholesterol-heart disease theory in posts such as this one.

In fact, there is much to support the theory that Easter Island was populated from the east by exiles from the monument-building culture of the Inca regions, and that hundreds of years later another group of Polynesians from further west came to Easter Island and wiped them out. First, the monumental moai of Easter Island have strong similarities to anthropomorphic stone statues found in Central and South America (including at Tiahuanaco). F.A. Allen's Polynesian Antiquities (1884) argues, "If it is merely a coincidence that these wonderful antiquities [on Easter Island], so closely resembling in character those of Peru and Central America, should exist on the very next land to the New-World, it is surely a most curious one . . ." (Heyerdahl 215).

Further, Heyerdahl notes extensive evidence for the elongation of the earlobes using a process that we call "gauging" today among the first inhabitants of Titicaca, including the mysterious Viracochas, a practice that was continued among the Incas (233-234). The earlobes were elongated to such a degree that they hung in some cases to the shoulders, and in order to keep them out of the way when not filled with a ring or a wooden block they would sometimes be hooked over the top of the ears or even tied together behind the head.

Significantly enough, Heyerdahl notes:

The sudden interruption of the megalithic work in the image quarry indicates the probability of a prehistoric invasion with tribal warfare on the island. Easter Island tradition is also very specific about such an early local war, which took place between their own ancestors and a legendary people referred to as the "long-ears," because they had the same extended earlobes as those seen on the statues. The adult men among the long-eared aborigines are said to have fled to fortify themselves on the extreme eastern headland, where finally they were all massacred in a ditch. [. . .] Thomson (1899), who collected the legends at a considerably earlier date, when they were less distorted, could even write: "The 'long-ears' appear to have been in power in the land at an early period in the history of the islands, though they were eventually defeated and exterminated by the others." (205).

Heyerdahl also notes that English archaeologist Katherine Routledge (1866 - 1935) wrote in The Mystery of Easter Island (1919):

According to the account of Admiral T. de Lapelin, there is a tradition at Mangarewa in the Gambier Islands to the effect that the adherents of a certain chief, being vanquished, sought safety in flight; they departed with a west wind in two big canoes, taking with them women, children, and all sorts of provisions. the party was never seen again, save for one man who subsequently returned to Mangarewa. From him it was learned that the fugitives had found an island in the middle of the seas, and disembarked in a little bay surrounded by mountains; where, finding traces of inhabitants, they had made fortifications of stone on one of the heights. A few days later they were attacked by a horde of natives armed with spears, but succeeded in defeating them. The victors then pitilessly massacred their opponents throughout the island, sparing only the women and children.

Heyerdahl notes on page 206 that if these Polynesians from Mangareva sailed east (with the "west wind" described in the account above), "there was no inhabited mountain island east of Mangareva save Pitcairn and Easter Island" (and Pitcairn was no longer inhabited when the mutineers from the Bounty settled there in the late 1700s, but Easter Island was inhabited when Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen landed there on Easter in 1722).

Thus, a completely different timeline emerges, in which long-eared descendents of the Viracocha people who built the Tiahuanaco Empire settled Easter Island and constructed the long-eared statues, but construction abruptly ceased when later Polynesian seafarers (themselves perhaps descended from seafarers originating in North, Central, and South America) came back to the east from Mangareva and massacred all the adult men, sparing only the women and children.

This timeline has much evidence to support it, including the not-inconsiderable fact of the actual oral histories of the Easter Islanders and Mangarevans themselves as told to the earliest European visitors.

Is it not possible that, in a desire to turn Easter Island into a morality tale supporting a certain modern narrative, much evidence is being overlooked? The Diamond and Van Tilburg quotations cited above both contain an overt admonishment against an imagined "arms race" of building larger and larger and more ostentatious moai at the expense of the environment, and a smug if unstated conclusion that "they got what they deserved" for such excessive consumption, but it may be that the real lesson of Easter Island is quite different.

In fact, the real lesson of the massacre of the "long-ears" by the "short-ears" may be that barbarity can always overwhelm civilization, and that the age-old human tendency to pit one group against another can bring constructive and culturative activity to a screeching halt. In this reading of the events of history, the moai of Easter Island are restored to the magnificent cultural achievement that they truly appear to be, rather than the despicable symbols of conspicuous consumption that Diamond wants to reduce them to (in a sort of displaced anger at the home-building activities of his wealthier Los Angeles neighbors).

On this Memorial Day, in which America remembers those who have fought and died in places like Normandy and Iwo Jima, it is perhaps appropriate to consider this possible lesson of Easter Island. We do not know what brought about the fall of the ancient civilizations that appear to have understood the size of the spherical earth, the mathematical concepts of pi and phi, the subtle astronomical process of precession, and the architectural techniques needed to build enormous pyramids and megalithic temples containing stones many tons in weight, but we do know that such knowledge was later lost for centuries and some of it is perhaps lost forever. As the Handy quotation cited by Heyerdahl counsels, we should be careful not to declare dogmatically that we know the answer or that other theories (especially those supported by careful analysis of extensive evidence) are wrong.

There are many today and in our own recent modern history who blame their problems on the success of another group, and believe that political power and even violence can be justifiably applied against those offending groups. This was the approach of Karl Marx, and it was the approach of the Nazis, against whom not only the Americans but the civilized people of the world fought and died in order to stop, not only those in uniform but also members of the underground in many occupied nations. Sadly, there are still people today who want to blame one group or another for their problems, and are not against massing power against that group in an attempt to remedy their grievances. I would suggest that this very tendency -- which we might see as analogous to pitting "short-ears" against "long-ears" -- is a strong candidate for the historical force which can destroy the fragile thing we call civilization, a force which has threatened to throw man into barbarity many times in the recent past, and which has succeeded in doing so many times as well.

If so, then it is a tendency that we should be very alert to detect, and to guard against in ourselves and others.

So what?

Why is it important to know if there was an advanced ancient civilization predating dynastic Egypt, possessing knowledge of the size and shape of the earth and how to navigate across its oceans, as well as sophisticated mathematical skills and unbelievable architectural prowess?

Why is it so important for so many in academia to deny such a possibility?

The existence of such an advanced civilization, at such an early date, completely upsets the conventional narrative of mankind's past, which includes a timeline of gradual improvement and almost unbroken progress through the ages. Such a timeline generally mirrors the assertions of Darwinism, which also posits gradual improvement and advancement in biological species from primitive to complex and sophisticated.

But the evidence clearly shows that the real timeline was almost the exact opposite to what is taught in schools and universities. Instead of centuries of progressive improvement, what we actually find is a precipitous decline from advanced understanding and ability to millennia of what can only be described as relative ignorance.

Because this understanding of mankind's past is suppressed at every turn, we are unable to move forward to the point of asking what lessons it has to offer us, a people who live at a point in history that can look back on centuries of tremendous technological advance and who take continued centuries of progress to be our birthright. Until we can even acknowledge the decline that took place, we can hardly begin to ask why it happened.

It is also evident that whatever the cause of their disappearance, the ancients were very careful to preserve and encode the fact of their existence and the knowledge they felt was most important in a way that would withstand millennia of chaos. In fact, they did this so effectively that we can still find their clues today, even during a period in which few in the academic community are looking for them (and some are in fact deliberately ignoring, ridiculing, and suppressing such signs). Perhaps they encoded other knowledge whose secrets we have yet to unlock.

How did they do it? It is apparent that they did so not only through the incredible megalithic structures but also through their mythology and legends. It is also evident that in many cultures there were groups of initiates who passed on some dim recollection (and perhaps in some cases a clear understanding) of the significance of the knowledge hidden in these myths and monuments.

Because of the suppression and general lack of awareness of the truths about mankind's ancient past, we generally operate today using various false assumptions and models which expose us to various liabilities. At the very least, they teach people to believe that they are little better than animals, or that they are in fact beasts. Worse, they paint a picture of age after age of nearly unbroken progress, giving a false sense of security and complacence that can prevent us from looking for warning signs. Those who try to prevent others from looking into these things can in some sense be thought of as deliberately removing the warning signs that might alert us to dangerous conditions ahead.

For these reasons, it is vitally important that everyone examine the evidence for themselves and reach their own conclusions. The

Mathisen Corollary

is written to provide some of the tools for readers to do so.