Ancient Egypt is an interest of mine, so I sometimes argue with those who've uncritically supped from the copious amount of bullshit supplied daily by the various grifters and purveyors of woo on the internet. For example; This often invokes a response, as I got the following to a criticism I'd made about a guest on the Joe Rogan Podcast (a repeat offender as far as I'm concerned);
'have you ever considered that the modern gatekeepers of supposed history and supposed science are BS? so much of the evolutionary narrative held about ancient archaeology and history is total BS, has been shown to be so, and yet they continue promoting it, while accusing everyone else of being tin foil hat wearers. The day that you realise that you've been lied to constantly for very real reasons is the day you start to actually think.'
Fairly typical anti-intellectual response from someone who as far as I'm concerned, is in the grips of a social media induced psychosis. I wrote back;
'The claim seems to be that there's a conspiracy that not only involves thousands of archaeologists from all around the world, but has also co-opted over 150 years of careful scientific archaeological and scholarly work. That the years of study academics undergo to become specialists in their field, the long hours, the poor pay and the peer reviewed papers they produce detailing their finds in minutia, are actually just cover for a conspiracy to hide 'THE TRUTH', as told to you on Ancient Aliens and from the lips of Joe Rogan's latest bro. That when the one artifact that would bust everything WIDE OPEN is unearthed, Zahi Hawass turns up and twirls his mustache while men from the Smithsonian bundle the find into a briefcase and use their neuralyzers to erase the event from memory.
It's a cool story, bro, but let's take a case in point; the Giza Necropolis. This is a site that has been under excavation since Flinders Petrie. Not once has it produced a giant mummy, electrical components or power tools. What it has produced is exactly what you'd expect from a highly organized Bronze Age civilization with a complex religion focusing on funerary practices, and who were adept at working with stone because they had little choice when it came to building materials.
This absence of evidence hasn't stopped the tall tales though. For example, the Great Pyramid has been described as a powerplant, water pump, chemical factory, rejuvenation chamber, earthquake inhibitor, cosmic communications device, a recharging point for aliens, galactic navigation marker, grain silo, even that the King Chamber's portcullis was a voice box allowing the monument to speak(!). Frankly, the claims made about this monument are like patients in a mental health facility claiming to be the returned Jesus. They can't all be right and it'd be wise to think none of them are. That the Great Pyramid should be a royal tomb, albeit a spectacular one, as the surrounding necropolis suggests and as the Egyptians themselves knew it, is handwaved away as being somehow less likely in favor of propositions even less likely again.
The point is, cranks and grifters exist and page one of the crank handbook is to claim there's a mysterious conspiracy hiding the truth, while it's the crank who is the real truthteller. That qualified experts are not to be trusted, but the crank's claims are wholly reliable and should be taken as self evident. Does that remind you of anyone? Someone who recently had a documentary series on Netflix, has published a multitude of books and yet still claims he's being repressed by the 'mainstream'? There's good money to be made by telling tall tales about ancient peoples and with the rise of the internet, there's never been a better time for the unscrupulous to be successful at it. Enjoy the stories, but be skeptical.'
The response to my carefully worded ?
'you deffo eat your cereal with water you lemon'
