Historically High - Ancient Egypt and The Pyramids

Episode Date: February 21, 2024

The title says it all folks. It's been a long time coming, we're talking Old Kingdom Egypt, specifically the 4th Dynasty, which was known as the Age of Pyramids. We cover it from the humble beginnings of the wondrous structures to a time when the stone giants we think of today were constructed. How were these things built? We discuss it all and come to a few of our own conclusions. Support the show Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

All right, guys. You know what that means? Schools in session. Ooh, 100, baby. 100. It is our 100th. Actual will be considered episodes, not counting the one-on-ones.

Oh, my God. And I forgot this was our 100th episode. Did you seriously? Yeah. 100, baby. Yeah, fellas. Ladies, we're doing something special today. We are.

I feel like every so often we do hit like mainstream. I feel like our stuff is kind of anywhere and everywhere. Oh yeah. But I think you got to hit. There are certain things that you have to hit to be, I think, considered a history podcast. We've been kind of dancing around some stuff. You've got to hit, if you don't cover anything World War II related, you're not a history podcast. I feel like we've covered that very well up to this point.

If you don't have a Hitler episode, there's just, there's mainstays. And I think this one's been waiting long enough. I feel like we're at the point where we've developed our skills enough to be able to properly do this one, do it justice. Beyond seeing the pyramids, I had no idea. Beyond our Alexandria episode, I really didn't quite understand how big, like I got that Egypt was a very big deal. Didn't realize that they were this big of a deal. That man over to the left of me, well, you probably can't see which direction he is sitting. this guy walks like an Egyptian this man wouldn't be caught

inside a pyramid dead inside a pyramid but he loves to he'd love to see one from the outside he's the Brendan to my Fraser we're talking about Encino man huh Encino man no the mummy

oh yeah that's right one of the greatest cinematic Brendan Fraser masterpiece and synonymous along with the mummy returns but not that third dragon emperor shit guys the great pyramids the research on this has been outstanding it's a lot of research i didn't expect this coming in um i got a little big for my britches i told chris hey let's do an episode on ancient egypt he's like i don't think we're going to be able to do one episode on ancient egypt like i don't

know, we'll start our research, we'll see how it goes, you know, we'll, we'll regroup and talk about it later. I think it was like a day or two later. I come to Chris, I'm like, hey, man, this is an issue. A little, little too much history. Hey, yeah, so this has more stuff than I anticipated. Yeah, why wouldn't a 4,000 year old civilization have a, have a little bit to talk about? And really 4,000 years that we know about. Like 4,000 sort of documented years. There's shit that we know about beforehand that happened before we got documents. And I mean, the civilization's crazy long.

Well, I'm not going to lie to you. I got into the research and it wasn't long. It was a matter of hours before like the rabbit hole of the pyramids just like sucked me in. And at that point, you then text like the next day. because I had been just doing pyramid research at that point. And I was like, I'll come back to the other stuff. This is obviously a big cornerstone of what we're going to be talking about. Or what I think we would talk about for ancient Egypt.

And then you text me and you're like, hey, this is too big. I was like, yeah, yeah, it is, you think? And we decided to kind of pivot a little bit and do essentially an episode on the Great Pyramids, but you got to set the stage for this. It can't just be talked about, you know, this is how they got built and everything. You have to find out how this civilization got to the point. And that's what we're going to do. We're going to take to soup to nuts.

Yeah, the old kingdom of the old kingdom. The old kingdom. There's multiple dynastic periods. There's a pre-dynastic period. There's the old kingdom. There's things called intermediate periods where shit goes real south and Egypt kind of pulls apart from each other. Yeah.

You're going to have the middle centuries, the middle kingdom, the late kingdom. I don't know. The new kingdom, maybe. Yeah, 31. It's like a fucking album. Yeah. It's a band that does just. the exact same theme.

It's like Boston, how they always did the spaceship theme and everything. I would say the Beatles, because it looked like a lot of their kings had the Beatles haircut. That is true. All right, guys, we're not going to go ahead and keep you waiting any longer. We're jumping into the episode. Oh.

Yeah, a little before our 100th episode, but since this is our 100th episode, just want to mention ratings, reviews, subscriptions. We love five stars. Good reviews are always a mood boost. for us. Also, we are on YouTube now. No video format yet. It's just going to be the tag picture for the episode. But if you want to put it on like a TV or anything, walk around

the house, listen to it, it makes it a lot easier. We're on YouTube. I think it's called YouTube Music now. Nice. It's their program too. So if you're looking for, you know, a different way to listen to us, really like YouTube. You already have that service. We're on there now. Yeah, guys, love the five star ratings. What that allows us to do, You can probably already hear that we have captured ourselves a sponsor. But yeah, those allow us to essentially attract more people, kind of up the production value of this thing, hopefully offer a video companion that would be fucking awesome for us to do. But yeah, those reviews and everything like that, they really help us on our way.

So send those in when you can, and we're getting into the pyramids. You know, Adam, something I found out about the ancient Egyptians is they actually had high that were determined to be psychedelic mushrooms. So it really, you know, helps make sense of how they were able to come up with all of these ideas. Really? Yeah. Huh. Well, I mean, if I try to get in that exact same headspace as far as where the ancient Egyptians would have been, I turned to our friends of Mind Man mushrooms.

Oh, tell me more. Mind Man Mushrooms is, I mean, everything that they've done so far that I've tried has been a home run from microdosing to macrodosing. microdosing on more of like a daily plane just to kind of keep myself level throughout the day. I know you enjoy it just as much as I do a good macro dosing trip out to the forest. Anywhere that you can kind of start to let your mind explore itself and using nature is a really great medium for it. I like the fact that for the macro dosing, they have the lemonade mix,

so it almost gives you a little tasty treat before you give your mind a little bit of a tasty treat. A little journey for the taste buds before the journey of the mind. Yeah, before we did this episode, I popped a couple other 200 milligram pills. Just a very easy, simple way to catch what you're looking for. Also, they are very focused on giving back to the communities. A portion of all of their revenue goes back to indigenous nonprofits. I don't see how you don't support that.

Nope. It's a great cause, a great company. If you're looking to have just as much fun with their product as we do, go to mindmenmushrooms.com. that's mind mend m-I-n-D-M-E-N-D-M-D-M-D-M-D-M-ROM. Don't forget to use the promo code high, H-I-G-H. They're going to give you 15% off the entire site. Oh, that's a deal.

Just for listening to us. It's a great deal. Definitely hit them up for that. All right, guys. Again, mind-menmushrooms.com. Enjoy life more using microdoses with big results. Okay, where do we start? Let's start at the beginning, or what we know or think might be the beginning.

After we walked through the beginning, I just want to put this in your head now. What do you think your favorite name? This is just something to think about. We'll talk about it here in a second. What's your favorite name that you learn from this research? Like the title of a person or not the actual name? Like the name of the person, like Kufu, something like that.

The Nile Valley has been a very, very important resource for Africa for a very long time, for the humans that live there. Africa is known as, I believe, the cradle of humankind. Our humanoid-esque ancestors date back millions of years. But in this Nile Valley around the Nile River, date back to hunter-gatherers right around like 120,000 years of existence. That feels like a very long time. And I don't know how far you have to dig down into the fossil record to find shit from 120,000, or 120,000 years. years ago. I don't know what's still around.

Arrowheads, probably. Oh, okay. Spear tips, different things like that where you can see that there's a concerted effort to make a weapon. Okay. So you're basing your civilization and how it operated based on the tools that you could see in their advancement. Yeah, something like that. Like a written history. No, I don't think there's any written histories that far away. But in the Nile, it was kind of the lifeblood of a continent who, whose climate was much, much different back then.

There was a lot more, and this is kind of pre-ice age, very green, very lush. After the ice age, even, it comes back to a point where the pyramids, but the sand dunes are just lush green hills. Just a very nice climate to live in. And as you get further away from the ice age, things start to get a little bit different. as far as climate-wise, things get hotter and drier, you're going to be pushed into the Nile Valley because that's kind of the lifeblood of finding water,

being able to grow things. They weren't necessarily growing things, but your food is going to come to where the water is. Yeah, if you're still a hunter-gatherer society, you're following what you're hunting, and then you're gathering along the way. So the ancient name, and I wrote this down, I tried to do the hieroglyphics so I could say it,

but then I just wrote the names of what it looked like. So the ancient name was torn piece of paper, owl dome above an X-Men symbol. That's what it looks like in the actual hyperglyphics. So it was actually known as the black land. And what the word, they're not sure of the pronunciation of it, but it was like Kemet, K-E-M-E-T. And it was known as the black land

because the Nile Valley was so fertile that when it would flood. And when you looked at the maps and everything, when you were kind of seeing where everything was, did you notice how far the Nile spread out? it's not like it has so many. Yeah, how many tributaries go into the ocean? It's not like a river that you would think of where it's just one big branch of the river

than dumping into the ocean. This is essentially, it goes into the delta and then branches off into, I didn't even count them. It was like countless tributaries and everything. And basically, this area stays green because of all the water and everything. You also then have at this point, like you're saying, it is a little bit different. You would have the flooding of the Nile every year. which is going to plan to a big thing with the pyramids.

And so after the Nile flooded, when it receded, it would leave all of this nutrient-rich silt, and it was like black. So that's why they called it the black land, because that's also where they were living. They then referred to the desert, I think, as the red land. The bad land. The dry land.

But yeah, like you were saying, considered the cradle of civilization, in the 10th century BC, the hunter-gatherers, essentially turned to a grain grinding society or grain grinding simple section. They consider if you're grinding the grain,

you're already growing the grain. But what it basically was is you were eating, you found a way to process the grain and then that was like, you know, you were making like stuff with flour and shit. 10,000 years ago to think that they were that for advanced? That's 10,000 BCE. Okay.

That's 10th century, which would be, I don't want to do the backward math. 10th century would be 1,000 BCE it would be 12,000 if it was 10,000 BCE Okay So to think that they were that advanced that far back in history is pretty crazy Like it's a I didn't really ever think I figured 12,000 years ago We were still like banging in caves and things like that

We were Yeah Our people probably were Yeah But this whole area just sort of became they were still hunter-gatherers, but as Chris was just talking about being a grain-grinding society, you're going to start to look more towards an agricultural base

to where you don't have to go out and do as much hunting and gathering because you're going to have a home base. And that's where this valley was. This valley was lush. It was green. It was getting worse. It was getting drier. But you were able to kind of form a society in these little villages,

I would say, a long denial. Yeah, I think at that point, like around 6,000 BC, I just say BC. I don't say BC anymore, but half the time it probably sounds like that because I just say C. That's kind of when their neolithic culture started in the Nile River Valley. And so that's basically like the later part of what would be considered the Stone Age when you would have like stone weapons and everything. So they find out that even though maybe the area is shrinking a little bit, that's what's just going to force them to have this area that's going to stay. fertile and lush and everything that they can survive in. To congregate in.

So there was the culture. Did you get to, how far down do you have the Bedarians? The Badarians were further out than that, weren't they? The Badarians were like... Well, you get the Badarians in later what's called the Nakata, N-Q-A-D-A. And those basically were like the precursors to the start of the Egyptian dynasties. Like the start of what they considered unified Egypt in like the old kingdom. the setup of

Egypt is something that I just I understand it fully I also this goes into how the Nile River is I understand it fully I don't fucking get it so basically the Nile they think that the Nile's main feeder is from Lake Victoria Lake Victoria is going to be in the middle of Africa if the Lake Victoria is the feeder

that means that the river will be traveling north on a map, but since the tectonic plates have shifted and that's a higher elevation, the river will flow north on a map and flow what looks to be straight up on a map. But since it's a higher plane, it's going to be flowing that direction. So it throws you off when you look at a map because it's pointing up and you think because you're looking at an up-to-down thing, all river. So all rivers should essentially be running north to south. Mississippi River has it.

Mississippi River has it. Wherever you're standing's always flat, man. It's just the highest point. It's so weird to me to think about One of the podcasts I was listening to doing research on it Actually said upriver When they're talking about it, I'm like, no, it wasn't Like it's not upriver

Because then that makes it seem like Upriver is headed back to Victoria Yeah, upriver is essentially heading down on a globe Or on a map how you want to look at it, yeah And that's the way that they looked at it too Upper Egypt is considered The south of Egypt towards Lake Victoria in the Nile River area.

Well, lower Egypt will be north on a map, but it's actually the Delta region where the water dumps out into the Mediterranean. Yeah, it just falls in the water. It's lower. It has to be lower because of the Mediterranean, so it's, yeah. The ocean's higher on the map, though,

so I would think it would drain down. Does it freak you out when they actually turn the map for you for the image that you're looking in Elflose? You're like, this is upside down. Yeah, so much. I don't like it. So you get the first unified kingdom by a guy named King Menez,

and that's around like 31.50 B.C. King Menez or King Norma. I think Mene's was the, like, Greek. Okay. I think that was the Greek name for it. I had King Normar. It's what I heard and read a couple different places, but I think they were the same person.

Let's go with that. There's so many people in this that, depending on who you listen to or what historian or what Egyptologist, there's going to be different names for everything. It's because it's 5,000 years ago, man. It's still so much of this. We had this conversation 10 minutes before we started recording. So much of this is knowing statistical stuff,

but then when it comes down to how stuff happened or when it happened, it's all just people going, I think. And based on this and based on this, but there's no hard evidence that can, like, that can fully convince you. There's always seeds of doubt. Well, and the evidence that they're going off of could be, like one document that's in one town or area and then another document that's in another area.

There's not like concrete evidence that this was beyond just their writing. If you're the king and you unify everything, that next king is going to look at the story and those documents and be like, or maybe I did that. And in a few generations, then it's me who was the first unifier. So take it with a grain of salt on who might have been the first or like you said, they might I've just been the same guy and were explaining nothing. So 3150 BC. So the time of the Old Kingdom is going to be between 2,700 and 2200 BC.

So you have a period of what? That's 4,800 years. Yeah. No, not 4,000, sorry. 400. Jesus, 480 years. And that's going to be essentially known as, dun, dun, dun, the age of pyramids.

Pyramids early Egyptian thing. after a certain point when this whole period of age of pyramids went down, not a lot of building those. Maybe some small ones, ones that aren't really known, but like, this is the time when, like,

they were going big. The big boys. This is where the big boys played, for sure. So the guy that you were talking about, Manas, Norma, whatever his name was,

was considered the first king to unite the upper and lower parts of Egypt and create this early dynastic period that started around 3,000 BCE. he was the one who kind of planned out that Memphis which is I think closer to the northern lower part of Egypt than it is from the actual by the Nile is in the upper part of Egypt in the south

I think he said you're confusing northern just consider it the just say the Nile Delta area okay in the river yeah yeah that's probably the smartest way to do it but the Delta was something that was going to be more important because you could get away with more in the delta. With more water and more resources up there, you could kind of be able to build a better society. That's where the majority of your agriculture is coming from. So you're going to be able to want to, or you're going to want to keep an eye on that area so you're able to make sure that everybody's

fed. They had some pretty crazy ways to navigate denial as far as for farming, different things like that. They would cut off, build canals, different things to irrigate farms. Oh, I lost my train of thought. Irrigate farms. That's why they moved them up to the Nile Delta. Oh. They had something called Nileometers.

Did you read about those? No. So Nileometers would be pits that they would dig down into the ground. And as the Nile River would flood, they would see how far they would fill up as you would go up so you would know like I have four meters of water I have five meters of water from the flooding and all that and as the water receded

the ones that were full going up they would know how much the flow was going to be so they could know how much to plant because they were going to have a better water year or a worse water year. It's pretty smart yeah so I thought you were going to say something like yeah they put sticks in there so they knew not to build their houses within

the sticks because the shit was going to get flooded also not a bad idea maybe they did that too but Their whole lifeblood was this Nile River because the conditions had gotten worse. They had gotten hotter. Everything was a lot more arid and dry. The sand was blowing in pretty frequently. There's some things that I had read about after the old kingdom.

They were having troubles because the sand dunes were actually moving closer to the cities because the wind was blowing them closer, which that's scary to think. Like, oh, shit, that sand dune looks closer than it did. last year. Like Mother Nature's coming in. They're coming in to swallow you up. So they control the agriculture from Memphis. Early trade routes were going to be established around that time into something

called a Levant region, which is Western Asia on the eastern Mediterranean. So they needed to launch boats because they were going to start crossing the Mediterranean to start trading. Well, you have, when you're kind of looking at how it's laid out, you have all the branches of the Nile Delta, but after they join together and form into the single Nile, Memphis is just going to be right on that route. Okay. But it's also going to be further

up to the north to where that's actually what makes a lot of sense because if traders are coming in, you want to catch them early because if you're going to have to like charge them or do any of that kind of stuff or buy their goods, if you're way down south, all that stuff is already gone. You're losing, they could just turn around and leave and you would

never know they were in your country. You're not taxing them or having any type of trade. Yeah. Yeah, they literally just stop at the first town that they see and offload and get out without anything or rob you. Which is nuts because who knows if that was even considered around this time? I don't know what the status of trade in the Mediterranean was at this point, but if they have foresighted, they're already doing that at this point, that's pretty fucking nuts. Yeah, it's very advanced thinking to know that you have what you can to establish yourself, but the only real resource you have around as far

as trees go or palm trees and they're not really great to build with. So you're going to need structural stuff that you can build houses with besides just clay bricks. Kind of fast-forwarding a lot, actually. 1799, there was something called the Rosetta Stone that was located by French soldiers that were sent down on a fact-finding mission from our friend Napoleon. We talked about that. Yeah. Yeah, we mentioned it.

The Rosetta Stone is so important, and I wanted to bring it up this early, because these ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs that they had written everything in on the inside of tombs on papyrus scripts, on stone tablets that they found up until 1799, we had no fucking clue what they said. And even after that, it took a long time to figure out how to decipher it. And the Rosetta Stone was so important

because on the Rosetta Stone, you had the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, you had Demotic script, and then you had Greek script. All the same thing. Yeah. It was just translations into three different languages. So without finding that Rosetta Stone that now resides, I believe, in England. We'll talk about that a little bit later.

The British National Museum where there's a lot of stuff. Yeah. But without that, I don't know how close we would have ever been come or become to like breaking this hieroglyphic code. Well, you got to imagine before this all the way up in, what was it, 1794 or 99? 1799. If there was anybody... And okay, so this was taken back my Napoleon. I wonder how it was found after that,

like when the British came in and were able to acquire it. Because if you're just looking at that, do you think that's a priority at that point? Or do you think it wasn't actually, like, looked at it and it's like, holy shit, and someone recognized what it was. It was like, we can use this. Because 1799, there's not a lot of tourism or, like, excavation going on down in Egypt. So, like...

I don't even know when they did the translation. It would be much closer to our current time. Yeah. And you would think, too, if the English were coming in after they down Napoleon to take the spoils of war, they would probably look at anything that looks super old and confusing, be like, yeah, yeah, let's take that. It might be something cool later. If it was in his house, they took it, they're like, it must be good. If this guy's got it, it's got to be good.

A maculent taste. So in the third dynasty, so this is, we're still working our way essentially to the age of pyramids. So the third dynasty prior to the age of pyramids, you get this guy named, is it Joser? Yeah, Josir. So you get this guy named Joeser, who basically kind of oversees and ushers in this era of piece. And that's going to essentially explain how they have so many resources to build the pyramids. And during his, right, he has this guy who is his, do they call it a vizier? A vizier?

A vizier. The vizier is a step below. The vizier is basically like the rome. royal advisor in like all matters. He's the right, he's, he's the right hand man. But he has no, I mean, they would appoint sometimes family members like their brothers or something like that. Never want anyone in the direct line of succession, it seemed. But it would be like, oh, you know, you're my brother.

I'm getting to be the, you know, fucking king. I'm the pharaoh. You can be the vizier. You're still not going to ever get the ground, but you're going to be taken care of you're going to have a hand at all this kind of stuff. So he has this architect vizier, um, guy named Imhotep. Now, if that name sounds familiar, it's because that is the villain's name in the mummy series. That's my God. That's my favorite name of this whole thing, Imhotep. Was Imhotep?

Yeah. Oh, man. Have you not seen these movies? I saw the Scorpion King when it came out. I saw the Mummy when it came out. I believe I saw the Mummy, too, but it was bad. That's just a... Also, we did skip over.

Scorpion King was a... a real person that the rock played that character off of, he was a part of the first dynasty. Yeah, but he wasn't like any like the Rock's character. He just called him that. Called Scorpion. I think he maybe like tortured people with scorpions

or something like that. Could have been. It was not the Rock. Let's just forget about that. Okay. So basically you have this guy that ushers in this area piece and everything. He has his architect in Motep basically construct his burial place. And Sakra.

Sakara. Around the 27th century BC. Is that when it's considered? Yeah, so 2,700. Oh, 2700. Because centuries are 100, so 2700. Oh, yeah. That's weird that it gets bigger as it works. Wow. That's been in mind because the number gets higher, so you're like, so it's got to be way earlier.

But at that time, it was common practice to basically use these thing called mastabas. And a mastabah is basically just like a, a, one story. I mean, you can make it a little taller than one story, but it would be a one level, basically square shaped, like, like if you took a casserole dish and flipped it upside down, that's a mastabaa. I heard a lot of phrase or a lot of comparisons, so they would call it like a bench. Yeah, if you saw it from a distance, it just looked like a bench. And so that was kind of the common practice was these rulers had, it was their version of a temple's sacred barrier place, not. Basically their version of the pyramid.

They just didn't know this stuff was available yet. Well, and they had to, with the way that burials worked, they had to work their way into these Mastabas, because the first way that they would bury anybody would be just dig a hole and throw them in there. 99%

of the places in the world, that probably works. Maybe 90% of the places it works, but in an area where it's all sand and you have to go real far to hit bedrock and you're not going to bury somebody in the bedrock and then cover back up a sand, is the winds would blow, the bodies would then be exposed once again to the light and to everybody walking by because they were just burying them in sand.

So you'd have to bury them deep, man. I don't know. Or maybe there was a requirement that you could not bury them within this many miles of town. Well, that was the issue. We're not burying Nana. Are we burying going out back and burying Nana in the backyard? They were burying people and the graves would end up being blown over and they would be able, they'd be exposed again.

Because it also preserves people. Yeah. Like the whole point with it being dry and everything is that that that's the whole point of mummies, how they discovered it. It's that like the sand would preserve these bodies to wear, because it's just not allowing a ton of air and it's just drawing out the moisture. So that's why they're essentially

Egypt is just all mummies underneath. Eventually, they'll turn into oil in another few million years. Egypt is going to be, unless they already have an oil export, but they're going to be swimming in oil. Could be. So the next step was to dig a pit and then fill it with rocks

because your next logical move. They thought that that really probably wasn't befitting of like a king or anything like that. The king thought it wasn't befitting. He's like, you're not fucking putting me into some rock hole. Probably him. So they came up with this idea of a Mastaba. The Mastaba also was very handy

because they had had issues with grave robbers before. Because if you know where the guy is buried, you've got to move a few rocks to get down to him. You're going to end up stealing a shit. You just need a shovel. It's just sand. most of the time. The easiest dig you're ever going to have. Well, yeah, but who's, if you're having to bury someone just in the sand like that, there's probably nothing on them of value. There were still kings that wanted to be buried with shit, I'm sure. Yeah. I mean, hell,

there's people that still get buried in their jewelry and they're putting a coffin in the ground. That's true. So, um, the Mastabas were a cover, so it was a protection for the burial. Um, it would be down in the bedrock this time, so you would actually have a solid place to be. Which is weird because essentially instead of just being a hole in the ground digging down into the bedrock, it's like we got to put something over the top of the hole to make sure people can't get to the hole. And it was also a place where supporters, lovers of the former king would be able to drop off like gifts. I'm trying to think of the word that you would use when you drop like flowers and shed at a grave site. That's just that. Offer.

offerings. I guess maybe that's not an offering now. I was going to say a lot of people next time I drive by a fucking graveyard and I see someone like they're providing offerings. Pouring one out for their homies, I guess. These offerings would be for the afterlife trip that these kings would have to take. And it provided an area

where you could kind of have this sense of worship. And when you get to the pyramid age, which we're coming right close on after Joe Zer in Imitap. But there were places that would become places of worship that would have like high priests that were working in them at all times to help usher these kings back

through these offerings into the afterlife to meet. They're like, we're sick of people robbing this shit. Just like, people stay here. Build some shit around it so people will stay here so someone can keep it watch. Yeah, and it was kind of like it gave high priest jobs in a sense to be able to take care of these areas,

these mortuary temples that they built and different things. And it's kind of their undoing towards the end of the Old Kingdom. I like how you said that. Like, hey, these guys are putting these priests to work. Yeah, well. The priest market exploded once they started

needing a surplus of priests. When we get to the end and you kind of see the end of the old kingdom, the priests were almost able to gain more power from the kings because as there were more priests and people were more focused on religion, they gravitated away from treating the king

as this all-knowing being because these priests were able to guide the religion in a different direction. So, in essence, the way that they brought the priests in to tend to them in the afterlife was kind of a foothold for them to get in to be like, these kings are cool and all, but follow the church.

Well, here's the thing, Joezer was like, I know this is common practice, but guess what? No Mastabob for this guy. And so Mhotep is like, hey boss, I got an idea. What if we do a mostaba on top of a mostabah, on top of a mostabah, on top of another mostabah? And he's like, I'm not following. He's like, and he came out.

He made it in the sand in front of him or made it in the dirt. And he's like this. He's like, oh my God, that's amazing. No one has anything like that. So Mhotep essentially designs a structure four-sided with a six-step progressively rising. think of it kind of almost like a stone version, or I guess they're all made of stone, but like the pyramids that you see like in Central America, the step-sided ones going up. And so he ends up designing this for Jozer.

And essentially this is what kicks off being like, oh shit, you know, there's a new act in town. We can start building up. And they said that this also might have been, weirdly enough, like religious or ideological like shift about instead of wanting to be buried underground like way in the ground and lower that they wanted to start building monuments that got them closer to the gods or closer to the sky

and that they felt like where they were buried because I guess they inhabit that area their spirits within that area that they would be able to travel up into like the heavens if it was high enough. Yeah at this point they believed it was kind of like a stairway to heaven actually not quite at this point because Joser is still his burying

chamber is still underground. So it's still under the Mazdaba. No, no, what I'm saying is, even though it's under, because that comes into play when they're building some of the later pyramids, it's down underground. What I'm saying is because you would inhabit not just the room you're in. The pyramid essentially would be your place. Can you imagine if like, like, because we've seen the burial chambers, what if you were like, yeah, you have to live in this little area for the afterlife? I think it essentially was like this whole monument will be your home. I don't, I, maybe, maybe not. There's just so many. That sounds like goddamn prison. that was the case where they're like, here's your coffin.

We're going to cram enough golden shit in here so you can bread and beer that you can live off of for the afterlife. You might get bored in this 9 by 11 room. They weren't that small. So you get essentially, Joe Zer kind of is like the first guy that starts this pyramid craze. I like that it's a craze because it really, this was like what was hot in the streets for kings back then. Like this was the trend that was happening that kind of came out of nowhere. And for reasons that we don't really understand besides like, hey, I want my shit to be grander than my grandfathers and my father's before him. Well, technically, they were viewed as, well, it wasn't gods because they had their gods like Horace Osiris, all those guys like raw and all that stuff.

But they were viewed essentially as divine in the form of like demigods, more like a Hercules type thing, that like that kind of status for like mythology. but because they were considered that way, it was like, you saw the temples for the gods and everything, these people being demigods and rulers sent down, would have to have these grand, even more, you know, grander and grander and grander burial chambers,

which is nuts. Instead of being like, design me this as my fucking palace. Yeah. This is where I want to rule from. It's more like, no, well, I guess also if it's an afterlife thing, it's like, nah, I can fucking hoof it for 30 years

in the current palace we have. if I get eternity and that's my thing for the rest of time. I just got to think what a droll life that would be to finally get in power and become king. Like the first thing you have to think about is the place that you're going to die. Oh, buddy. That feels very depressing. Oh, buddy. I don't think at all.

Really? I think you get in there and you call in he's like first day one stuff. It's like when everyone says if they became the president, they're like, tell me all the secrets day one. It's like day one stuff. You pull in your architect and you're like, so how are we up in this last bitch? What are we doing to, I know you had to have been cooking up something

since this one started. Let me see what you got. What didn't you show him? What did you learn from building his that you can now apply to the next one? Just as a point of reference, Josar's Temple or Josar's Pyramid, I don't know why I always call him temples, pyramid.

That's kind of horror. Yeah. it rose to a height of 200 feet or 205 feet or 62 and a half meters and the footprint of the base of this thing was 397 feet 121 meters by 358 feet or 109 meters and it was made a limestone. So it's not a small structure still. Like 205 feet in the air is really fucking tall. That's really big. That's something that you're going to see from a great distance away. and this was just like the first version of it.

Like they didn't shoot this shit 40 feet in the air and called it good. That's what I was thinking is like, well, who knows? With them building just the one story of the Mastabas, I didn't really do enough research to know how big the biggest ones were. But I'm assuming that if you're going to go for it and you, you know, someone tells you that you're going to be able to stack this thing for Mastavaz high. You're just like, fuck it. Yeah, if you can do that, do it.

No one's ever offered this before. He's like, we can stack me. He's like, they can do that? He's like, yeah. We know how. It's just dirt on dirt. Or it's just limestone on more limestone on more limestone. But to think that you could build a structure that big with the way that,

because you had to build it in a way to where you could climb up onto the next level and bring all the supplies up onto the next level to build the next step. Think of it this way, buddy. I just kind of thought about this. Every time they were building this, they were the current record holder for tallest man-made structure. Yeah. They, I don't know, like, they had no.

way of knowing that or no way of knowing how to them this would always be the tallest thing and it almost fucking was for a long long long long fucking time but every time they built something it was literally at that in all of the world it was it was always the tallest thing yeah it was always them doing it i think the only time it was surpassed like the the closest time it was surpassed. It was like the 1300s CE, so 1300s AD, and it was like a what was it, it was like the Lincoln Chapel or

something like that that was made of wood. Then I believe blew over. Yeah. So they were... We got it. Did you guys measure it before it? Okay, we got it. We got it. They were unchallenged for thousands upon thousands of years for the tallest structure in the world. And correct me if I'm wrong, we'll talk about it here a little while. but the Great Pyramid in Giza

is the only still standing seven wonders of the world? Ancient world. Yeah, so this thing has lived a life and a half and it's like the only thing still standing. Okay, so first Pharaoh, founding Pharaoh of the fourth dynasty, we are finally at the age of pyramids. Guy named Snifuru.

And at this point, as we probably just discussed, as soon as Snafuru comes to power, he calls his guy and he's like, Do you see what they did with the four Mastabas? He's like, I'm going to need something bigger and better than that. He's like, well, have you heard of this thing? We can actually try to do this thing called a smooth-sided pyramid. And he's like, the fuck is that.

How? How can we build up on a smooth side? Yeah, tell me more. And so he was actually the first guy to do. His initial one was actually, was it the, the maitam? Maitem. Yeah. Yeah, this is where things get very tough for me.

We talked about a little bit before the podcast. I'd like giving you guys the most accurate information possible. There's just no real vein for accuracy here. I believe that Snifuru is around and all that stuff, but his reign was allegedly between 30 and 48 years. Which back then seems like a long... Well, I guess you could also become emperor like eight. it depends on when the last guy died

but the variance of being like well he reigned for 30 years or he rained for 48 years the man built four or three pyramids that's what makes it more impressive I think maybe save that part for the end and be like and then he did it all in 30 to 48 years yeah but that's

18 years of variance of how long his reign could have been like that's a whole building three pyramids in 30 years if you're on the low end that to me sounds outrageous and insane 48 years, it still sounds crazy, but it's almost more doable. So they start out by building this thing. It's the Median pyramid.

And basically, they just try to almost make a spire. Like, they don't mess around with, like, the traditional, what you would consider the pyramid structure now. They try to build it, like, up very, very steep. And, unfortunately, it did work out for a little bit, right? Well, their plan was to build it in three phases. First phase was going to be to build not necessarily. like a Mastaba because these were like to me it looks like it's two chunks

and it's just like one top of a house sitting on another top of a house and then the second phase was going to bring the smooth sides down like you're talking about with the white limestone and so that was going to be the second phase of it after they did that

they realized that the footing wasn't very good and they'd kind of thrown it together helter-skelter as far as like where they were lining things up. Their joints weren't always so tight between these stones and it suffered a partial collapse. So its height originally, or its height now is 213 feet or 65 meters. It would have been prior to the collapse, 301 feet or 91 meters. So that's a pretty big collapse. When I look at it,

if you guys have the option to do that, pull it up. It's M-E-I-D-U-M pyramid. It's, it's a, it It looks like they have like a solid core and then it was like ice cream built up in a pyramid around it. And then someone just held a blow torch to it. And everything just melted and all that was left was a core and then just stuff that like had settled near the bottom. And they built it on sand. Any structure that's this big to be built on sand always seems very silly. I don't know if it was a Mormon thing, but we always had this song in primary called the Wise Man and the Foolish Man where they built their house upon the sand or they built their house upon a rock. You're looking at me like, no.

Is any of this registering for you? Okay, so yeah, it's probably a weird Mormon thing. But it's foolish to build your house on sand because you need a solid structure and a base to be able to carry all the way. You just said it was a story about not building houses on it. I would have got the metaphor. Well, there's hands signs that you did with it.

Ooh. Okay. Yeah, yeah, it was pretty cool. I was like six. Well, and here's the thing too. So you build it on sand, you know, anything shifts at all. It's going to essentially shake.

Or just one side's going to start falling off, it's going to throw it off kilter. Can you imagine being the guy that after it collapses and they find out it's not going to work out, having to walk into Snifu's office to be like, bad news, boss. The pyramid, yeah, it kind of collapsed. Lost 100 feet on that bitch today.

So they decide, what's he going to do? Okay, fuck it. Don't even do anything. Just, I guess, leave it. I mean, I'm sure they took blocks and stuff from that one to the other one. but how much of it is left today, they didn't take all of it. No.

So he was just like, start work on the next one. Don't worry about that one. They learned that they can't build up like that. So they had to reduce essentially, build the base out bigger, and then have the slope be more gradual. You would think that they would have learned that the slope was a very important thing, right? They altered it. They just didn't alter it enough because then you get what's called the bent pyramid.

And this one is still in, like, remarkably good condition. On the outside. On the outside. It even has, man, I wish the Great Pyramids saw this, the Bent Pyramid still has a lot of the limestone exterior on it. I mean, it's nowhere near, you know, good enough to appreciate what it would look like brand new.

But if you're looking at it, you can actually see how, it's hard to look at the Great Pyramid with all of the, like, jaggedness to and everything, being in the pyramid shape, and imagine what it was like when it was seriously white and gleaming in the sunlight

because it was polished and the edges looked like razors because everything was just so tight on it. Yeah. You look at it now and you're just like, well, first of all, it's that faded limestone color. It's like, that's not at all what it looked like when it was completed. You look at the bent pyramid that has like a large side of it still has that on it. You could almost kind of then build it in your head and being like, I see how they made it smooth. Yeah. Yeah, it's a, the bent pyramid to me is,

such an optical illusion that it throws me through a loop. It kind of looks like a nipple. It looks a little bit like a nipple with the way that it's built. But the reason that it's called the Bent Pyramid is because this was the second attempt that they had. They moved to a place called Dachur that was south of where President Day Cairo is. It was 25 miles south. 25 miles south. And this guy was big.

344 feet or 104 meters. Its base was 621 feet and 189 meters. No, so it was, yeah, so I had 621 foot sides, and it was 344 feet high. Yeah, that's what I just said. Oh, okay. Sorry. I just used height and base. Okay.

But the most important thing about this, disregard the height and disregard the base. The slope of this started out at 54 degrees. Yeah. Now, you wouldn't think 54 degrees is a whole lot if you're rising 344 feet in the air. 54 degrees is a pretty decent incline. If you look at pictures of it, you've, can definitely kind of tell because it's called the bent pyramid for a reason because what it like 154 feet off the ground they're like oh fuck they're like i don't think we can keep doing it like

we're already having some accidents keeping these blocks up and everything he's like um okay the rest of it change the angle go up at a nice gradual slope and maybe he won't even notice oh you think this wasn't run past him first oh no i'm sure it was run past him where he's like hey listen, this thing, it looks like this one might collapse too. And he's like, fuck! And they're like, but, but we have an idea. What if we just change the slope of it a little bit? He's like, well, how much height am I going to lose? They're like, 20 feet. But you will still be the tallest by far ever built. I guarantee it. He's like, okay, go ahead and complete it. They obviously had to run it by him. Because if it would have collapsed, you'd be like, what the fuck happened? But the thing, too, is he still had them complete it. And then at the same time was like, I can tell. I can tell where you guys changed it because it's exactly that. It looks like the same thing. It looks like someone took a blowtorch at the top of it melted off the top that's just a little bit smaller.

You can tell that it's not quite right. Yeah. And part of the reason why they think that they finished it but still abandoned it was when you go into the burial chamber, and this to me seems like something that I just don't understand how they ever would have come up with the idea. but in the burial chamber there's something called a corbled roof. You know what a corbled roof is? Is it the ones that looks like a chevron?

No. A corbled roof is where as the steps get higher up as the walls get higher up they bring them in a little further and a little further Yes, yes, yes, yes. So basically it's like it's tiered

going up but it's so minuscule that it almost, I mean you can tell it is but like it takes a long time for it to reach the top. Yeah. And so by the time it reaches the top of the burial pyramid it supports the weight of the roof. The walls inside have vertical cracks running through them, so they knew that the weight was just becoming too much,

even with the coral roof to carry it. So to reduce the weight, they think that that's why they changed it to the 43-degree slope because there was going to be less material and less weight on it. That makes a ton of sense that way. But they said that, and even now, which I can't imagine how just terrifyingly scary is, I wouldn't go on this one.

This one I wouldn't step foot in Because there's actual cedar timbers that Snifuru Sorry, earlier when we were talking We said that they needed to import wood We talked about that before the podcast We hadn't mentioned here yet So yeah, maybe, I don't know

Palm trees, not great, weight bearing Anything like that Snifuru had actually gone to a place called Or I guess it's still called Lebanon But he got wood from them in a trade And they're called the Cedars of Lebanon They're very strong trees. If you know anything about wood, cedar is not exactly the hardest, strongest wood that you can get a hold of.

But there's cedar beams that are still up in the ceiling of the burial chamber that are holding it apart that they think that if those weren't there, it would just collapse in upon itself. It's the dry climate, the preservation type thing where it's just not getting a ton. That's insane, like wood carved wood that you can tell that it's that old. Well, and they said that that's why they don't think that he chose that is his pyramid. He's like it looks kind of rickety. Uh-huh. Yeah, this wasn't a great plan. After it got done, who knows how far he is?

Because these things aren't being built in a couple months. You have a ton of resources being put into this limestone quarries that are just trying to crank out these blocks to keep building these pyramids. So he, you know, he's probably, he's of course still alive at this time. He's like, oh, shit. He's like, I'm still alive. and you guys can keep cranking these things out. Let's go for it again. I want you guys to build me another one.

And that's what brings us to the red pyramid. Now, kind of, oh, I should probably jump back real quick. So with the limestone, these all being built out of limestone. Yeah. So to differentiate a little bit, you have limestone that is essentially quarried at different areas and has different colors to it or different properties to it. It's not all the exact same. So the majority of these pyramids, essentially the entire internal structure,

and all that kind of stuff, is basically like a limestone that's, that kind of is abundant in the area that they're building. The stuff that they have to then cap and the casings that they put on these pyramids that may give them that white polished look, that has to be brought from someplace else because that's not available, you know, just right there.

From Turah. Yes. So Turah limestone is this more whitish-style limestone that can be essentially polished. And so this is what, what, like five miles away? Yeah. I'm not sure where DeShir was. I think it was five miles away from Giza.

Oh, that's true. So they're having to quarry this, bring it across the Nile because it's on the other side of the Nile. So even at this point, when they're starting to crank out these larger and larger stones, they're somehow able to take these stones

that are probably weighing almost close to a ton. Yeah. If not more. I don't know what the size progression was up until the Great Pyramid, but it even gets kind of weird here at this point. We're like, like, what are the boats they're fucking bringing these things over on

across this huge fucking river? And then how are they carrying this stuff? Or they're sliding this stuff for miles and miles and miles? You don't have any real natural wood that you can build a sled with. You're probably building boats upon bundles of hollow reeds that are going to float and be buoyant. They basically look like the way

when I was looking at the boats, it looks like someone made two big reed canoes. Yeah. And then basically like a catamaran. It's basically what it is. Well, and travel up the Nile was a little bit tricky, but the prevailing winds head down towards Lake Victoria. So what would be upstream but headed south?

Yeah, downstream is heading toward the Mediterranean. Yeah. So you could use a sail and a sail would carry you inland further down the Nile south. And then if you had to go back up north towards the Delta, all you'd have to do is drop the sail and just go with the flow of the river. I know what I'm saying is they're already fucking sailors technically. They are, but you have to be able to put a sail if you're ever going back up river. And if you have these giant-ass blocks of limestone,

you're probably not going to have a lot of room for a sale or a sail big enough to carry that much weight. I don't think they have to go up. I think all of this was always coming downriver from Tira. I think that's also one of the reasons that they kind of had to do that. Okay. Because to bring that, there's no possible way in hell that there would be wind that could push these boats, holding, getting these stones up the fucking river. That's too much. We're going to get into some crazy ship, but that's, that's actually too much.

You don't think they were sending them back up river for modifications? No. So, no, if they fucked up a stone and it couldn't be fixed on site, it's like fucking send another one. You're not getting this shit back. We'll use it for something else. So the Red Pyramid, that was in DeSherne. That was part of the DeSherne Necropolis. Necropolis is such a fucking cool word.

When the Greeks were using it, it's like the area of the dead. Yeah, that's scary to me. Necropolis sounds like a confusing version of like a graveyard, which I guess it is. Now, the red pyramid is still the third largest. And it's the first successful smooth side pyramid. So they finally crack the nut. They get the angle that they need to.

They're able to go ahead and do the whole thing. And they built it just a half a mile north of the bent pyramid. Do you think they did that and is like, see that one? We almost had it on that one. Close. I was going to say, too. Along with this, along with the red pyramid, I'm sure you'll explain why they call it the red pyramid here in a little bit.

Height, as you said, third largest, 344 feet tall, 105 meters. Fucking huge. The base was actually square all the way around on this one at 722 feet or 220 meters. Most important part of this, just like the most important part of the bent pyramid. pyramid, they started out with a 45 degree incline. So they had realized from the bent pyramid's second attempt, the 43 degree angle, the 43 degree slope. Oh, it's 43. Yeah. Oh, I thought you said 45. No, so 43 degrees. We got to get these numbers right, man. Yeah, it's very important. But I mean, they realized 54 wasn't going to work, so they weren't going to make a bigger version of something

that was going to fail. So 43 worked for the rest of the bent pyramid. Let's just run with that number. This one took 10 to 17. There's some, I know it's a wide range, but again, we don't have a lot of concrete information. So some people are like, it took 10 years to build. Some people are like it took 17. So 10 to 17 years is what I'm going with. And this ended up being Snifuru's tomb. So this is the one he's like, you know what?

You did it. Great job, guys. And the reason it was called the Red Pyramid, it was made from Red Limestone, which, looking at the current pyramids, that kind of looks like Red Limestone as well. But then they just put on the more white limestone for the cap or for the casing. And then as time went on. Yeah. And other people visited the pyramids.

Had a lot of early visitors. A lot of early visitors. They realized that this really beautiful white tour of limestone would make great buildings. Yeah. And so they stripped it off exposing this red limestone below. There's blocks right here. Why don't we got to walk? Five miles.

whole fucking mountain of blocks right there we can use. Look that, five miles. It's right here. Let's just climb this bitch. Well, another kind of new thing with the red pyramid is this is when you get the concept of multiple chambers. And above ground. Yeah. Well, I guess above ground, it would have been the first, the medium, and then the bent pyramid. So this would have been the third iteration of above ground. Correct.

So closer to heaven. Yes. And so you get the first chamber that's 40 feet high with 40 foot high ceilings. Then you get the second chamber that again has 40 foot high ceiling. which if you're thinking about it, you're walking into a giant stone structure, like, that's pretty big, 40 feet. That's a four,

that's looking from ground level up to the roof of a four-story building. Buddy, this gives me anxiety even thinking about having that much weight on top of it. And again, this one had a corbled roof, so it was correct to be built up on the corbels to hold that much pressure,

but to know there's that much rock above you and to look up and see a ceiling that high. Today's the day that it all comes crashing down. It's an uncomfortable feeling. But yeah, like you said, I would literally be walking with you through that and been like, Adam, this thing's been,

you know, up for thousands and thousands of years. Which means that it's probably due. Yeah. At any point to deteriorate right on top of us. And I would ask you if you heard that crack. You'd be like, yeah,

you stepped on a rock. I've been listening to cracks the entire time we've been walking through. I just thought these things are like an old house. They just make noises. But yeah, like you were talking about the second chamber. The second chamber is something that's completely new. Um, it's, they considered it, I think they said, a queen's chamber.

Or was it, was that one a queen's chamber? Did they think that this was the, uh, thief proof? I don't know if it was kind of a combination of both of them. I think they just kind of got the impression that like the most opulent or the largest or highest chamber was going to be the Kings. And then if they were thinking about it, it was probably just, because again, we don't know a lot of this shit. Because all, most of the, there's never been a mummy recovered inside one of these pyramids or tombs.

They know that. fucking sink in. There has never been one recovered, which means that they've been grave robbed in the past. Again, 4,000 years had a lot of fucking time. These things have all been grave robbed. So when they first came into most of these tombs,

if the only thing left was all the stuff that was like, it was basically like, if it ain't nailed down, grab it. The only things that are left in there is stuff that was too large or too heavy to carry. I think the only thing of real substance that they found in this red pyramid, was they found a foot and they don't know if it was Snefrew's foot or not but that was like the only evidence of a person being in the sarcophagus

because it was a sarcophagus and that foot is in the British National it's the great chance it is so Snifuru his kid coming up taking over as the new Pharaoh we got kufu and first day kufu's in office what do you think happens I don't know if I heard a couple different versions of they think that Snifuru maybe had died before the completion of the red pyramid. And then Kufu might have finished that one up before he moved on to his. Yeah, I think that's what it was. Okay.

Which makes sense, man. He built the first one. How long did that take? It collapses. They build the bent pyramid, which could take between again 10 and 17 years. He reigned from 3 to 48. Each one of these are taking a ton of time.

So it stands to reason that the more, the bigger it is and the more luxurious it is, the longer it's going to take. So there's a chance that it wasn't finished and it sounds like, yeah, I just fucking finish it. Well, not only do you have these giant pyramids that are being built, you have these sprawling complexes around them that hold all sorts of different things. They hold other

tombs, other even smaller pyramids for like a second or third wife. There would be like almost mastabaa type like other burial chambers around that would be for like their vizier or people close to the family or advisors, people that were their personal priests. Basically, you're

your posse. Yeah, and you would have mortuary temples on each one of these complexes. It's like how friends always talk about like we should buy a plot of land and then just put a bunch of houses on it. That's exactly what it was except it was like the fucking like God king and then he was like, and I'll just spread you guys out kind of around it, but you're all

going to be, you know, I get the biggest one, I'm all going to, you'll be in the shadow of me. We'll be able to hang out and yell back and forth from pyramid to pyramid after we all die. I wonder if Kufu was like, okay, dad's gone. Yeah, go ahead and finish. Let them keep working on this. They need to keep their skills sharp because I'm going to be putting them to work real soon. I need the surveyors to go out and find me a spot because we're going bigger.

All your guys' surveyors are done over there. You're just on the finish up. I need the surveyors now. This whole idea can really, we haven't talked about it yet because I, I think it's something that we're pretty close to completely an agreement on. But I don't think the experts and the Egyptologists are completely sold on this. But the only way that you're able to build anything this big is if you have a massive workforce. Now, a lot of what people hear, kind of the generally accepted idea nowadays,

is that no slave labor was used to build these people. No animals were harmed in the making of this. Yeah. And it's one of those things where it kind of shocks you because you always hear the stories of like the Israelites being enslaved and working on these things. The Israelites don't come in tell like, I think it's Ramseys, which I think is like Bousin B.C. something like that. That's like 17th Dynasty. Yeah, so way, way, way further down the line. You want to know how I know that?

Oh. I was looking through pictures on my phone today and I went to. down in Houston, I went to the National History Museum there. Oh, really? And they had an Egyptian exhibit, and I was looking through all the pictures, just to kind of give myself an idea of, like, remind yourself what they're capable of, because they had literally, like, statues and jewelry, and they had, um, uh, recreation of the entire kintat sarcophagus, like the seven layer dip of sarcophagus and all that shit.

And it was just like looking at all that. It's like, it's so elaborate. And they were, it just looks like, if it. looks like as good as it did then, or when I saw it, imagine what he was new. Break your brain. Yeah. You'd never seen anything like that before. So the generally accepted theory now is that no slave labor was used to build any of these pyramids.

And the way that they would get away with it. The way they'd get away with it, the explanation was that there's always going to be an off-season to agriculture and growing in Egypt because there's just a time when the river floods. And when the river floods the fields, you can't plant anything, you can't do anything. So you need those people to be still working, to still keep busy. But you also have these public works projects. And clearly, if you're building this many pyramids, you're probably doing pretty well. There hasn't been war in a while. You have a lot of money that's flowing into the city from your exports. So you have some money to build some cool municipal things. And you need

a workforce. You're building these things, even if you don't have money. I guess, well, I think the grandiosity or the grandiosity the large ones are because you have those resources because we'll see some later on that are much smaller because I think the economy probably wasn't doing as well. You don't have to dance around this no slavery thing. There were slaves that built this thing. Both can be true. It can be, you know, the common thought when you first see this or when you hear, you know,

watch a Charlton Heston movie or something like that, it's that like it was built strictly by slave labor with just like the overseers, crack, the whips and all that kind of stuff. I'm not saying there wasn't that. But I don't think everyone working on it was a slave because like you said, there was a time when the farmers couldn't do everything. Now, are these people chomping at the bit and jumping for joy instead of saying like, hey, you guys can take three months off. You've been farming hard and everything. Use this to recharge the batteries before you get back to it. No, no, no. It was, hey, guess what? You're going to come lug fucking stone for the next three to four months and build this,

fucking this rich guy's fucking death house. Death mansion. Yeah. There are, there is proof to the fact that these were not all enslaved people

at work there. There's kind of like a dormitory that was found, I believe it was by the Great Pyramid, close to the Great Pyramid where these people would stay. They worked them into kind of like groups and gangs, and there's actual graffiti which stupid me the whole entire time I thought they had like taken a piece of chalk and written on the limestone and not just realized that they just graffiti was them carving shit into the limestone which is even fucking crazier yeah but they they would carve graffiti of like kufu's gang or the drunkards or anything like that because they were supplied ample amounts of beer which beer and bread baby yeah they said that this was kind of a crazy thing that i just ran across but they said that they looked at a lot of the dental records of the skeletons that they found that were the workers back then and they all had really really bad teeth and they all had really bad teeth

And they said the reason that they had really bad teeth was the main staple of their diet was bread To make bread you have to grind it down into flour When the wind's blowing all the time and there's sand in the air it's bound to get into the flower So they said that prolonged bread eating sandy yeah they were they were basically eating sandpaper in their mouths that were wearing down their teeth That would cause all sorts of dental issues when you heard graffiti did it instantly go into your head of like some guys down carving a stone me like, look out, look out. And he's like, someone's going, someone's going. And they all just fucking...

I thought it was paint. I literally thought. I know how your mind gets there. It made me picture essentially like three young guys going down by stone. I mean like, do it, do it, do it. Just didn't even cross my mind that it was them actually tamping stuff in. But there's also, you said, you were telling me that there's also like receipts, and not really receipts, but like a ledger or something like that,

that shows that King Snefuru, the one prior to Kufu, actually had like a receipt from like slaves that they had taken, um, or they took involuntary people, whatever they want to fucking call them from like Syria or something like that. Nubia. Yeah. So he said that this was a kind of like a war campaign that they went on down into Nubia. He said they brought back 7,000 prisoners. Uh, it was like 10,000 head of cattle and a bunch of other stuff.

And so if you're bringing back 7,000 prisoners, you don't know if it's families. You don't know if it's just men. I would assume it was probably just a good mixture of men and not families. I don't think you're, they're like, you're a prisoner, go get your family. Well, if they took over like an entire village and just took everybody out of the village type deal. So, but they had to bring them back as prisoners and what do you do with prisoners? You can't just put them in a jail and feed them and house them. Yeah, you put them to work.

So you're putting them out in the fields as servants. Can't just set them free. Exactly, yeah. So you're kind of building them into your society, but at the same time, they're forced labor to work out in the fields. they're going to be forced labor to work on the pyramids. Okay. I think we've come to the conclusion there were some slaves involved. Yeah, it wasn't all slaves.

There was certainly volunteers. There was also, and again, this is all just theory when I say this, there was a sense of pride that if you worked on the pyramids, you would have a better understanding of like God would know that you did something very good for the king.

That had to have a huge play in it because, again, you're, it's hard for me to wrap my head around actually, like, believing that there's a deity, like, ruling over you. It's very hard to, like, wrap my head around that. And, and, okay, I guess I can do this. My football team sucks, but I'll actively wear their stuff and think that it's

going to be different. And if I have that type of reverence for someone who's hurt me so many times, then if there was, I had proof that there was, like, you know, not proof, but, like, I thought there was, like, a God ruling over us. I'd be like, you know what? I can tell my kids that I help build the God's temple. And then there was also something I was listening to was that because like with their beliefs, the religion, everything like that, I'm going to mix up the gods names because I can't remember. But one of the guys when you ended up dying and your spirit went to the afterlife, they would weigh your soul against a feather.

They would weigh your heart. And if you had a heavy heart from a lot of bad things that you had done or you hadn't done good deeds in your life, your heart would weigh more than the feather. And you would then be devoured by this weird fucking creature. if your heart was lighter than the feather, which means you held no regrets and you were a good person, you would then be entered entrance into the afterlife. So I'm wondering if they somehow also kind of made a plane and been like, hey, are you done with farming this season?

Would you like to get into the afterlife? Come join the Pharaoh's workforce to build his giant death mansion. The lightest hearts this side of the Nile. Yeah, it's just that there had to have been, some sort of payoff for these guys to do it because they weren't it wasn't like they were paying out money for them it was just like hey payoffs for the egyptians yeah for the prisoners no yeah but show up we're gonna feed you we're they actually said that a typical Egyptian diet didn't have a lot of meat in it but they found so many bones of animals around the construction sites that they said

it would have probably been like a weekly or like a biweekly type they said two times a week from what I heard. I guess biweeklies every two weeks, right? Yeah, two times a week. I don't think that's enough protein if it's biweekly. No, probably not. I wonder if that was also a lesson they learned from, like, you never really think back on this stuff. Is that something they learned from construction of the previous pyramids? It's been like, man, these guys can't carry very much. Probably. And they had people been like, yeah, these guys are fucking like, have no muscle. They're working themselves, like, to death and everything. Well, how do we fix that? I don't know. We have a couple guys in the village that eat a lot of meat. They're pretty big. And like, so we start introducing this into

the diet. Like, I don't know, let's try it. They get to the pyramid. They're like, these guys are really increasing production, aren't they? What did you guys do? Well, we started feeding them goat. Yeah. Like, fantastic. We realized that the only really healthy people in town were the royalty that could eat meat all the time, so we just said to feed me. What's the common denominator?

Or what's missing here? Got to be something there, but they were, I mean, besides the backbreaking labor and the fact that you could lose any appendage at any time, I think they were probably treated better than... O'SHA's not around. No. But as far as like lifestyle with being able, We'll eat a lot of bread, drink a lot of beer, eat meat more than a normal time.

The backbreaking labor sucked, obviously. But I think they were treated in a way that was probably better than a normal person that was just like a merchant. Well, now we come to it. The Great Pyramid of Giza. This is Kufu's place. Can we bathroom break before we hit it? Oh, yeah. Well, hey, there, all you sexy historians, how are you guys doing?

It is time for social. Where can they find us on Instagram? If they want to follow us, they can find us at Historically High Pod on Instagram. That goes the same for threads as well. You can also find us on Twitter. Tell them about Twitter. Historically high. That's historically H.I. on Twitter.

And if you want to email any of your comments or suggestions, where can they find us at, Adam? at historically high podcast at gmail.com. Jha, jemail. All right, and back to the show. All right, the Great Pyramid. This is where it might get a little bit weird. So Kufu decides that it's going to be the biggest and the best. And you got to put it somewhere good, right?

You got to put it somewhere good. So find me a place on. He's learning all the lessons. Hey, the first one, collapse because he's, it's on sand. We know that we have to build it on hard surface, but this thing's going to be huge. I also want it in a place of prominence, so go find me an area. We'll just say the geys a plateau. Stands above everything else. It's going to give us a little extra height from further away.

It's solid rock that we know we can build on that's not going to be messed up. One thing, too, like me and you were talking about, part of like the fascinating thing about this is all the buildup to it. like he had to send people out to find like it like you're just with a group of people and it's like we got to find a place to build this guy's fucking huge ass fucking pyramid are you just going around with the stick fucking stabbing him and be like let me know when you hit something hard i mean i know they'd done this before so they probably had an idea but basically then you're like okay so now we bring a bunch of people out here we dig down as far and we make sure that this is a big enough piece of bedrock to support this or how far down the bedrock is and then after you do that you have to find a nearby stone source. So that's kind of come into play as well, too. It's like, we got to find an area that's close enough to where we can actually quarry all this stone. But that also meets all the qualifications of being able to support this weight. I think that's why the plateau is perfect, though, because they had to dig part of the plateau out in order to build the base.

Like you were telling me a few days ago, but at the same time, you're going to build it out of the, limestone that makes up the plateau. So anything that you dig out, you can start quarring stones literally right next to, yeah, right next to where you're building. But it's so weird. The, whenever you like think of like Egypt and everything like that, because it doesn't look like a traditionally, it's weird to say, but when you see images of Egypt, how everything is like, you know, it's no gleamy glass or anything like that.

It's a city in the middle of the desert. And I know it has all the kind of, you know, it has its problems and everything. But you just look at it and you're like, this is a. city back in time. It just looks like a huge city. Am I right? And so you look at this and then you think of like the ancient Egyptians and you're like these people like were really, it makes you appreciate how really, really advanced even on this stuff. Like they were able to go out and identify all this. They weren't just building this wherever. They had the knowledge to go out like the instruments. You know, when we go over the stats for this thing, it's insane. Let's just get into it. It ends up being

480 feet tall, brand new. It's 454 feet now. Old girls lost some height. Yeah, well, yeah. I mean, how could you recognize 30 feet on something that high you think? Just looking at it? It's been surveyed.

Yeah, but like from the naked eye, if you saw it back and then. You're saying if I was looking at something that was 454 feet, if I could imagine another. 30 feet on top of it? I don't. That's the other. thing too is this is one of those things that you see pictures of it. They're normally from far away, so you don't get a scale of the size of this thing. So 454 feet now, that's a 45-story building.

And change. And change. Yeah, 146 meters for everybody in the rest of the world. Did you say the base? Go ahead. Yeah, base was 756 feet or 230 meters. On each side. And it was equal to within two inches. All square within two inches, which I just, I don't quite, that's something that I would contend can't, it just can't be. There's no way that they could have been that advanced to get it that fucking close, man. That's really close. And I get that it's limestone so you can chisel a little bit out. But when you're building all the way up, you have to have that all level.

And I think this is the one in the Great Pyramid where, I don't know if it was that two inches, but where it comes to the pyramid on top or it comes to a pyramid on top or it comes to a little. a point. It's actually twisted just a little bit because once you climb that far up the two inches, it's off enough to where it can't just be a perfect line down. Like, you can't notice it. It would be hard to identify that now because of the way the rocks are kind of cock-eyed. Like, if you look at it from far away, it looks very smooth. But I mean, when this thing was completed, it had a total of 200 or sorry, 2.3 million blocks, each block weighing an average of 2.5 tons. yeah they said all in total um six million tons of rock that's that's a lot of rock i don't i can't like i get what you're saying but i've never i don't know i have no pounds i know i have no concept

of that of that amount of weight no it's just impossible and this one being so big they were able to bump the slope up a little bit i'm sure they needed to because 481 feet is so fucking tall. They went up to 50 degrees, which not seven degrees isn't a ton, but it is in that scenario. You get a little cocky. Yeah. Well, and also you have a base at 756 feet wide. That's a lot of room to go up. Also, what's going to happen? It collapses. I'm going to have you guys build a new one. Yeah, there kind of always is that. And I forget, I don't remember how long it took them to build this one. They said it was somewhere between, what, 27 years? Is that? Yeah, I feel like that number says.

Somewhere around that is what the number I heard. So when they first, you know, got the foundation, got the area done, they had to level this thing. And there's a couple different ways that it's been theorized about how they actually leveled it. Because the entire foundation, how much did you say it was level within? I think it was like eight millimeters or something like that. Across the entirety of the foundation. Yeah. And so some thoughts on how they do it.

like how do you get level? Like not level with the ground that it's on. It's going at the same slope or anything. Level. And so some theories on it were they would actually dig a trench around the outside of the area they were digging and they would fill that with water. When the water got up to the point in which the water

would start to spill over a certain area, they would stop and be like, that's the area we're making it level to. They would go around the outside and they would chisel away at it to the point where the water was just barely not coming over the edge. Yeah. they would do that the entire way in

toward the center, eventually until the thing was all level. So now you got your foundation, which is, that's still fucking insane, man. I don't even know what the square footage would be, but 756 feet all the way around. The square footage should have to be massive. Yes.

And you're leveling that off. I'm sure everything in the middle couldn't have been because there's no way that you can... What are you using to level this stuff off with? What do they have available? You're telling me about it. The arsenic. Oh, yeah.

I believe it's called arsenical copper. And arsenical copper is copper that just has a higher level of arsenic in it. And it's a metal that can be called, it's called work hardened. So basically as you pound on it more, as you beat on it more, it just becomes more dense and the tensile strength. The harder you beat it? If you beat it hard, it gets hard. Yeah. Well, I wouldn't try that in the desert.

Too much sand. but it was stronger than copper. And this is really, really important because this is still the copper age. This is still the bronze age. We haven't reached the metal age yet to where you have tools that are made out of metal. The strongest thing that you have is this arsenical copper.

And this, to me, before I found out about it, was kind of a sticking point. Because like you're talking about, to level off the ground and bedrock. Bedrock, yeah. Well, it's limestone. It's the exact same material that they're making the blocks out of.

But to level off the ground and then to make these blocks and to shape them correctly, you have to have something that's strong enough in the limestone that won't a bend when you hit it or just wear out immediately. So you need something that has enough sharpness but also enough strength to where you can use it to beat against these rocks to shape them. What's crazy too is when you, I don't have a vast breadth of experience with limestone and its hardness or anything like that. But just an example with the entire pyramid being.

built out of limestone, it's hard enough to support all the other limestone that's on top of it. So I don't imagine it being a rock that, you know, doesn't take a real hammering before it splits or before its integrity gives out. Well, I think it's porous. But what I'm saying is that even the strength, but still the strength of it. Yeah. To have to hit through that. I think that's part of the idea behind the block size too, because the blocks were pretty massive. So the bigger the block, the more, I think, structural integrity that you have to carry more weight. And the less work it would take. You don't have to bury it down the smaller pieces and then shape those and everything,

which is still insane that that's probably the reason they did it. And they were like, we'll figure out how to just make them really fucking huge. And we'll figure out a way to move them later. Well, the other kind of fun thing about it, kind of going to that theory too, and I'm sure it became a very much a weight thing. But the block height at the bottom, they were, I think they're right around 4.86 feet. high. The ones at the top are about one and a half feet high. Yeah. The blocks get smaller, but the blocks also aren't all uniform, even on the same levels or anything.

And you're like, well, you know, that doesn't make sense or anything like that. Here's the deal. The thing just had to be structurally sound. Yeah. And the way that it looks now, you're like, well, there's rock shifting all over and it looks like somewhere falling out. Yeah, but that all used to be completely covered smoothly with these... The limestone. Yeah. The tree. Yeah, the Tura limestone. And so you would never see any of this. You know, had it been taken care of and had nothing ever happened to it. Can you imagine what that would still fucking look like today with like restoration, like a country keeping up restoration efforts and everything?

Yeah, or even Egypt going through and restoring it to what it looked like before by just putting lines. I don't think they could do that. I don't think the integrity is there anymore. But be pretty cool. So kind of jumping back to the foundation real quick. and this actually goes into the block thing too. The first two levels, when you're standing next to the Great Pyramid,

I had no idea about this. The first two levels, they're just two steps up at this height, but it's carved out of the bedrock. It's not blocks. It's made to look like blocks almost, but it essentially goes up almost what, so if it's the first two levels,

it would be like 12, 10 or 12 feet. Yeah. Up just of the bedrock, and then they started, that's where they leveled it off. And then so at one point, if they're leveling it off there, all the area around it had to be high enough to be able to fill that with water to get that leveled off. That feels so weird to me to think about that though, because like even foundations nowadays being cement, they don't necessarily need backfill when you dig and pour a foundation. Because you're digging a foundation down.

This is the craziest thing. They're digging a foundation up. Yeah. You would think that you would want your first two levels to be solved. ground, but you also can't control everything in that environment. So you dig down to create those first two levels. It's just so much weight that would have to sit on them. Oh, that's right. That's what it wasn't. Okay, I mixed up my details because I remember talking to you about this. They didn't dig the first two levels down until they had gotten so far up the actual pyramid on the blocks.

Oh, so they built up and then they dug down. Correct. So they leveled it. But then they also dug down and then they dug everything around it down to the same level to where it looked level. So all that bedrock they had to dig down and then all of that shit off to the side. They had to clear to make it look like that was the ground level. That was probably why part of the reason they did it was like we need to harvest as many blocks as close to this as possible because these bitches are heavy. Do you think they went out there and he looked at it and he's like, can you make it any taller? And they're like, well, this is as tall as they can get. He's like, so you can't put anything else on top of that.

He's like, no. And he's like, what if you were to remove some of the ground around it so that it appeared until he's like, are you fucking kidding me? They say that the reason that that happened is because they anticipated that at some point they might run into a stacking issue where, you know, if you're looking at a direct sharp corner going up at the top, if it started to deviate any or they had to make corrections, they could somehow make the corrections in the steps below by carving those in a certain manner. I was a little stone when I watched it, but that's the reason that they

said take out of the grain and salt yeah i'm not sure they still dug two levels down regardless which is still fucking insane there's a lot of these things that we're going to check to um really not based on anything besides just sort of like common sense to us i i'm no architect i'm no structural engineer uh i built a lot of stuff and just kind of through the my logical thought process there's just not a whole lot of stuff that makes sense but also i've never built anything at a stone so i don't know quite how anything would go. I think Chris kind of falls along the same line

of being handy and knowing how things are put together that it just doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And that's the whole my whole thought behind this whole copper beyond the metal is these things weren't riveted together. There wasn't like they didn't have nails for anything

wood first off again because no iron but they used mortar like just a bunch of large bricks where the mortar was poured in between to connect everything to hold everything. I think it was kind of surprised to both of us that they had mortar, but they also had limestone. So you burn the limestone down to lime and then you mix it with ash.

You're able to form something that's a pretty sticky mortar. I think we talked about it in the Great Wall of China episode. But it was something to where they, I think we talked about it in my episode too. But they had something to be able to bond these two things together. The other crazy thing, man, is the directional alignment. Yeah. Okay, so the directional alignment of the Great Pyramid of Giza is almost perfect within, is it a tenth of a degree? I thought it was perfect.

It's within a tenth, like a tenth of a degree though. Not like a couple degrees, a tenth of a degree, perfect north, south, east, and west. You don't do that. That's not, you cannot say in any way, shape, or form that that's coincidental. No. You don't get within a tenth of, so you have a civilization. that is able to determine true north, there were a couple different ways

that they talked about possibly how they did that. So one of them was, they called it the solar stick method. You would take a stick, put it in the ground. You would then intersect that with a circle. And wherever the shadow, when the shadow was coming across, you would mark it at the point

where it intersected the circle that you drew. Then when it came back down, you would intersect it on the other part of the circle. That would give you perfect east to west. And then you would just determine true north base. on that. Then another thing that they thought they might have used called the polar, it was polar star tracking, which would have taken a long time because it couldn't, the North Star as we know it today was not the North Star back then. It wasn't in alignment. It wasn't in the direction. It wasn't in our universe. So they had a way to actually determine based on the constellations following stars repeatedly for probably years and years and years as a way to determine what North was. if you have another explanation for it, I don't fucking know.

Yeah, that's... All of this to me was like, how the fuck did they figure out how to do that? Like, I'm gonna, like, obviously you put a stick in the ground, you notice that the sun and the stick moves and everything, but how in your fucking head are you like, well, you know, if you draw a circle here and a circle here, then when our intersects, that must be east and west.

the thing that I guess you notice that it's where the sun rises and the sunset like because that's not always true east and west right? Yeah it is. It is okay. Yeah, I think possibly when this like during different seasons

it might be different because I think the earth tilts. They said they had to do it on like the equinox because it's equal time, night time, equal time, daytime. How I get that you know what an equinox is because you come from civilizations that are living by the moon and the stars and all that kind of stuff. so that information gets passed down,

but to then figure out that that's the day in which you need to base your measurements on is, like, were people as smart, like, as smart back then as they are the smart people today? The smart people today just have access to better tools and more resources that make them seem smarter. I would say that the people back then were smarter

because they had to figure the shit out. You just said something that was, like, right on the tip of my tongue that I couldn't quite figure out how to get across, but we know about how the sun works now because we were told that. That was how it was explained to us. We also know that the sun is called the sun because it just had the name of the sun.

I would assume back then they considered the sun to be part of the deity raw. Something like that. And so you just had this big fireball in the sky that hurt your eyes to look at, but you were able to think, well, this thing rises. It burned you if you stayed too long out in it. Yeah.

This thing rises, and it, falls the same way every single day. It becomes alive and then it dies the exact same way every day. This is where his ship takes it across this guy. He takes this. This is the shipping lane he takes every day. So why don't we stick a piece of wood in the ground and we'll go from that side to that side. We'll call those two points and then we'll just make the other two points exactly. Like you don't know direction really at that point because I don't think you know north, southeast, and west. Apparently you do know direction. You know that they're not called north, southeast, and west. It's just like this is where the direction is between,

we're going to line up perfectly with the rising and setting sun. They might not even have been thinking north or south. They're just like, we're going to rise it with the sun and set it with the sun. That's true. And it's lined up. If it lines up perfect east and west, it's lined up north. That's right. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

So they also said that if you're looking at it from the air directly above it, I mean, you have to be kind of close down on it, that it actually is an eight-sided pyramid, that there's a small facet in which, Each side angles in and meets in the middle a little bit, and you can only notice it during certain times of day where you get different variations of the shadows on one side. They said it's so subtle that you can't even notice it

unless you're looking down on it from above. It's like curvature of the earth, probably. Correct, but it's equal on each side. It all meets in the exact middle. That kind of makes sense to me, though, because you would think everything sags in the middle, and gravity eventually is going to keep up to it. So that long of a stretch,

the weight. Just that it's equal, right in the middle. Yeah, but if your points square on top, everything's going to be equal on all sides that's all the same size. It makes you think, though, because it's so unnoticeable, was that something that they had planned in there where it was like

it's structurally stronger if we make it this way, and no one is ever going to see it. Because no one, whoever, who's going to get a fucking view for above this thing? But raw, that's it. Yeah. And maybe the number eight was like Raw's favorite number, some shit. And they're like,

make it eight-sided. be. So yeah, 2.3 million blocks average of 2.5 tons. Most of them quarried from the quarry right next to the Pyramid of Giza. Now this brings up another point. How the fuck do you move to, and this is just the average between the top ones and the bottom ones. How do you start moving those fucking blocks once you start getting up higher? Because again, it's not smooth at this point. It's a terraced a very, you know, it's terraced every few feet and everything, but it's still technically a step pyramid because it's angled blocks going up. It's not a true smoothside of pyramid yet, but not to the point where you can, like, it's too steep of an angle. So how do you get the

fucking blocks up there? Earth and ramps. It's the only way. So the way that they were talking about that, they said to be able to get an earthen ramp and build it from the quarry, the quarry was so close that they couldn't even build the ramp when it got near the top at an angle that they could figure that anyone could pull a sled up just because of the pull that the stone

would have coming back down that's how far away the fucking either how big the ramp was getting up there or how far away the quarry, how close the quarry was to the pyramid. Well and they also said once you got up towards the top the biggest issue was the earth and ramp would have to be somewhere like a half mile long

because of the slope that it would have to be at. Also think of how thick it would have to be. Was it the width of the pyramid? It would have to be pretty wide to get those blocks all the way up there and be pulled up. How the fuck do you remove that much earth? First you have to bring it in

and then you have to fucking bring it back out. By hand. Am I correct in saying no beast of burden in this? No. No. Wait, they had cattle. I don't know if they were working cattle though.

I think they were eating cattle. Okay. Um, there was something, I think it was a podcast that I was listening to and the guy was an Egyptologist and he was talking about how he got to go to one of the quarries where they were pulling stones out of. And they had used a device to measure out these stones and they just had a very long piece of string like you would nowadays and they would dip it in ink and they would have one person hold it at the end and they would stretch it out and then they would slap it.

the string down against the sandstone or the limestone so you would know what line to cut down to make it the shape that it was but he said that you could still see the red ink on the limestone that's still been preserved from all the way back in the day so just to know that you're standing in an area where that was like mapped out and like was that the last block that they were going to need and then they didn't need it so they didn't cut it were they just pre-measuring until finally Like, you know what? We're good. We don't need anymore. But they were also different sizes. Yeah.

But they had to be strategically enough to where it still had to fit together. So it wasn't just like someone handing you size and being like, I'm making it work. It's not like Tetris. You're like, this size goes here, this size goes here, this. But they were kind of different sizes. You have to then have the planning of knowing when those rocks are coming out of the quarry. They said that they figured that 3,500 men could produce 250 blocks a day. that seems, I understand that's a lot of guys.

So even if that's, you know, six guys working on one blocker or whatever, that still seems pretty insane to me. It's a lot of blocks. But then you also had to have some type of, it wasn't just like, hey, we're all making blocks this size because you had to have different ones. So it's like, you're doing this. You're like the planning from just like a civil engineering like standpoint of being like, it was so mapped out.

And the guy that was planning this was like, I need this size here, this size. this size here. This is the schedule. This is when they're moving. This is when they're going up the ramp. And then to have everybody on board of being like, this one goes here, like, everybody that had to know exactly what to do on this. Like, we look at construction sites today. Like, our things are our stadiums. Yeah. If we're going to compare like what we don't have long enough history to have anything remotely close to this. So our thing is stadiums. This is what awes us. I don't think that in our country, most of us, and enough of us have been outside the country and seen some of the other things that the ancient world built. We just look at it as like it's old and we don't understand because when we see stuff built, we see it in like a time lapse.

We see all the cranes moving. We see the stuff being lifted up, the scaffolding. All the pre-made machine steel that comes out is being put into place by machines, figured out by a computer that's designing the best program of what should be completed first. and then we'd look back at this and say, no, these were just like highly intelligent people that knew somehow how all this was going to get pulled off and still make it perfect within fucking two inches on each side when it was done. Well, nowadays, we don't build anything by stones like this.

We build it just with concrete walls. So you're just pouring concrete to think about how to build something with stones that big and to be able, like you say, to get them in the right spots, all our shit would probably be the exact same size to do it. But again, we have all these advanced technologies to make it that way to do it, whereas they just had 3,600 guys, whatever you said, and a bunch of chisels. The biggest question that did not get answered, and it was just, I don't knows, is everyone, how did they do it?

We know what they used to do it. We have a theory on how they did it, but no one can say for certainty how they were able to build this thing. thing. And there have been attempts, they said, to build smaller versions of this using the tools that they had. No one can figure out how to do it. There's even been attempts to use it using more modern machines to see if they could build this. And even some of the tests with the more modern machines weren't able to do this kind of stuff. Well, like you were talking about just the earth and ramp. There's also the second theory of the earthen ramp where instead of just one long straight shot up, it was,

Uh, switchbacks. Yeah. So you would travel up 40 feet, then you travel back that direction, 40 feet up another path and just zigzag away. I saw one that wrapped around the whole pyramid. And then like the distance on this ended up being like double the distance. Yeah. It was like a mile just to get up to the top of this thing.

You stuff to pull these things on sleds, whatever method that you're doing. But again, sleds you're going to have to make out of wood. Wood is only in brought in from trades from other areas. So every, you know, they were bringing in. every fucking piece of wood for this they could. Yeah, you had to because you still, again, you're building stuff inside all the doors or anything like that. All that shit has to be wood that's inside this pyramid.

So you're building inside with that. But then you also have to burn wood to make sleds to be able to yank these ton, ton, ton, tons, ton rocks. Or you're burning wood to make the ash. Yeah. How much mortar were you having and how much ash did you have to make mortar for that thing? Did you see the thing about the wooden wedges on how they would split some rocks? Mm-mm.

They would drive wooden. wedges into cracks and rocks and then they would soak them in water and when the wood absorbed their water it would expand and then break the pieces of the blocks off that's i mean it's brilliant it's yeah fairly logical it's sort of what we do now except for we just use metal chisels and drill holes and then pound the chisels in until the crack happens and then just keep pounding until it breaks but right so we can't think of a way and maybe two point five tons the way we're thinking about it when you get a bunch of people pushing a sled over sand maybe it's not as as we really think, especially when you add an incline.

Maybe it's, you know, maybe it's possible. The King's Chamber has blocks in it. Now, inside there's three chambers inside the Great Pyramid. There's one that actually goes, you know, there's two entrances, one of them, we'll get into that a little bit more, but there's one that people go into when you see pictures called the robber's entrance,

up above and kind of up like 11 o'clock position from that is the actual entrance. And as you go on the entrance, there's a passageway that goes down and that goes into the bedrock. It's a chamber that has the roof is finished on it, but the floor it shows was like unfinished or something.

It's still, it wasn't what they would be considered. It looks like they were still working on it or something. Someone decided that they didn't like it and they started building somewhere else. Maybe it was a tactic to full robbers into going down there. Exactly. Then if you kind of kept going, if you came in the entrance and went straight

or like up a little bit, it would then take you on a pathway and then that one branched out. another chamber you would go in and all these chambers it seems like are built in the center of the fucking pyramid I think you're about to get to the most confusing thing in the world for me so you get into that smaller chamber they named that one the queen's chamber yeah so again we don't know if it really was the queen it could have been for more valuables for the afterlife for possessions it could have been for the goddamn dogs it could have been for like queen elizabeth had corgis this guy might have a

shit ton of cats yeah and it could have a shit ton of cats yeah then going up, you enter what's called the Grand Gallery. Now, the Grand Gallery is essentially, how many, do you remember how many feet wide it was? Uh, I don't think it was super duper wide. Wasn't it like 15 or 20 feet? It's, I think even a little bit narrower than that, but it's also tall because it's got those, what do you call the Corbled? Yeah, the Corbled stones going up. This wasn't Corbeled, my friend. The, no, no, the gallery was. Oh, yeah, yeah, not the King's Yeah, the gallery is just the, it's the foyer. Yeah, that was smaller.

That was only 10 feet going on. Yeah, so, and it's up a slope. So you'd be going up that. And then once you got into the King's Chamber, I was the, I know the Kings Chamber was made of the Red Granite, but was the Gallery also made of the Red Granite. I want to. I don't think the gallery was. I think it was just Turah. Okay.

So you get into the King's Chamber, and the King's Chamber is completely made. of polished, perfectly shaped, and pushed together red granite blocks. Now, is if that's not enough, they said you couldn't, like, someone took, you couldn't get a credit card

in any of the cracks in the King's Chamber. At the far end of it is the, basically like the, I guess what would be the outer sarcophagus, made out of a giant piece of hollowed out red granite. The way that it looks today, the lid's been stolen,

and it kind of like, it looks like a box without a lid with like a kind of a chunk taken out like an Amazon box after like my wife gets done trying to open it. It's kind of torn up a little bit. The real thing that I can't fucking figure out and I think I'm getting to what you were talking about, you look up and there are nine stones stacked up that weigh 80 between what it was at 50 to 80 tons each. Yeah, that wasn't. It wasn't, it's shocking, but I'm looking more up. I'm looking more at the roof. That's what I'm saying.

Those were the stones of the king's chamber, the roof stones of the king's chamber. There were slabs. Yes. Up on top. Yes. But just laid sideways. And there were nine of them going across. Yeah.

Not just one time. Above that nine, there was what was called a relieving chamber. It was like a pocket of air or anything like that. Yeah. Then above that. Four feet wide. Then above that, another row of these. nine giant 50 to 80 ton stones.

Another relieving chamber. Four fucking stacks of these things. Each stone, each layer having nine, each one weighing between 50 and 80 tons. And you remember what the idea behind it was? Because what was on top? It was a chevron. So a chevron is essentially the shape of the roof of a normal house.

It's the pointed arrow, but it stacks over, and it's meant to spread and distribute weight evenly out instead of like just straight. down on the center. So yeah, when you had that triangular shape on top, the brilliance of a triangle and kind of the brilliance of a pyramid is all of the weight as it's coming down the slope is not going to be pushed directly down. It's going to be pushed out towards the edges because the top part of it's going to be pushing against each other. So these relief chambers

over the top of it, granted in and of itself when it's laid like that is not very strong. It's strength, it's going to crack pretty easily. You're spreading it out too far where all the weight is in the middle and if it's going to break, that's going to be the point. Yeah. It's inflexible. So the ideas for these relief chambers is, A, all these little air gaps up there are going to lighten it up quite a bit. But when you get up to these two triangles that are pressing against each other, everything on the outside is going to be carrying all the weight. So there's going to be nothing.

There's still going to be weight pressing down on the granite roof. The weight of the fucking stone. Yeah. But at the same time, it's not going to be the weight of all the stones above it because it's going to be pressed out to where there's going to be a wall underneath. And why do you build four of them? Well, if one fails. two is definitely not going to fail, but in case two fails, the third one will catch it. What the third one doesn't catch it?

And I just put in four. Well, and you had to make it tall enough to get the point up at the top, too. That's true. Okay, so this is, I'm going to fix it on this for a second. So 50 to 80 tons. So let's just say 50 tons, 100,000 pounds per stone. Let's go on the smaller side of what these things weigh. 100,000 pounds per stone.

The King's Chamber, it's not ground level. it actually looks like the King's Chamber is what a third of the way up this thing yeah yeah I'd say the way up pretty so you're already if you're talking about a third of the way up total height of the pyramid what was it again 481 4801 let's just say you're 150

160 170 feet up you're having to transport 100,000 pounds 9 times 4 is 36 36 times and that's actually trying to figure out if any of those stones break on the way up. You have to get those up.

Okay, well, guess what? They're made of red granite. All of them are made of red granite. Guess what the area in the quarry that they're getting these stones provide doesn't have. Red granite. Where's the nearest place to get red granite? What is like 500 miles away?

560 miles south. At least it sounds. Because if it's south, you can just float them up the river. A place called Aswan. Aswan. Aswan sounds funny. Aswan. So Aswan was the place that you could get red granite.

And so these 50 to 80 pounds, and these are what they call monoliths, which means it's all one piece. These were somehow put onto boats. A hundred thousand pounds was put onto boats. and then floated 500 let's just say 500 let's even go down a little bit on that 500 miles down a river

at no point I'm guessing does that river get narrow or I don't think that the nile is pretty wide maybe never gets rough right yeah um probably not too rough I don't know if it goes from mountain ranges

any shifting at all yeah where do you where do you how do you float these things. Like what would a single stone of laid? A hundred if we're going on the conservative side of saying because they were 50 to 80, 50 to 70, 50 to 80 tons. A piece? Yes. I don't know, man. That's a. That's what I'm trying to figure out. Like just from a logistics for like, and you're having to do this with all of these stones. So you can't put more than one, of course,

right? What happens at the, a couple boats sink then you're just having, like, Like, I don't know how this was done. If someone knows the answer to this and it can actually make it make sense, please send us a comment or an email or something on this episode. Because I can't figure this shit out. This is one of the things that I'm not going to aliens. No. Because that's not even.

I even tried to watch an episode of ancient aliens just to see what kind of stuff is. I couldn't even get through it. To see if it made more sense than this. Yeah, I wasn't going to, it would have, you know what? I was afraid I was going to get too convinced. And so I had to turn it off. but there has to be something here that we don't know about this civilization as far as like their level of advancement and everything. Just for the simple fact that I have no idea how you would transport something that weighs that much this far back ago down 550 miles.

Not only 550 miles of river, you would then have to get it to the pyramid, which there's a way that they did that kind of stuff. but you would then have to get it into place once it was built high enough and you're building it as it goes. Also, fun fact, the sarcophagus that was in there was too big to be taken through any of the chambers. Both of them, the kings and the queens. Yep. And so they had to be put into place and then everything had to be built around it.

Can you imagine if you were in there working and you knocked off a chunk and it fell down and you chipped the fucking kings and everyone was just like, oh. Yeah, you just go walk. into the river. Like there's nothing. Hope you find a fucking one of those electrifying catfish real quick. Yeah. The thing, and maybe this has never been looked at, I would, if

we had just amazing amounts of money, I would try to fund this if this hasn't ever happened. I wonder if they've ever gone down that stretch of river and just seen if there's just one giant chunk of granite that's sitting at the bottom of

the riverbed somewhere that had been dropped. or a boat had sank or anything like that. Multiple. But that's what I'm saying. That would be fairly verifiable to be like, okay, they actually did this. If there's a massive chunk of granite

that sunk a boat or fell off or something like that, you can pretty easily decide and be like, yeah, no, this has some logic to it. Like, this is definitely something that could have happened. Because like you say, to float something like that,

I mean, to float something like that nowadays, I feel like we have to have, I don't think we could float anything that big down a river today. Oh, I mean, you could if it's a river as big as the Nile. Like,

you got to think of how, much like 80 tons though in a boat we have ships now man that's the whole point we have ships now that are made of steel that float not wood not reads that have optimal scientifically designed buoyancy

that have been designed in labs I think you'd still need a river that's super duper deep I don't know how deep denial is but I just this one's the toughest bridge for me I think to get across to figure out how they floated this stuff down the river. And I mean, granite doesn't float. Limestone doesn't float.

They had to float limestone down the river too. I don't know what the size of the limestone blocks were, but it's still very, very heavy to try to get down the river. So, I mean, it happened because they found pieces, they found these pieces in the pyramids that they know only comes from so far away. So they had to have done it somehow. there's there's very and fiable proof that it happened

we just don't know how it happened there's proof that it happens because it's fucking there yeah I just I have no fucking clue man it's yeah it says above the floor formed by nine slabs of stone

weighing total 400 tons and then up and up and up that's a lot but yeah as far as this complex went on the outside of it.

They had a lot of different stuff. The... Oh, wait. Before we did the complex, did you read about the casing? Oh, it was stripped off to make the mosques later on. Well, that, but, like, if you're thinking about it, so looking at the pyramid right now, this kind of actually,

fucking blew my mind with this documentary I was watching, the guy was standing about, like, 10 feet away from the base of the pyramid. Yeah. And he was like, this marker on the ground is where the pyramid actually used to kill out to. Oh, because of the thickness of the casing. Because not only that, but that's how many stones have been taken over the course of years from this thing, is that it actually pushed the thing in about 10 feet.

All the casing got completely, there isn't any casing on this, which is crazy. Because the casing stones had to basically be almost like, they had to be almost, triangular shape because if they're fitting in a square on one side, then to make it smooth, it has to be triangular. There were 144,000 casing stones on this thing, which means that 144,000 casing stones have been stolen or removed from that period. In addition to all of the stones inside in the first layer, they got taken off as well. Enough to, if you're looking at it, and if you look at the top of the pyramid, if you were to continue going at that angle, you wouldn't it would only go up i think they said maybe another 10 to 12 feet

the distance between the actual pyramid was new was you said 481 i think so yeah it was 554 so that's what 27 feet there was also another what 15 feet then or more on top of that which means that the pyramid had to be wide enough than to accommodate going all the way up that additional 15 feet like the way we're seeing it now it was bigger than that where the fuck did all those stones go man geiza is very very close I know it is we talked about this too

like there's so many stones gone how many people do you think have stones in private collections a lot I would say a lot I don't think you're allowed to climb on the Great Pyramid anymore you're only allowed to go if you have the access

where you get the permissions, you're only able to go up to. People will take pictures on the first couple steps, and there's probably someone chewing them off and everything. You can get up to, which I think is five or six levels up, the robbers tunnel. And that's where people enter in. And usually if they're able to go in and view it, and then up a little bit from that,

there's, I don't even think you're allowed to go up toward that entrance. You used to be. That, yeah. Now you're not, though. So there was a lot of tourists over time, I'm sure that chipped away at Rock or stole something or in the middle of the night, back to truck up

and tried to yank one of these things out. Were you going with the two two and a half fucking tonstone? You gotta hide it at that point too. But so for however long that it's been being protected and however long someone would be able to identify a truck

pulling up big enough to hold those stones out, of all the years of warfare that the country has seen, all of the fucking conquerors that have come in there, you know Napoleon took some of that shit. We talked about this when we were texting this week.

I was like, how much do you want to bet that inside one of Napoleon's palaces or anything like that there was a giant chunk of the Great Pyramid he's like see what I brought back they have they just have a huge pile of these there's an interesting theory with Napoleon that we'll get into and we get to the sphinx but I think he had a lot of respect for certain things I definitely think he stole his fair share of things that he had respect for too oh yeah 100% he had so much respect for him he wanted them to be his I can't even imagine if he saw that and he was like what am I going to get buried in?

Yeah. Yeah, there's just some big pyramid out on whatever island it was that he died in France. But just, I mean, there's so many things that can't be, don't have like an actual explanation that I can actually wrap my head around in regards to this. The thing with it only taking 27 years to complete, they said the workforce on this was probably around, what, 30,000? They used to think it had to take in like 100,000 people to do it. They're like, no, 30,000 guys could handle this. So Herodotus, who came down a very long time after this had been built,

had written something about it saying that the labor force worked part of the year and the labor force was 90,000 strong. Now, again, this guy didn't see it firsthand. We'll put it this way. So Herodotis probably wasn't too far behind Cleopatra in the grand scheme of time. Anyone who's maybe heard this fact before, Cleopatra, the time of Cleopatra,

is closer to today than it was to when the pyramids were built. She is closer to today in time than when the pyramids of Giza were completed. That's how fucking old these are. Herodotus was, I think, a ways before her, though. Even if he was aways. Yeah. He's going to come back

the thing's already going to kind of be probably a little bit degraded. How's he going to have any fucking... The thing about, didn't they call him the great liar as well? So, of course, he's trying to pump up his stories and bump him up and everything. But like, to just look at that and be like, I believe this took 90,000 men to complete. I honestly, looking at it today, have not knowing anything about this, I would have said more. I would have, I would have balled that up higher if I said to guess. I think I still would have been like, I don't care if you have.

have a million guys. You can't have a million guys pushing something because the ramp would be too big. Like just the logistics, if even like you can't, guess what? You can't float them on their bodies. If you had it, like there still has to be boats that are built that are able to support these fucking stones. So I mean, after this thing ends up being completed, how do you, how do you follow this? How do you follow this with an encore? Well, we got to get to the fun part of his, um, his burial complex. Oh, yes. That's, Because there's something that I really had no understanding, and I had to listen to it a few times to really get it. So his whole funeral complex, it's the pyramid. It had two mortuary temples in it where they believe, like all the offerings and everything were left.

They also, I think, this is where they did the embalming and the mummification process, the preservation process. Yeah, because it was a necropolis, is basically what it still was. And so I would assume that they're doing literally all of that because it's so sacred and only certain people would have access to it, like the highest of high priests and everything to do this kind of stuff. I would assume that it was all done at this place specifically built, essentially for his corpse. So in these mortuary temples, this blew me away. These high priests would work in these mortuary temples.

And there was a belief that the physical body would stay here. They would make statues as far as like effigies for the bodies, while the spiritual bodies were trying to reconcile with raw and then come back down and complete in the perfect body. So these statues that they would have, these high priests would be in there for most of the day, they would do things like they would actually dress the statues in linens and they would bless the statues.

They would basically treat them like it was the body of the person outside of it, but they would do just all these different rituals inside these mortuary that were happening like every day. You're so beautiful. Yeah. It puts on the headdress and it's like, you're beautiful. So these temples, are like, we're going to take care of you in the afterlife.

Beyond the temples, you had tombs for family in anybody that's in his court, so you're going to have anybody that's close to him. Yeah, this is a very funny part. We're all going to party in the afterlife. I need to keep you guys close. Well, and to maybe satisfy his first wife in the afterlife, he had three smaller pyramids that were erected on the burial complex for his other wives that he had. after her. Still visible today. There's three smaller pyramids, you can see.

They get the pyramids, but they don't get to be in the big pyramid because they were the wives after the queen the first time. And then the weirdest thing is there's two large holes, and in one of the holes, they found a completely deconstructed ship. Yeah. That was outside the pyramid, right? Outside the pyramid, but it was still in the complex for his pyramid. And this was his ship.

the only thing about the ship was it didn't have a sail on it so it could never go back upriver and fight against the current and they also said that the ores the spiritual current you're not talking about it. No the actual like if it was a boat that he had used. Okay. They said that it didn't have the mast so it couldn't have ever gone up the Nile

and the oars weren't like they actually recreated it in like a seven foot boat. This was like a 150 foot long boat. They said that the oars weren't going to be effective with as long in the way that they were built was. So the belief in, you pitched me the first one that you had heard about this boat was built and then set next to the temple so he could boat through the afterlife. Damn, he wanted like, you know, party yacht.

Uh-huh. The other theory that I had heard was it was built so it could carry him from the east side, which is where everybody lived to the west side. I was just going to ask that because this was built on the other side of the river. That's how it was also kind of partitioned off from people. It was on the other side of the now. I imagine that that's what the boat was also used. It was just incorporated like, oh, if he needs a boat now, he's going to need a boat in the afterlife.

And they honestly probably, I wouldn't be surprised if they carried him on the boat. Yeah. Because they had to transport the boat there. So if his body is already on there, maybe they got the boat to there, took his body off of it. And then they deconstructed and buried the boat. They actually had two different ways that they would build boats back then, too. Again, didn't have nails. So this imported wood to make the boats, they would either use pegs to peg the pieces of wood together.

Yeah, they would. And then you would have to set it in the water or get it wet so it would swell up to make it water tight. They actually used to sew boats together where they would cut holes in them, drill holes in them with whatever rudimentary drill that they had. And then use like sinew to actually bind them together. So sewing pieces of wood together and they would sew them. tight that again once they would get them wet and make them water tight there weren't any pegs or anything that hold it it was just actually two pieces of wood that were sewed together next to each other they said that part of the reason that they did it was so that they could break down boats faster

so if they needed like if they had a long portage to go or if they needed to store it and they couldn't just keep it in the river because there weren't like any stagnant bodies of water they could just break them down and then rebuild them again when they needed them so the boat's actually reconstructed and it's in a museum in geiza now completely reconstructed in its own little area. A pretty cool boat, to say the least. Speaking of a boat,

so I forgot to mention. So once you get everything down the river, because again, you're having to bring in all the Turr-Lymstone for the casing, and then you've got to bring in

the impossible fucking stones that didn't really move that were somehow put there by other means. You had to still get them to the pyramid complex. And so they actually dug a canal that went from the Nile

all the way up and created like an artificial lake and harbor next to the building site for the pyramid and basically had like Kufu's Lake and would bring in all the shipments and there were docks and everything that they could offload all of this shit and then get it to

the pyramid faster. Pretty brilliant. It's fucking nuts. Pretty brilliant. Pretty smart. So yeah, I don't know. Do you have anything else on the Great Pyramid? I don't, but this one is making me take another bathroom break.

Okay. All right. I think I've got the Great Pyramat. I've got it out of me. I'm glad. We can move on. It's a lot to be in you. Jadafre is going to be the next successor to Kufu. He took a completely different approach.

He actually took his pyramid in his burial complex to a place called Abu Ravash, which is north of Giza. So another stone place, but I don't know why he tried to get away from. Giza. I don't know if it was like he wanted to be a little bit different. I think he figured he's like, fuck, I don't think I can beat that one. It took so long to build. You know what? And it's not going to look as impressive, even if it's a little bit bigger. It's not going to look that much more impressive. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to catch everybody coming in first and have them see my peer admitted and then just be like, good people. Nothing more to see here. This is as big as it gets. Turn around. Go back to your homes. I like that theory because it actually worked against him.

And his pyramid is now completely plundered. When the Romans showed up in town, the Romans just went ahead and tore it down and used all the stones to build their shit. Yeah. And then by the time they got to the other pyramids, they're like, we're so fucking tired. Look how big these things are. Is it like, did we get enough stones from the first? Yeah, we're good on stones. Yeah.

Those stones are like a lot bigger than this one. just the fact that he went off and his was the only one that like basically gets destroyed seems kind of funny. It was like they thought well this is the only one we'll ever see so if we destroy it nobody will ever know that they built these awesome pyramids.

There's more. They got to, he's like we can't destroy these. So he ends up he has a younger brother correct? Yep Coffre. So Coffre ends up being his younger brother so I'm guessing Jadofre did not have any sons because they would have been in the line of succession. Probably not. The line of succession

is kind of a weird tentative thing. We talked about it. I spent too much time trying to figure it out. So these dynasties with the way that they worked, a dynasty would continue if the king had a son that was born of him from his first queen. So his, I guess, full royal child. But if he had a son that was born with a concubine

or a second or third wife... Yeah. He would... That would start a new dynastic line. Okay. So it's kind of like you're a half... child of the royal family. But you would still be a pharaoh, but you're a new dynasty if you're the only one.

Okay, so it's not like it disqualified you. It's just like, yeah, you're not part of this dynasty. You're going to have to, a dynasty's full. You're going to have to go start your own dynasty. Which, who the fuck cares? Who cares if you're in the same dynasty? You're starting your own dynasty. You're like, I don't fucking need your dynasty.

I got my own dynasty now. Well, and again, I don't think dynasties were really words that they used. I think the dynasties have come with... That makes so much sense. Studying it. We put the title to that. Yeah, they never called themselves. So after he dies,

Coffre, his brother actually succeeds him. And Coffre's like, nope, we're going back. And again, the pyramid hasn't been destroyed at this point. He doesn't know what fate beholds for that one. He's like, you know what? Is there any way that we could build one next to dads and it can be bigger?

And his guy came in and was like, well, technically yes. He's like, then fucking do it. So I, and I kind of, brought this point up to you, when you see a picture of all of the pyramids, when it does that picture, the three shot, the three shot. With the great pyramid even in front, it looks like the one behind it. The second one is larger. It's the one that if you're looking at pictures of it, it's the one that still has some of the casing along like the capstone around like the top

of it. And in the pictures, yes, it does look bigger. So how do you? Technically too, in all reality, uh, if it goes higher in the air. Correct. So how do you accomplish this? Well, you just, what you do is you try to increase the appeal of the size, kind of like when you trim your bushback to try to make it look bigger. The root, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So what you do is you just use more root.

So what Coffre ends up doing is as far as scale, his is actually the second largest, but it appears taller because he built it up starting on 33 feet of bedrock. He basically found a higher point. Yep. right back behind his old man's and was like, are we, wait, are we standing taller than the floor of his pyramid down there? And they're like, yes, we are. And he's like, build it here. We're building it right here. So it's taller because it's, what, 33 feet, the base. It's up 33 feet more before it even starts. Yep. Yeah. So you have 10 more meters of bedrock below it. So technically the pyramid is smaller, but it sits higher in the air because it's raised higher on bedrock. Yeah. Which a surprisingly small amount of information.

On Coffre's. It literally looks taller, and you would think with all of this time we have to study the pyramids, there would be a lot more. No, Kufus gets all the shine, which I understand it, it's technically bigger,

but you'd think we would get a block count, we would get some facts about it, slim pickings. Well, arguably, Coffre's pyramid wasn't the, like, most mind-blowing thing that he built. That is true. Maybe that's also why it doesn't get as much.

what else did he oh one thing that it did do that I thought was cool the first like area around the stones and everything like that were actually pink granite so he still did the like the limestone casing going up to where it was like polished white but then around the bottom was all blocks and casing of pink granite he wanted to add just a little bit a little bit extra to it that and I wonder if maybe they had realized that granite was a sturdier stone to build on than limestone

I think it was for the look because why would they build the rest of it like that? It had to been just a little window dressing. Yeah, it could have been window dressing. I also think that the weight probably would have become a much bigger factor had it all been granite. Probably. That and again, you have to source it from forever away. Yeah, who knows where there's fucking pink granite.

So we come to, which is technically debatable if it's cough raise. There's no way it's not. Okay, we'll discuss that. But what do we get to, Adam? I have a feeling your discussion's going to be much. longer than my discussion. The Sphinx, I think everyone's familiar with the Sphinx. It is the man lion that sits out in front of Koffrey's pyramid.

Do you want to, go ahead and you can go ahead and start on this. I would like to hear your position on the Sphinx. So the Sphinx, it, technically it sits like almost directly straight out in front of Koffrey's pyramid. And it actually sits so directly out in front of it that each one of these pyramids had what's called the causeway. It's basically like a street. The causeway had to have just been where they brought everything up and where they let all the stones and everything in. It was just a road that was built for them to make that happen. Well, in the causeway for Coffreys Temple, or Jesus, Cochreys Pyramid, there was just this big ass chunk of limestone right in the middle of it.

So they uncover it. They're looking at it. They're like, well, what do we do with it? We can't knock it out and move it. It's way too big. Coffre probably, and again, these are all theories,

Coffrey probably wanted to have something a little bit different than his father, his grandfather, everybody else was building pyramids. And he kind of wanted to show his sign of more of a divine nature, I think. I think he did it. I don't think he looked at the block because the crazy thing about the Sphinx, it is not made of blocks. It is actually shaped just out of, basically, they started carving, starting at the head, kind of like Petra.

They started at the top, and they carved it all the way down and then cleared the area around it. It is all one piece of stone. Yeah, which extremely impressive. The way that they carved it out, it is a lion at the back. and then it is a, like a relief, a sculptured out of Coffre's face. And again, this is all inside of Coffre's pyramidal complex. So everything that is there is a dedication to him. The rocks that you were talking about, how they dug out around the Sphinx,

were actually used to build the mortuary temple that's in front of the Sphinx, too. It's like the temple of the Sphinx, right? That's what it would later become when the cult started. but it was his mortuary temple that was built out there. The interesting thing about it in a point against, I think, a point for your side and a point against my side is there's not a single inscription that connects Coffrey to the Sphinx as far as like there's no name or anything like that. The best guess is the, like I say, the sculpture that his face or the face that's on the Sphinx

completely resembles all the release that anybody's ever seen of Coffray, it was inside of his temple or anything pertaining to Coffrey. Everything looks very, very similar. It has a pharaoh's headdress on it, which some people confuse his hair. It's actually the headdress on it is... Like the cobra style. Yeah, it's modeled after that. Underneath his chin, interestingly enough,

pharaohs for some reason back in the day were pretty cool with like no hair. I don't know if it was a sign of purity to not have a lot of hair, but a lot of them would shave their heads, wear wigs, during normal times. No facial hair, but they actually had this thing that is, it was like a hair dildo, that they would strap underneath their chin like a hairdo, yeah.

They would strap underneath their chin, and it would actually have loops that would go up over their ears, so it would be like a braided goatee that they would wear out, even the women, even... Like a chin cod piece. Yeah, a lot like that, yes. And underneath the Sphinx's ears, there's actually drilled holes where some,

something would have been able to hang down on the chin. They found it. Yeah. Part of it is in a library in Giza, and then the other part is in a museum in England. It's not on display. It's just sitting in the back, gaining dust. Oh, no.

Special people get it to go back there. Well, yeah, I'm sure they do. But, hey, you kids want to see the good shit. Egypt's made many requests to get it back, because they think if they get it back, they might be able to put it back together and actually put it on the face of the sphinx. So I think Egypt probably, I mean, they don't have any room for it. They don't have a reason to put it out because also it's a pretty bad look because then you have to explain how you got it and that's not always great.

But if they were to give that back, there is quite a few other Egyptian relics such as the Rosetta Stone that they're also holding on to. You got what you needed from it. How much passed that back over there? Exactly. That dirty little Frenchman took it. If you start by giving back the Sphinx's goate, then they're going to be asking for everything else next. And you kind of want to hold on to that shit. Even though it's not yours, you were able to achieve getting it by scrupulous means.

But you want to hold on to it. So I'm sure that one's not as big of a deal as all the other relics that they have. But it would be an idea to where they could go ahead and just attach it back, which I think would be pretty sweet to see it. There's also the myth that the nose was shot off by Napoleon with a cannon. But there are earlier accounts of Napoleon, like before he got there, accounts of people that saw it that did say that the nose was already missing. So, and again, Napoleon, he had a lot of great reverence for monuments and different things like that, but anything that he couldn't, he took anything that wasn't nailed down.

And the Sphinx was just a little too big to be taken. So counter argument. Okay. Okay. So I don't know. Oh, that wasn't my argument. That was just explaining it. So I don't think Koffrey built the Sphinx.

And I think the Sphinx, I'm not saying the pyramids are or anything like that. But I think the Sphinx is actually older. And no idea where it comes from. I just believe it to be older than the pyramids. I think it may have been initially just because of the layout and from kind of what I've heard is looking at all of the other Egyptian sculpture and statues and everything, everything is always proportionate. There's never really, and there's several other like lions and sphinx that are actually carved. Glad you brought this up.

Okay. That are proportionate. The head is so disproportionate to the body that what I think it was initially is whoever carved it beforehand, I believe that it was actually like a lion. And they said that even with like the chin thing that there were like, there was like a lion goddess of the hunt or anything because again they were in africa and it was used as like a guard or some type of like not a temple because it's all out of one piece of rock but that because it was the lion it had a main and everything like that when they recarved it they recarved it and of course chipped

away to make it look like coffrey the other reason i think that is because the head itself has the least amount of erosion compared to like the area around it and also on the body and all the accounts of when this thing was actually found, both during other dynasties and everything like that, it got covered by sand. Like the sand came in and covered it, and they would be able to find it by where the head was. So if the bottom of it is covered by sand,

even for a good period of, or a short period of time more than the head is covered, then the head should technically show the most erosion and be in the worst shape of everything. So we would only stand a reason that any of the eroded stuff when they were recarving it, that layer would then be taken off when they were reshaping it into Coffre's head. The combination of that and just the proportion of it when all their other stuff appears to be very proportionate makes me think that that thing

was there beforehand. I'm not going to get into the erosion shit or anything because I don't know about that and it can kind of seem off the wall, but just from the fact of whatever the natural erosion there in the desert was, the head doesn't show it as much as the body. Do you want the bummer about the proportions? Sure. So underneath the Sphinx, there are just a bunch of cracks in the limestone through just all sorts of tectonic shifts and everything that have happened underneath it. It is on a plateau, so it's already raised up. Well, it's also, it can't move.

It's one solid piece. It's not like the pyramid that could technically shift a little bit. Yeah. Because, again, yeah, it's one solid piece. So there's no relief going back and forth. So there's a bunch of cracks underneath it. And they said just sort of through. the way that they've 3D scaled it

and modeled it and seen where the cracks are. The reason that it's elongated is because the legs in the back had they been shorter, it would have been over a fault line. So as you're chipping away and you're carving out the feet, the feet would just immediately crumble because there wouldn't be enough rock to be able to be held together.

So they actually had to push it back because, and again, a theory when they were carving out the feet, they realized that they couldn't make it that short because the toes and everything would just crumble over this line of this fault line that was right below it, this crack that was right below it. Okay. So they made it an extra amount longer so they could be able to construct everything.

Because if the body is just over the fault line, it's not going to crack because it's still just one big piece. Whereas you're carving out a paw and a foot and everything like that, the pieces are going to be getting smaller. They're going to be less strength to it. So they're going to be more prone to cracking and falling apart. So as they were building it back and they realized they couldn't do it, they just continued to carve it back further and further until they found a space where they could do the feet correctly. How do they know about the fault line and like all the work that they did when they were building it? Because like I say, if they were carving it out and everything started to crumble, they realized that that wasn't a good spot for it.

But how would they know that it was crumbling? Because they would be carving on feet. Not them. How do we know now that that's what they were doing? Because underneath the body, you can see where the cracks are. I like mine. Yeah, you like it. it. There's still no explanation for why they would have done it. Why they would have recarved it or why they would have done a lion? What would the Sphinx be protecting on a plateau out away from any major city? That's what I'm saying. If it was built, essentially if it was older, it could have essentially just been like an idol or something like that. Just out in the middle of nowhere? Maybe. Facing the wrong direction.

You understand that there could have also been something there on the Giza Plateau that was much smaller that stuff could have either been built on top of or demolished. I don't... We're going to spend too much time on this. We're going to... Hey, we're going to let the... We're going to put out... What do you call it? A pole? Well, a poll, but like the thing that you can do on instead or whatever.

Is it a poll? Yeah, I think I'm just going to pull. Okay, we're putting out a poll after this episode releases or by the time this episode releases to see which you guys think, which one. Who's right? We're going to let the people decide. Yeah. Yeah, so go actual built that way. Yeah, this thing was goddamn massive, even for just what it was. It was 66 feet tall, so 20 meters tall.

The width on it was 62 feet or 19 meters, and the length was 240 feet or 73 meters. So yeah, much, much longer than anywhere else. More wiener dog shaped than lion shape. Maybe that was it. Maybe we got it confused, and it's a wiener dog body on a pharaoh's head. You think they started, like, worshipping Dotsons? Could have been, yeah, yeah. It's the oldest non-monument in Egypt.

Again, we talked about the beard and everything like that. The stones that were cut from the sphinx, like I say, were used to build a temple that wasn't completely finished out in front of it. So there was kind of some question on if Koffrey had passed away during the time when they were building that kind of stuff. It's just a, it's such a massive thing. I mean, they have them. We have a sphinx in Las Vegas. again right next to the Luxor. Yeah, exactly.

Oh yeah, that reminds me also for some scale for anybody here in the States that have been to Vegas. So the Luxor Pyramid, that's, did I say it's a three-quarter scale? So it's 25% smaller. It's only 75% the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza. So if you've been to Vegas and you've seen that, fucking bigger.

Yeah, that's, and the one in Vegas is ginormous. So after moving on from, The debatable construction projects of Coffre, who do we get to next? Mencaray. Mencaray is responsible for the smallest pyramid on the Giza Plateau. And when I say smallest, I'm still talking about a tiny 339 feet tall or 103 meters at the base. Smallest by comparison of the other two big-ass ones next to it. Yeah, well, 215 feet.

sorry, I don't know why I wrote those backwards. 215 feet tall, 65 and a half meters tall. 339 feet at the base, 103 meters at the base. So it's still got a pretty fat base on it, but I want to say the last one was like 730 feet for a base. The biggest one? Along the walls. The second biggest one, maybe it was.

Oh, no. It had a smaller base. So Coffre is one, the one that was technically taller. Yeah. Its base was 706. So it was smaller, like I said, like weight-wise and like structure-wise, smaller than the Great Pyramid. That's why it's the Great Pyramid. It's the larger one technically.

But yeah, so it was both technically shorter and then the sides were smaller, but because of that 33-foot. The raise from Bedrock. Bedrock bump. Yeah. And this kind of signals something a little bit different for Mencare and kind of, I think, Egypt as a whole. His barrel complex, there were three other smaller pyramids on it. There was a valley temple in there just like everything. else a place to worship.

As these pharaohs were dropping off, again, I mentioned the priests are working on these effigies. They're working to keep these spirits going in the afterlife while being more of the messengers to say, hey, these guys are kings, these guys are deities, these guys talk to the Lord. We're helping them through that process. Just know that raw above all else, God, above all else, is... You think it got to the point where they were putting themselves, they thought that they may have been trying to put themselves a little bit too far out of station.

And so maybe they were an influence of saying like, you know what? This bigger thing, we actually heard from Raw. And you guys are getting a little close. He says like, whoa, whoa, whoa, not too close. So what he wants, he's actually looking for something a little bit smaller, a little bit more humble and everything. So that's what Raw wants. The guy's like, oh, okay.

So we'll just make it smaller? Well, I think it's kind of like a two-prong approach. I think something that you said earlier is very salient to this point. I don't think they were drawn a lot of interest from the people to continue to build these things because they're all massive. It's back to back, man. Yeah. Like when they say the age of pyramids, you're literally going from just in the time since, was it Snufuru? Mm-hmm.

Three with him. Then you go straight from him into Kufus, the Lord's. Great pyramid, yep. Then you go straight from that into probably building another one up north. Yeah. You're still building that one. Then you're coming back to Giza and you're building the one for Kufuru. So there's definitely...

You're getting fucking... What do you call it? Burned out. Yeah. You're getting pyramid burned out. You're getting pyramid sick every time you hear about it. I think that was a big factor in it. Also, I think the tides of Egypt were changing a lot.

I think financially there was a little bit more of a burden. There's a weather event that takes place a little bit later on. There's an eruption of a volcano. Bad research on this point. We're pretty deep in. I should have nailed this. But there was a volcano eruption that happened. And these weather-changing patterns were starting to change the flow of the Nile.

Obviously, you get a little less flow of water into the Nile. Your crop yields a little bit lower. That means you're going to have to eat into storage more. The next time it comes around, you're going to have to refill storage, and you're going to have to keep filling mouths. And I don't think it would take much either. If you get into any situation, we talk about this on several of the episodes, the only time that you can do stuff like this that isn't specifically necessary for survival

is when all of that other stuff necessary for survival isn't in question or any danger. Reverse change, you get off seasons. All it takes is one or two years where you don't get as much rainfall. And especially if you're one of these civilizations, that's so attuned to what you think that your deities want. Yeah. And you're trying to interpret messages. And all of your messages are related to natural phenomenon

and things like that and the priests. You get a couple bad seasons, especially like, let's imagine that the last one that was completed was um, uh, kufurus. It's a huge pyramid. And all of a sudden,

a couple years later you have a drought. And then the next year you have a drought. And it's like, what was the last thing we did that was kind of in honor of the god and all this kind of stuff? and you're like, well, maybe it's punishment, or maybe we need to do something different. So I could definitely see kind of shying away from that.

And then if you do get those, you know, occurrences where your survival is threatened, you're going to have a much, everyone's going to be in, you know, panic mode trying to gather as many crops or grow them in different places. You're not, like you said, going to have a workforce that's even, not even willing, but available to come in and take care of these huge projects. So I think it's a combination. It's got to be, I don't think it's combination. Never mind. I think it's got to be purely based upon what the, I don't want to say the economic status, but essentially the social status of the people of this area, the people of Egypt are.

Oh, yeah. And another, when you're talking about financials and you're talking about the economy of Egypt, if you are having lean years on grain or any agriculture or anything like that, not only do you have to feed your people still and you have to have the storage, but if you don't have anything to export, you don't have any money or anything coming back in trade to fill the coffers to be able to build these temples or to build these pyramids.

The other thing, too, these pyramids aren't making money. No, no, they're just... It's not a tourist attraction like it is. It's going to become one... Even, you know, that's why it becomes one of the seven wonders of the ancient world is that once the Greeks and Romans find out about this, it then does become a tourist attraction,

but this is still so far away that once this thing is built, it's not an income generating thing. Well, and you don't, there are still temple, or fuck me, there are still pyramids that show up later on in the history of Egypt, but nothing near the size that they are. Excuse me, moving out of the fourth dynasty into the fifth dynasty, this dynasty starts to sort of change, again,

the idea that Ra and the sun god need to be first and four, foremost front and center. Um, they're credited with the cult of raw and they constructed sun temples in a place called Abusir and it was sort of drawing more attention to being able to like some these places were nuts. Like they would be temples that would be built with actual holes in the ceiling to where a certain time of day, the light from raw would be shining down onto the statues of

themselves that were built inside of it. So it's almost like the sun is shining on your king. He's still in favor. I know it only happens during the point of the day where the hole that we punched in the roof comes through, but you guys aren't thinking of that kind of stuff. So there's still a little bit of manipulation, but they're starting to less worship the kings and more try to bring it back to a religious standpoint. Hey, over here.

Over here. Attention over here. Yeah. They had a very quick succession of kings. and when you have these successions of kings happening over and over and over again, you kind of start to wonder like, hey, if these guys are really divine, why do they keep dropping dead? When you start having a lot of turnover, people start to question stuff, become disinterested. Another thing, you know, thinking about the episode we did on Greece, when you start to become more advanced,

I'm assuming at this point because they are already doing trade with like Lebanon for the timber and all that kind of stuff. Sinai for a ton of different things. If you're having people come in and out, that's also how you get foreign diseases coming in and out. So at this point, too, I didn't read anything about it, but I imagine that at some point during, you know, from going from the fourth to fifth or the third dynasty of anything, you would get illnesses that sweep through these areas that take out a chunk of your populace to where it's going to be smaller. So you're going to have less of a workforce. You're also going to have people that are worried less about like, if you're the king or the pharaoh and this stuff is coming through, you're going to be like, you're fucking up, dude. You're not a deity. Like the gods are not happy with you.

I think that is actually the beginning of the fall of the middle pyramid is when the diseases started sweeping through because they started bringing people in from other countries for like different dedications of things. Dedication slavery. Well, like dedications of like temples or any sort of big things like that. But yeah, it's you have all these different elements that are coming into play along with these weather changes that are happening. you're still not doing too bad though like everything's still doing pretty well we move into the sixth dynasty and it basically started

the sixth dynasty starts at its peak this is the best that the sixth dynasty is going to get we're bouncing back we're not building these fucking pyramids anymore we're starting to focus on the stuff that matters we're going to start mining we're going to be trade with people and then we're going to start looking to conquer some areas

yeah military expeditions were huge because they would bring back a ton of spoils if you won plus they would bring back human capital. Oh, you're getting good shit from over there. Go out and get more good shit. Yeah. And if you can take these areas over, then you can start to just mine their good shit

and bring it in instead of just trading with them. That also brings a lot of fire back towards Egypt, though, because there's a lot of people that are putting up a fight. One of the other things that we didn't talk about during the construction as far as slavery and everything went, the thing that kind of made me take pause when I thought there had to be slaves. I really thought about it,

and it was a point that was brought up by, I think it was a professor that I was listening to give a speech or give a lecture. But he said that weaponry at that point in time wasn't up to snuff enough to where if you had a very large group of indentured servants or slaves that if you pissed them off,

they weren't just going to be able to over certain. Not a high likelihood of revolt. Yeah, the revolt would have won out every single time. You're not making your own weapons. Yeah, exactly. Basically, weapons are not going to be able to be made. You're going to have to steal the weapons from the people making it in order to have really any. But the people that are watching over the slaves, they don't have weapons to be able to quell a mass rebellion.

So if everybody just picks up a limestone rock out of the quarry and walks over to the dude and bashes them in the head, they can leave pretty quickly. Like, there's not a lot of ways there were, like, I think, crude bows and arrows and shit like that. But one of the things that takes them down later on is people coming in on chariots that hit us. that had understood horses and everything and how to battle that way. The Mongols completely conquered the entire empire because of horses. Yeah.

Because they knew how to, like that's the thing. It's cavalry, we've talked about this in Central America man. If horses are this thing that is, it's a moving weapon. Yeah. Yeah, it's a four-legged tank at that point.

But they start to get a lot of blowback from that. They start to rely more on these regional, governors called no marks. Well, yeah, you're conquering these new lands and everything. You're spreading out. You're not going to be able to instantly have control. So you have to establish leadership in these areas that then report to you for their leadership. But even in like upper Egypt being that far away from Memphis and that far away from everything else, there's a lot of people, especially during lean years, are like, well, we can send some shit back to the king into the royal city, but we also have to keep some stuff here in case things go worse for us. Like I have to watch out for you guys

over watching out for the king more. And, or you're going to march your army out there again. Yeah. And then what's going to happen if you march your army out there and fight someone on the other side is going to be like, hmm, they're weakened now and just move theirs in. So there was probably some, some fear there as well. Well, and then you have this regional warfare that's going on between these cities because left to their own devices, if they need something that somebody else has, they're going to start in fighting just among villages in Egypt. Yeah. So you're going to have those kind of problems. Kind of the death knell. And I love this guy's name to, Pepe the second. Nice.

Pepe the second is... Pharaoh Pepe the second. Yeah, dude, it's just an awesome name. Like, did you imagine listening to somebody speak Egyptian and then they just fire out of Pepe's pyramid? Pepe's pyramid would have been cool. It probably would have sold like tacos or something. But Pepe is arguably the longest ruling monarch in history. Pepe went ahead and ascended the throne at the age of six years old.

So they believe that Pepe was probably like the rule. in name, but his mother was kind of the one behind the scenes. Yeah, it happened a lot where females would take kind of a behind the scenes role where they'd never be called the king, but there was a lot of rulership. There was one that happened during the, I think it was a fifth dynasty that she was pretty

cool. She did a lot of good stuff. But when Pepe comes in as a kid, whoever was running kind of the exploration, expeditions of it, sent a lot of troops down into the southern portions

of Africa to start kind of searching out, expanding, seeing what's out there. More south, you mean south of Egypt? Yeah, South Africa. Not like South Africa. No, no, no. Further down in Africa, but south of Egypt. And there's one story, I forgot this dude's name too. It's late in the episode and I forgot to look up these names. But he was a leader of an expedition and he actually found a little person. They think that it could have potentially been a pygmy from the tribe in Africa and brought it back.

And this guy was so fired up about bringing this guy back that Pepe had actually written him a letter saying that he wanted to meet him. And he said, when you're bringing him up to the little guy? Yeah. Okay. When you're bringing him up the boat, I want you to put your two biggest guards on each side of him. So that way there's no chance of him falling out of the boat. Like bring him to my, my temple at once.

I must meet him. I must be around him. And there was something like all the spoils that you brought back or everything that you brought back, Pails and comparisons. into this little man that you've brought me. And he was so fired up about the letter that he actually had it inscribed on the wall of his tomb.

The letter word for word. He's probably seen everything else. Yeah. He's seen every other spoil, but he had never seen. He's like, so it's a child. And they're like, no. He was only like 10 at the time that this happened.

I realized that. But what I'm saying is they're like, no, he is a man. But he is small like a child. And he's like, he's small like you. He's like, I don't, I'm not getting this. I need to see this guy. Like I said, the guy that was the leader of the

expedition that brought him back was so happy to get a letter from the king that he actually had it inscribed in his tomb word for word what the letter said back from the king. Really? Yeah. So that's how we know that this all happened. But Pepe, and again, this is all, I've heard a million different numbers for his reign, but he was a very, very long, long reigning king. 94 years is disputed. They think that his reign was probably in the mid 80s and he could have died at like, 94. He died at 100 is what they're. Could have. died at 100 for 94 years, probably more likely. They said it was very long time, so it could have been 80s and he might have died at age 94. But the problem with that is your king is supposed

to be the leader of everything. And as time goes on and things don't change and you kind of get more of the same, you kind of get bored. As he gets older, all of his children, all the heirs, all the new kings and everything like that are also getting older at the same time. Well, here's the thing too. That doesn't mean he was a good king. No, that didn't mean that. And if he's not a great king or not even a competent king, you have 94 years. Let's even just say the 80 years. You have 80 years of possible mediocrity, poor leadership, that kind of stuff. That can fucking drive a civilization into the side of the mountain.

Well, and if you're being attacked or anything like that or you need to go on the offensive, the guy that's calling all the shots is too old to be worrying about. Yeah, pop pops behind the wheel and he might not want to go out and run the troops or anything like that. So like you say, as this mediocrity goes on, goes on, he finally drops off the face of the planet. He finally goes up and meets Raw. All of his heirs and all of the children that then would become king are so old that they're getting like two-year rules in. And there's probably so many of them too. Yeah.

Can you imagine? Because they're not only, they're having kids too. So the line of succession is like boom, boom, boom, boom, but there's a huge supply of them. He's a great, great-grandfather. And there's a ton of them. But is they're not living as long and they're going in and out? all these regional, these no marks are like, well, I mean, we're not getting a lot of great leadership from the top. Let's just focus on us and we see a divide of this upper and lower

Egypt happen again where kingship becomes nothing. Ceremonial. Well, yeah. Hey, sure you're the king. When your kingdom is divided, you don't have a kingdom to rule over. You just have a bunch of warring factions that are looking to either. And you're a little piece of land. Yeah, to take you out or to be.

build up a resistance against you. So this is kind of where we see the fall into what's called the intermediate period. The intermediate period is just warring within Egypt before we get a ruler to reunite upper and lower. Yeah, where leadership is essentially just changing hands. Well, who's the most, it's not centralized and like you said, it's not unified. So basically it's a chaotic period where it's just kind of swapping hands. Sometimes it's not even swapping hands with people within like Egypt or anything like that. It's being taken over by foreign, you know, foreign invaders and that kind of stuff.

Well, and we have, this is how long Egyptian history is we have two of these intermediate periods. Yeah. We have another one that comes up after the Middle Kingdom. Again, man, if we're talking about the sixth dynasty, you know, the pyramids were during the fourth, we have the sixth here. We're still a thousand years plus away from even like talking about like Cleopatra, the Ptolemaic, the Ptolemaic reign, like Alexander, all that kind of stuff. So exactly why we couldn't handle this stuff in one episode. It's going to take several, which we'll cover over the course of of making these things for you guys. But yeah, it's a meaty, meaty topic.

Hopefully we wet your guys' beaks on it a little bit. And do you have anything else on this thing? This might be the funnest part of Egyptian history as far as like the shit that they built. Later on down the line when we start talking about Ramsey's and get into the Ptolemaic rains and everything like that, it's so much more battle and war and taking over and being taken over. Well, that seems like a cool part. Yeah, and this is kind of where we start to see the intermingling of like the Israelites, shit that's in the Bible that we've just passed, not we, but most people have

passed off. It's like, yeah, this is a story. This is shit that religion. That's how you make a story last, though. You have to intersperse actual facts that you can track back and be like, no, you see they were there at that time. It's like, but was there really? did he really part the ocean?

It's like, well, they were there at that time. So, like, that's, you have to have, it's like when you have to, like, pepper in kernels of truth when you're trying to tell a lie. So there's enough to ground it in reality. Oh, before we go, the story of Moses parting the Red Sea, not the first time that we have a story

of somebody parting water in Egypt. Really? Yeah, so, um, the first, Sneffuru, he, there was one story that they had picked off of something and I don't even remember where it was. It must have been a tablet or something. But he was known as a fairly likable guy. And since there was a story about him being ferried at an older age down the Nile. And he had women that were rowing for him. And one of the women was wearing an amulet, I believe it was turquoise. I think it was a turquoise amulet.

And as she bent over to row, her amulet fell off and fell into the water. And he realized, that she looked troubled so it was like hey what's up my amulet slipped off and it fell into the Nile he's like I'm the king don't worry about it'll get you new and she's like no I want this one this one is mine and this is the one that I want and this is what's the river so

he had a magician come down as one does it was either a magician or a priest honestly I think they're probably right around the same thing in today's times but he actually parted the Nile River to where they could find the amulet so the amulet could be given back to the woman that was

paddling his boat down the river. Such a benevolent king, man of the people. I don't know if maybe this is where the Moses parting the Red Sea story could have come from, but there is some previous fact that maybe was thrown into religious texts. Yes, yeah. Little fan fiction that might have taken place after.

Exactly. All right, guys. Well, thanks for joining us for another week. Remember, read, rate, review, subscribe, five stars, if you please. And yeah, let us know what you. you guys think and anything you'd like to see in the future. Later guys. Peace.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, thanks for joining us for another episode. If you like what you heard, hit that subscribe and like button. Follow us. If you didn't like what you heard, still hit that anyway because we'll probably cover something in the future that you do like. Please follow us on our social media. Adam, hit him with it. Our Instagram is historically high pod, historically high POD.

And we are on Twitter at Historically High. That's historically H-I. All right. And if you guys want to send in any feedback suggestions, hit us up on those two or you can even do it on Gmail. It's historically high podcast at gmail.com. Thanks again. Peace.