
A coherent story of Stonehenge may be beginning to emerge - ohjeez
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20170713-why-stonehenge-was-built
======
komali2
Well, that's a clickbait title if I ever saw one, but it is a good article.
It's basically a summary of everything we know up to now about Stonehenge. If
you haven't read about Stonehenge in a couple years, there's some good recent
work done that's worth catching up on.

From the article itself:

>But a coherent story may be beginning to emerge. That has been particularly
true over the last decade.

Basically "here's the new stuff we've got on Stonehenge."

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fluxby
Nothing was cracked really. Still no explanation of who built it and how it
was built.

The fact that it was a religious area for many centuries has been known for a
long time.

Same can be said about pyramids in Mexico and great pyramid in Egypt, as well
as many other sites like Pumapunku, etc.

Ancient mega structures are one of the biggest mysteries of our world.

~~~
pvg
We heave a pretty good idea who built the pyramids and why since they wrote
about it.

~~~
fluxby
Not really. Which pyramids are you talking about? What we have are some
lukewarm explanations which do not hold up to scientific scrutiny of all the
historic sources. If you are talking about the Great Pyramyd of Cheops in Giza
then plenty of evidence show that Cheops had nothing to do with building that
pyramid. He was a Stone Age monarch at the time when writing and mathematics
have not been developed in Egypt. The pyramid has no indication anywhere on it
that it belonged to Cheops, one would think that if a guy spent over 20 years
and killed over 20,000 slaves building it, then he'd put his name on it. :)

~~~
fluxby
The idea that pyramid belonged to Cheops comes from Herodotus who travelled to
Egypt long after Cheops, and in fact what he wrote down is an urban legend
from the local folk, because no historic Egyptian documents could verify who
built the great pyramid. There are other much earlier historic accounts about
the great pyramid from Arab historians. Who have a very different story about
the pyramid.

~~~
mustacheemperor
>a very different story about the pyramid.

Do you have any sources or articles? I'm a huge ancient Egypt nerd and would
love to read more about it - as is unfortunately usually the case with nuanced
historical topics, Wikipedia just breezes through the common assumptions (that
it was built for Cheops).

~~~
fluxby
Few historical points that we know for certain:

\- Cheops lived in 26th century BC. This is Stone Age territory. A time where
humans still didn't master metalworks, and understanding of mathematics and
written language was very poor.

\- Herodotus traveled to Egypt and later made his claim in 5th century BC.
This is about 2100 years after the rule of Cheops! To say that his historic
account can be deemed as verifiable is a joke.

\- Up until 820 AD the pyramid was completely closed off by the granite plates
that covered all external walls, and an Arab caliph Al-Mamoun broke most of
them and found a way in.

\- The architectual complexity of the Great Pyramid is unbelievable. On top of
everything that most people know, it also has an underground chambers with an
artificial lake (water comes from underground sources) and a really big
sarcophagus submerged in the water. The sarcophagus is larger than the
walkways leading up to the underground chamber.

\- All the consequent pyramids that came after the great pyramid are much
smaller and much less sophisticated. We know that Egyptian empire was growing
substantially in wealth and power at that time, so why the pyramids are less
sophisticated? Shouldn't we see technological progression, not regression in a
rich developing society?

What I think is that we have a serious case of Cargo Cult where emperors try
to emulate the greatness of the pyramid.

\- The Arab historians I mentioned refer to the legend of Enoch.

~~~
pvg
_Few historical points that we know for certain:_

None of these are 'known for certain' and they are at odds with archeological
evidence and well-accepted egyptology.

 _Cheops lived in 26th century BC. This is Stone Age territory. A time where
humans still didn 't master metalworks, and understanding of mathematics and
written language was very poor._

Egyptians at the time had copper tools, two different writing systems,
papyrus.

[http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ancient-egypt-
shipping...](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ancient-egypt-shipping-
mining-farming-economy-pyramids-180956619/)

 _Herodotus traveled to Egypt and later made his claim in 5th century BC._

Herodotus is by far not the only source of information we have about the Old
Kingdom.

 _Up until 820 AD the pyramid was completely closed off by the granite plates
that covered all external walls, and an Arab caliph Al-Mamoun broke most of
them and found a way in_

You can easily find references to egyptologists who believe most pyramids were
robbed by the Middle Kingdom.

 _On top of everything that most people know, it also has an underground
chambers with an artificial lake_

The only reference I can find to that is on crackpot sites. Do you have
anything better?

 _Shouldn 't we see technological progression, not regression in a rich
developing society_

We see exactly such a progression in the first four or so pyramids.

 _What I think is that we have a serious case of Cargo Cult where emperors try
to emulate the greatness of the pyramid._

Again, do you have any decent references to all this stuff? Because otherwise
it's 'internet person vs all of Egyptology' which is not very convincing.

~~~
rando444
Asking for references, but providing none of your own?

Saying stuff like:

 _Herodotus is by far not the only source of information we have about the Old
Kingdom_

and

 _We see exactly such a progression in the first four or so pyramids._

You're not only not providing references, you're not even supporting your
argument at all..

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_the_stone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_the_stone)

~~~
pvg
I didn't ask for references, someone else did and then this person spouted a
whole bunch of obviously inaccurate stuff. You can hit the relevant pages on
wikipedia and trivially verify that no egyptologist thinks Egyptians during
the fourth dynasty lived in the stone age or had barely developed written
language (and for that, I did put in a helpful link). The rest is exactly the
same - uncontroversial consensus stuff you can get from wikipedia - I don't
really need to defend egyptology with meticulous citations.

You can also google the weird claims made by this poster and you'll find that
underground lakes below the great pyramid, 'legend of Enoch' and a strange
obsession with Herodotus invariably appear on crackpot sites. It seems
reasonable to ask for better references for such claims.

------
bahjoite
> In other words, the landscape was used in religious or ceremonial
> processions related to the monuments.

Surely it was the Glastonbury Festival venue of the day. There were even
sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession
of repetitive beats.

~~~
twic
Not to mention bearded patriarchs delivering messages of spiritual renewal to
the rapturous masses [1].

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rN07fnvGomo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rN07fnvGomo)

------
JoshMnem
Anyone interested in Stonehenge should also check out this book:
[http://www.lynnekelly.com.au/the-memory-
code/](http://www.lynnekelly.com.au/the-memory-code/)

It goes into some new ideas about what it was used for.

------
Siemer
Ah, I thought it was only 46 miles from Wales! [ 1 ]

[ 1 ] [https://youtu.be/mbyzgeee2mg](https://youtu.be/mbyzgeee2mg)

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ajarmst
"We found that there were some other structures near here and it's a bit older
than we originally thought. Also, some of the rock came from quite far away.
We still have a lot of questions." isn't really what comes to mind when the
title claims that a mystery has been cracked.

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apokryptein
Interesting read -- thanks.

