Megalithic Marvels - Lost Technology of Ancient Egypt / Ben Van Kerkwyk

Episode Date: September 26, 2024

Is there more to ancient Egypt's history than we've been told? How would the Dynastic Egyptians (3,000 - 30 B.C.) have precision crafted extremely hard granite structures, statues and vessels with their softer copper chisels and hammers as the mainstream narrative states? Did the Dynastic Egyptians actually possess technology that we do no know of, or did an earlier lost civilization engineer these megalithic marvels in ways that we can only dream of? In this exclusive interview, I sit down with researcher, explorer and film-maker Ben Kerkwyk from UnchartedX  to talk about lost technology of ancient Egypt. A highly sought after expert, who has recently been a featured guest on the Joe Rogan podcast amongst others, Ben pulls from his decades of research to shares his theories on this fascinating topic. Follow Ben below: https://unchartedx.com/ BOOKMARK this page for future tour announcements: https://stargatevoyager.com/tours/

Stargate Voyager. Well, I'm excited to be joined today by researcher and explorer Ben Van Kirkwick from Uncharted X. Derek, mate, thank you so much for having me. Big fan of your work. It's great to connect. Really great to connect and did of that. Big fan of your work. I've been following you the last couple of years. Man, your YouTube channel is just epic, loving your video content. I thought we'd start with selfishly. I'd just like to learn a little bit about your journey. your journey and I know my audience would too. Tell us a little bit about your story and how you came to this place of traveling the world and going to Egypt and researching all this lost

ancient technology with uncharted X. Well it's yeah I mean I didn't get into this immediately I guess I've had a 20 year career in IT I worked for Hewlett packet for for 20 years more or less I was I had a very much I was a technologist and an architect I ended up in the the chief office for the networking division and doing a lot of like data system and cloud stuff like that i was always interested in history my mother was a history teacher uh so i you know i i i almost went that way at university but you know i mean i decided it to be better to to go and make some money and do that type of thing and i was i'm very interested in the computer side and technology side as well but i maintain that interest and and i think it's a it's a similar story to a lot of people and i

I always credit him with getting me into this field to this depth. It was Graham Hancock. So it was, I think I'd read a couple of his books and then I saw his very first appearance on the Joe Rogan experience. And that just kind of really opened my eyes to a little bit more depth about some of the things he was saying. It exposed me to some of his work around consciousness and psychedelics, things like that. And so, you know, I guess you go through, when you start to explore those avenues in your own life,

you can have a shift in priorities and sort of figure out a little bit more about what's important to you. And certainly that happened to me. But then I was following Graham and it was like 2012 or thereabouts, 2013. And he threw out a tweet that said, hey, I'm going to Peru and Bolivia to research his next book, which was at the time, Magicians of the gods, the follow up to the fingerprints of the gods. And I jumped on it straight away. So it was like, I think it was October of 2013. I had the chance to travel through Peru and Bolivia with like, you know, 25 other people,

Anne Graham, and Brian Forrester was there as well. And that sort of kicked it off for me. I mean, I think two years later, 2015, I, Graham went to Egypt. This was the, some people may be aware of this, but the sort of the infamous debate with Zahi. This is the tour that was set up around that event. I was in the room for that little, so-called debate and all of the things that happened there. But yeah, and that was my first trip to Egypt. in 2015 and that was at the back end of that I thought yeah I've got a I've got a I'm just so

fascinated by this I've been taking more and more time off from work to travel and visit sites and I kind of saw looking at YouTube and reading all these books that there was an opportunity for some what I would call like high quality footage and a fresh look at a lot of these sites that incorporates a lot of the ideas that are buried in these books like if people are into this topic like a lot of the really interesting stuff is better. buried in these books, but at the time there wasn't there wasn't a real exposure to that, I guess in that new media form on YouTube and in these, you know, the sort of mini documentaries. And it coincided with the rise of, you know, high quality consumer grade sort of stabilized 4K video

equipment. So, you know, it was at that time, there was a real lack of high quality footage on these sites that was easily available. So that's what I did. I mean, just took the, took the gamble and decided to take a couple of years of off work in IT to go pursue that and travel and build up a library of footage, which is what I did. And I kind of worked with a partner for a while. We had another channel. It didn't work out in the end. And then I sort of reevaluated and thought about what I was going to do.

And I thought, well, I haven't said what I want to say. I haven't created the content I want to make and, you know, do the things that I want to do. So I put together the whole just unchartedex branding and page and then and then sort of, have dived in and started from there and thankfully it it grew well people seem to respond well to it and i've kind of been writing the uh the the crazy world that is that is uh you know being a youtube ever since and uh it's been yeah i i love it i wouldn't trade it for anything so you witness this debate with zaui yeah is there anything you can tell us a little bit more about that as you experienced it was there like a moment where it was like graham really uh took him to the

woodshed or was it just respect on both sides and just asking questions well so there was it was definitely when graham uh in the room it was certainly on graham's side pretty respectful zahi you could tell in my opinion and and so the famous part of that is and a lot of this is there's a couple of segments of this that are filmed they're on youtube you can find them if you like if you search for like graham hancock zahi was there was a moment before the lectures had started there's only a few people in the room when uh you know you Graham's flipping through his slides and and I think a picture of Robert Boval appeared in one of Graham's slides. It's the Orion correlation at the Great Pyramids and, you know, I think it's not unknown that Zahy really doesn't like Robert Boval.

He's had an issue with him for many years. It wasn't always that way. In fact, you can go back and find out, I've got a picture of, you know, Robert Boval, John Anthony West, Graham Hancock, Zahy. It was like arm in arm in front of the Sphinx at one point. They guys have worked together. and were friendly at one point, but I'm not sure what happened. But anyway, Sazai kind of flipped out, and this is all on YouTube if people want to see it. But Graham talked about it after the trip too quite a bit.

But yeah, it was unfortunate. I honestly think that he didn't want to be there. He probably didn't want a debate. He probably had no intention of debating. He initially said he was just going to leave. He wasn't going to do anything. And then settled on the fact, well, he said, you know, I'll give, I'm not going to watch your presentation, but I'll come in and give my presentation, then I'll take some questions.

So that happened. Graham did a fantastic job. His presentation was as if like a was set up for a debate. He addressed a lot of these topics head on. Zahi gave his presentation, which wasn't quite the same thing. I think it was his stock standard kind of his me with, you know, presidents of the United States and royalty and this is these stories. And, you know, this is I'm Batman and I caught the robbers that rob something. from the, you know, the Egypt museum, the Cairo Museum during the Arab Spring and the

revolution. So he told this story and he just did his overall thing. And then there was a few questions afterwards. And some of those were quite telling too. I remember there's a good, and again, this is on YouTube if people want to find it. He was asked about Gobeckli-Tepa. He wasn't aware of that site, didn't see that it had any relevance whatsoever to the story of civilization in Egypt. Also, famously at that point, it's a sound clip that I use quite often, he sort of, you know, hit the table and said, you know, I don't believe in radar. Like, as if I've never found anything with Grand Penetrating Radar, it doesn't, that doesn't work or whatever. But yes, it was an interesting, it was a really dramatic kind of end to the two weeks.

We had, we were with Graham for two weeks. And then we had, we had one day with Zahy, we went into the Sphinx early that morning. He gave his talk, I guess, in the Sphinx enclosure. And then we had the debate that evening. But the funny thing about that was that after all, this. went down we're at the mean house this beautiful resort that's right at the foot almost at the foot of the great pyramid um and in the middle of the night uh everyone that attended that debate had had an excerpt that was written from a book that he was working on with mark lena uh the whole the pyramid

sort of section of it and it's i still have it here it's in a little bind and a bit it's like a chapter from that book that that he must have had printed said everybody needs to to read this and have so everyone at their room had this had this little little little little pamphlet of a chapter for his book sort of shoved under the door and it was kind of a weird way for it for it to end but it as far as i was i mean you know it's it's sad i talked to graham i was the only one interview him last year and you know i think he he did express a few regrets around how that worked out and you know it's it's sad that there hasn't been real like legitimate debate and and cord you know cordial sort of civil debate in this space because I think it's what we really need. It's all, you know, these things

make the news when they blow up. But you can see the reaction to Hancock's work now with ancient apocalypse. I mean, it's just he's getting all this vitriol sputed him and there's a real lack of actual civil debate trying to address the specific topics that are in this field that are in this alternative view on history. But yeah, it was a real interesting experience. And I do remember my, there was a few people there and my mother's kind of in this crowd where you have this impression of Zahi and he is a charming guy on TV you know he's the world world's most famous egyptologist he wears his hat he's got his clothing line and you know you have this impression of him from from from that footage and the stuff he's done on TV but I know there was a

few people that were shocked to see kind of the the reaction that that he gave and how he handled himself in that debate so yeah I think Graham came out really well on on the back of that but it was It was a very much a formational thing for me to go, all right, there's definitely something here. And a lot of these topics need more exploration, more depth and more research. How exciting has it been to have, you know, this really, it seems like the first ever, again, alternative history, documentary. Go mainstream, I mean, where it's a premier Netflix show. Obviously, like you referenced, there's so much vitriol and media coming against Graham Hancock. and we see it on Twitter, but I mean, I've never had so many people that really aren't into this stuff messaging me.

Have you seen ancient apocalypse? What do you think? Like, to me, it shows there is a mass awakening really in large part because of the show. How cool has that been for you as somebody who's also leading the charge in the alternative history world? It's been great. I mean, I was, yeah, it's a fantastic show. I applaud Graham for persevering and getting it done. and making it happen.

I kind of knew it was happening for a little while before it came out. It was a big, you know, he was keeping it on the downline for quite a while, I think, like the last couple of years while he was filming it. As some people know, he's had some issues. Like he got banned from Egypt. The serpent mound people banned him from coming in with his alternative ideas and filming. But it's, I think it's great. And as you said, like, it's, it is, and it's certainly something that I've seen,

even on the YouTube side, it does seem to be a lot more people. um becoming aware of some of the issues that that really do surround the earliest parts and the the history like the origins of human civilization and this idea that you know maybe we're not the only this might not be the only time where we've risen to what you might call an advanced civilization it's it's it seems quite likely in the evidence is certainly pointing in the direction that it's happened before certainly that's the space that i focus on but it's yeah it's fantastic that it's getting the eyeballs that it is uh the the whole vitriol side of it and the it became politicized i think what happened i mean three years ago he was

graham was attacked by um several mainstream academics in the the society of american archaeology journal they dedicated 27 pages of their journal to attacking him and i did a whole deconstruct of it on a live stream but three years ago and the fun and even then i was calling it back like this is this is political like they're calling him a white supremacist and a racist which is the most nonsense terms if you know the man And he doesn't ever mention these sort of things in any of his work. But I consider it kind of like almost liberal dog whistling terms that are being thrown at him trying to rally. You know, and he gets compared to ancient aliens. It's a collection of ad homonyms and logical fallacies and association fallacies.

And the funny thing is it's what you, you fast forward three years to now. And it's exactly the same arguments being made by exactly the same people, spewing the same. kind of dog whistles at him. And what happened was, in my opinion, is that, you know, as soon as you see the previews for it, and you have guys like Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson in the clip, which I think they were, then that triggers what you might consider the left a little bit. And so you have some left-winging publications like The Guardian, and they'll go out looking for the opposition to it, and that amplifies that same argument.

And they get, you know, guys like John Hoops and Jason Covalido, these same. guys that was saying the same thing for years now. They get their message gets amplified. But ultimately, I mean, whatever, it's the nature of the internet, right? It brings more eyeballs to the whole thing. And I think they've made themselves look a little silly by saying things like, well, how is this to the most dangerous show on Netflix? How has this been allowed as if, you know, it shouldn't be allowed somehow. It's some of the articles that were written about this are utterly ridiculous. But yeah, it's generated a lot of interest in the space, which has been been great. And I think it will continue to do that.

I think there's a lot of depth to a lot of these topics and a lot of different directions. You can go in particular, you know, the thing Graham talks a lot about with the apocalypse side is obviously the younger dry. So we know now that the true cataclysm happened on this planet not that long ago. It's associated with a, you know, an extinction event that happened and humans lived through it. And it would have been an absolute civilization ender. So, yeah, I think there's just a lot more to be. be done here. And I hope it stirs up a lot more legitimate debate, legitimate research, and even you know, over time, hopefully starts to change the, what you might call the mainstream narrative.

It's still, this whole space is still somewhat controlled by academia, if you like. It's still, the official narrative of history hasn't changed much in 100 years in terms of civilization is more or less in the hands of the academic establishment, the guys and professors and the people that write the textbooks and that teach the courses in universities and whatnot. But there's a lot of different vectors that are coming at that now, and a lot of different people have voices that are being recognized, and I think that's one of the issues that I think some of these people

will find quite threatening, like the nature of the discourses has shifted. Other people, me, whatever, the YouTubers, authors, they can gain a platform and they can have a voice and they can start to convince people. And I think that's threatening. But I think I do have some hope on this front. I mean, I've been contacted by lots of students and people that are in, you know, archaeology courses, the people that will be the academics of tomorrow. And I think they're being forced to deal with some of these questions and issues and topics that really show,

well, there's actually some vectors that should be affecting history. So I have hope that over time, you know, will this whole thing. field might become a bit more open-minded on the academic side and we'll be able to embrace some of these new topics and really factor them into what our picture of history is. Well said. So you just got back from Egypt. It sounds like you've been there several times. Was there an aha moment or something you saw this time that you never saw before? Maybe it was at a site. Maybe it was some kind of revelation or new idea, new theory. Anything like that you want to share to start out with?

Sure, yeah. Well, so I went twice this year. I was there in October and then again in November. So I spent a fair bit of time in Egypt. And I did, I had absolutely in October and then in November, there was, I mean, we hit a lot of sites. For me, one of the best things that I've managed to do in the last couple of years, and the first time I did this was 2021, was getting down beneath the step pyramid to where they,

of Josah at Sakara. And this is where they found, you know, 40 to 50,000 of these of these stone vases. The hard stone vases have always fascinated me. And they're, to me, they're really a smoking gun that unlocks kind of the story of advanced technology deep in the past. Because you can point at lots of other aspects of Egyptian artifacts and architecture. And some of them get attributed to like New Kingdom in later periods and they're sort of spread out across the civilization. but not the jars. The jazz and vases are generally said to have come from the first and second dynasty even though we have, and this is mainstream evidence of them going back to as far as like

15,000 BC. So well into like mesolithic times, even even neolithic sort of times in Egypt. But then they disappear. They sort of stop right there. And it's, you know, Joseph hoovered them all up and he had them buried with him. And even in the museum at Sakhar. they talk about it being, you know, that he, most of these were inherited heirlooms from earlier times. They actually say that on one of the displays. But after that period, they pretty much disappear from the narrative. And what you get are these handmade alabaster vessels, which developed in a high art form. They're beautiful, but it's, they're nothing technologically speaking compared to, you know,

vases made from schist or corundum or porphyry and granite and things that are much, much harder. and they display much more precision and machining than these handmade alabaster vessels. So getting down beneath the step pyramid, being able to handle some of these fragments that are still down there, you can actually touch them, feel, and measure them, examine them. You can't do any of that in museums, unfortunately. Everything's locked up behind cases and not allowed to touch all of these objects. So that's been a real revelation, and I've got some content out there on that. But this year in particular, and it was the subject of my last video,

there was what I would call some real incontrovertible evidence of advanced machining. I mean, there's lots of different flavors of that, you can say. But this one was in particular something that was then confirmed by a real master, stone mason artist, stoneworker, who was with us on the tour. And it was something I kind of realized like, yeah, this is really, really, it's impossible to explain with handles. And this is the, there's that box on Elephantine Island. Like it's a shrine, I guess.

It's got a pyramid like top. It's got tube drills in it. It's this giant big single piece granite box. It's probably the most famous and well-known artifact at Elephantine Island. But it has this edging, this cornice, this bullnose thing that runs around it. And on one side of it, it's perfect like a semi-circle. It's, you know, maybe it's two inches across, but it's just semicircle edging that runs around it. All part of the single-piece box.

But on one side of the box, halfway down, where this thing runs around the edge of it, it's not finished. And it's, it's like that, it, you can see where the polishing has, and the,

the polishing to give it that round shape, it ends. And then for a meter or so of this, of this bull nose, it's faceted, like it faceted like you would think of a gemstone being faceted, these flat planes. It has these straight flat plains,

about nine of them, around this semi-circular shape. And it's, we know that it's not finished, right? So this isn't the intended finished shape for this bull nose, this is the result of machining on the stone. This is the result of whatever tool was roughing out the stone to create that shape and then they would polish it out and for

whatever reason they never finished it. It kind of shows the value of unfinished work. Lots of examples of this across Egypt. It's almost more valuable than seeing finished work. But we had this Alma Allen with us who's a really well-known artist in the art world works in stone billionaires and Zuckerberg and these guys buy his work. But he looked at it. this and in the same way he looked at the vases beneath the step pyramid and there's fragments and said there's just no way like this isn't it's just 100 100% the result of of machine tools and and you just can't do this work by hand so yeah he that was a real revelation to me i've been looking at this thing for a few years and not

really connecting the dots between like well this is unfinished work these flat planes can't be done with hand shizzles they must have been done with some form of rotating tool that was machine guided that was very precisely guided to create these straight facets and it's just yeah it's those types of things that are it's just like you can't it becomes very difficult to argue i think that this was done with pounding stones and chisels or whatever uh you know and and just grinding because the evidence isn't there it's just it's something else the only way you can achieve it was with these machine tools so that for me was was was huge but yeah every time we go to egypt though you learn something new i always in every site revisit you see

little details it's one of the benefits of going back there several times you keep you keep getting to you think about stuff after you come back and then you go back and look at it closer and learn a little more. Yeah, it was, those were fantastic trips. Yeah, I really enjoyed your latest YouTube video about evidence of advanced machining on Elephantine Island. I got to see this box, yeah, this last February when I was there.

And so incredible to walk up to this multi-ton rose granite box. Or like you said, a lot of people call it a shrine and just see the precision work, 90-degree corners, as you say, inset edges, tube drill holes on the inside of it, corners? Yeah, that's a challenge in its own. Yeah, and your video is just perfect because you're so close up to these holes. I like how you made the point that is not the final appearance for the edging. Right. And you said it was like the signature of the tool that did the shaping. It's the mark left by the machining process.

I know we're theorizing here, but when you kind of consider what this ancient tool might have looked like, do you have anything like that you can share? Well, and it is speculation. Like, I don't know. But to my mind and discussing it with people that, like guys like Ulmer Allen, who was there, who has literally worked in stone with both hand tools, machines. tools and then later robotics and you know these like CNC machines real expert i i'm convinced that that that particular thing was created by something that was rotating it had to be rotating

to create these facets and then be guided the trick is you have two problems you have to have something that can that can make that can can eat away stone i mean that's that's a challenge in its own when you're talking about granite uh not easy to do people people make a lot of comparisons to the wood, but it's like there's a, there's a world of difference between working in wood and working in granite, you know, marble and alabaster and stuff like that. It's much softer and much easy, but granite's like, why, you almost question why are they doing this in granite. It's like one of the hardest things to work in material-wise. But to me, there's two things where it has to be something that's rotating and a tool tip that's wide enough to create these small facets, but it has

to be very precisely guided. So almost machine guided or there's a jig involved, like something that creates it and runs it along, you know, keeps it very straight because that's the thing. These facets aren't wobbling and all over the place. They're straight for like a meter. So in my mind, it's either a tool that makes a facet per pass almost, or it could be something more complex where it was like, well, this is the bullnosed tool and we slap it in here and it just creates that whole thing in one part. They might have had like nine several different faces that were rotating to create that shape. And then after that, they come in with the whatever tool is that that polishes it down or whatever technique that it is to polish it down to make it

semicircular and get rid of those facets so that's that's what i think something like that may look at but it's very difficult to say we don't know um i don't i mean when it comes to like the speculation about how some of this stuff was done or even what it was for uh because i firmly believe that a lot of these old kingdom sites and things like the boxes and the serapium were functional there must have been a purpose for them i don't think they're everything ceremonial It's, it, it, it, it's, it's, we, we, we're almost forced to look at this stuff through the lens of our own technology, through our own evolution and science. And for sure, we know that there's stuff that's outside of that lens, of that viewpoint, right?

We're going to know more about science in the world and the nature of everything in 10 years and 100 years, in a thousand years, we'll know more. So we know there's stuff outside the realms of our understanding today. And I do believe that, that some of these things, perhaps some of the techniques and, and perhaps some of the functions of these sites and objects may exist outside those realms of understanding. So it becomes quite difficult to really speculate. All I can do, or we tend to look at this and go, well, how would we do it today? How would we solve this problem?

And that's not necessarily the way it was done, I think, back then, or what it was for. You know, we have this electromechanical approach to problem solving, and that may well be have other fundamental directions of technology that might have been explored. by the ancients in the past and that don't that we haven't quite got there yet or we're any beginning to explore stuff you know resonance and frequency stuff or or using organic materials in the way that they did uh obviously didn't seem to have the need to make composite materials um those sort of things so i don't yeah i i i don't know but if i was to guess i'd say it was some sort of rotating tool that that that was very precisely guided and that's the that's the challenge and we see that we see that in a lot of objects. You have to have this, you have to have this precision, this guiding, this crazy precision. And it's really well exemplified by stuff, things like the faces of the giant statues at Luxor, all the headjets, the crowns, the Pashchens and the head jets, just the pure symmetry

that's in those from left to right. And it was exemplified really well by Christopher Dunn in his work, lost technologies of ancient Egypt. And because you often get to the question well you know if enough time and these artists work on it and look at what michael angelo did with david and i agreed that's spectacular but a it's in marble and b it's not symmetrical it's very human um but this this pure symmetry that you get in complex objects from left to right isn't something that's really achievable by hand and it's and it seems to have been stamped out again and again and again almost like there was a template almost like there was a machine making it And I think that's the most logical explanation for what we see because that type of symmetry is is, is evidence for some seriously advanced technology and capability to be able to do that.

It's not, you don't really do it by accident and you don't really, it's almost impossible I would imagine to achieve by hand doing things like that in granite. And it's like, you know, one mistake and it's, you're done. But they seem to have had a lot of confidence in their ability to execute this stuff in single pieces of stone. and it's just astonishing. You know, we had talked about Zawai Ha-West at the top, and, you know, these Egyptologists, basically they tell us, and, you know, I mean, I grew up believing before I really got into a lot of this alternative research that, yeah,

everything you see in Egypt was built by the dynastic Egyptians, like you point out, I point out, and if you're listening, you don't know, the dynastic Egyptians of about 3,000 BC, they're the ones that were told, create everything in Egypt everything Ben's talking about this incredible precision box on Elefontein Island

that the pyramids were made as tombs but like you like you point out in a lot of your videos when you look at the archaeological record the dynastic Egyptians had certain tools right they had copper tools and even some iron tools

right which later on later on on the most scale of hardness rank between three and four I think ink or around there. Yeah, like copper is the three, bronze, might be a four steel. Irons like a five. Steel can be five and a half, six-ish, but still less than granite and certainly some of the other stones they used.

Right. So how were they precision crafting these eight plus on the most scale hardness, granite, whether it's statues or you mentioned these vessels, stone vessels, these statues, these boxes and I definitely want to talk to you about the statues because that was my biggest takeaway in this last Egypt trip. I mean, I knew the pyramids

weren't built as tombs but I had never really thought a whole lot about statues until we got to some of these sites and our guide, Muhammad Ibrahim, was pointing out like that 1,000 ton statue. And so I know you recently did a video on this as well and I want you just to talk to us about these ancient, whether it's the precision statues or just colossal statues,

which are precision too. Yep. One, it sounds like you lean like me that these may have been created way before the dynastic Egyptians. So, I mean, right there, we're just,

this is mind-blowing to consider that these, we might be looking at depictions of the earlier civilization. Yep. And then just tell us about this 1,000 ton statue and what is craziest to you about the precision and then like the symbols you even see on like the shoulders or the base of that one. Yeah, so there's a lot to unpack there. So I would preface this by going back and saying, yeah, so you're right in that, in the archaeological record, we have, we have copper tools, bronze tools, pounding stones, flint chisels, stuff like that.

And that's all we've found. Now, when I look at ancient Egypt, and this spreads across architecture, but also categories of artifacts, columns, boxes, statues, slabs, vessels, I'm honing in on this concept of what I would call a tale of two industries. Because, as you said, ancient Egypt ran from more or less just after 3,000 BC up until around like 30, I think it was 30 BC when Cleopatra committed its. suicide, that was officially the end of it. There's a lot of time for renovation, rework existing on these sites. We know they did that. They obviously built a lot of stuff.

You know, they were an amazing civilization. But when you look closely at the artifacts and what we see, you see two classes of objects. You see stuff that absolutely matches the tools and techniques that we have in the archaeological record, much rougher work, definitely handmade, statues, boxes, columns, things like this. But then you have this other classes. of objects, things like the box on the Alphantine Island, some of the statues. And I would put anything that's above, say, 200, 250 tonnes into this category, just from a logistics perspective, because I don't believe that they had the capability to shift loads that large, or stuff like the

Serapian boxes, like moving them in underground. I think you could up above ground, they're probably capable of doing stuff at 150 tons with the, because they didn't use pulleys, you know, these wooden sleds and levers and human horsepower and ropes. But in those tight spaces, it's a different story. So you have all these, you have these two categories of artifacts, one that's explainable by the tools that we have in the record and one that really isn't that requires something else. And, you know, I do, I do think that a lot of this stuff, the advanced stuff, is most

likely inherited because we do see it at the very earliest parts of the Egyptian civilization, the vases, the big single-piece granite columns, the palm-shaped columns. You see him at Abbey Cic, at Sakara. And I think, I think you also see him in places like Luxor and Karnak, and I think that those temples were rebuilt in the New Kingdom in the 19th dynasty by Ramsey's around some of that original granite infrastructure, like with the obelisks. And yeah, so I would include statues in that as well. And so you mentioned the thousand-ton statue.

There was actually several of them. We have evidence for at least three or four that I know of. There is the one at the Ramascium, probably the best known one, it's fallen over. You still see that like the shoulder and the head and it's the pedestal still there. Just the pedestal that thing sits on and is not less than 460 tons single piece block of granite. I paste it out and you can calculate kind of the mass of it roughly. It's insane. And we see them at Karnak.

There's evidence for at least a thousand-ton single-piece statue. There's a giant hand and thumb, and they've kind of put most of the arm together on the ground. It's all these fragmented pieces of it all over the place. And that one's actually made from an even harder material than granite. It's a conglomerate quartzite, which includes huge chunks of flint, and that's an eight on the most scale. They used flint to cut granite. You know, it's when you're making it out of Flint, and you're polishing these surfaces and making it, it's mind-bendingly difficult. and in these conglomerate materials

where you go from softer to harder, it's much more difficult than working in something even as difficult as granite. And then for me, probably one of the most impressive examples of a thousand-ton statue is what's left at Tannis. There's not much of it left.

There's a foot. And this foot is about the same size as the foot of the Statue of Liberty. So if you're looking for like a scale comparison how big this statue likely was, it's probably about the same size as the Statue of Liberty but carved from a single piece

of granite. And the crazy thing about it being in Tannis is that that's up in the north in the delta. That's more than a thousand miles from Aswan from the source of that material of that stone. So at some point, there was what could have been 12 or 1,500 tons of single piece granite moved more than a thousand miles and then put up there in the delta. And the river doesn't run right to Tannis. Like there's, you're not just shipping it on a boat. There's a lot more involved. So there's You know That stuff is utterly remarkable

And as you said There's a high degree of precision And I'd love to see more of them More of these statues analysed I do think that That some of them were worked on Some of them may have been replicated By the dynastic Egyptians

I mean they became very capable Over time of working in stone You look real close at the statues At Luxor There is differences in in precision And in sort of cleanness Of what things are So I don't think

every statue at Luxor is pre-dynastic, but certainly several of them are, and in particular the ones that have been analysed and shown things like this perfect symmetry. You see a couple of signs. For me, we talked about symmetry. That's one. The other one is you see repeated radius cuts. Like you see the same radius being employed in different parts of the face and the curves in the, in the objects. It's kind of difficult to analyze given they're all. three dimensions not just like a flat plan they're three dimensional um faces but just that alone is a sign that okay this you have to imagine like some giant cnc machine with the same tool that's making cuts in different places because that's how you know the the the algorithm made it made it go but

that's that in itself is kind of a sign of some pretty seriously advanced tool users but yeah so what's interesting about the statutes are is there's not a huge argument to be made that they're functional like they're they're clearly represented They don't have a function other than as a marker perhaps like they could have been used to mark a location But yeah, I think they were in they were they I think several of them in particularly that the big ones were Were most likely inherited and What's interesting about that is as you said it seems to be depictions of the builder culture whatever the civilization Atlanta whoever you want to call them that came before the dynastic civilization and

You know let's not forget the Egyptians themselves Recognize that they called themselves a legacy civilization. They trace their own history back some 36,000 years. And I think what, what a better explanation, because I get the question what often it's like, well, if the statues, if you think the statues are so old, then how come they look like the dynastic Egyptians? I actually think it's the other way around. I think that, that they, if you are a culture that comes out of nowhere, in the old kingdom boom, we're here and we're building, we've got these pyramids, we've got these statues. These are our, these are your ancestors, your gods. They likely, they didn't start from

nothing. They came from, with images of, of their gods. They came with probably culture, religion, perhaps, maybe even in language. And that's where it starts. Because one thing that's consistent, if you go and look at all the temples, the beautiful temple of like Sedi the First and all of the artwork that's undoubtedly dynastic, there's something that doesn't change throughout the ages. You you always see these pharaohs and rulers being depicted as being amongst the gods they're always in there and here's here's you with isis or you with horus or you're with amun and the gods are giving them the gifts of life and stability and power the the anch the was the the jed pillar like all these symbols and that seems really consistent so they always pictured themselves as being amongst the gods and so they have these

representations of that iconic look so they created themselves in these images of of of these gods that were gods to them. I think a lot of that iconography and that that look of what we associate with the nastic Egypt may will be very old, very much older. And they're inheriting that. So it's almost a form of like a cargo cult, you know, it's like they're trying to gain significance through ceremony and through, you know, just, just, what would you call it, like significance, like by creating these ceremonies and trying to take some of that power

and bring it upon themselves and make themselves seem godlike in their own times. And this, you know, this extends, you know, you have thousands of years of this, and then you do get like really huge, powerful empires, like in the 19th dynasty, with, you know, Setti the First, Ramsey's the Second, Merrin Patar, these guys that are notorious for claiming these things. And, you mean, everything, today we consider Ramsey's the second to be the most powerful Pharaoh and the biggest one, the best one, because his names on everything. It's not really talked about as much in these days

But it certainly was in Flinders Petrie's time And when they were really There was a lot of that You know really primary Egyptological research going on Where they know that he was claiming older objects Like there's so many examples of it Where he's overriding glyphs He's overriding the names

He's chiseling his name into statues Into slabs into obelisks And you know over the top of features I get into it in a bunch of my my videos and yet the science of Egyptology pretty much depends on that writing to then date and relate the object and if not the object the whole site itself into the story of history so it's kind of like this faulty premise for how we date and relate a lot of these objects they could potentially be far older than that but this guy just came along later on and chiseled his name deeply into

it and he would do it really deeply because he knew that somebody after him would probably try and do the same thing to him, which they did. And there's a bunch of objects like statues at Luxor, for example, that have the names of two or three different rulers on them. So how do we know who did what first or if this thing was here before them or not? We don't. But it seems we have lots and lots of evidence that they were recycling and renaming and claiming these artifacts for themselves.

I assume it's just the arrogance and the power of being a king in a really powerful time like the 19th industry. I mean, they had tons of resources and power and money to do that stuff. He did embark on these huge building projects. Ramsey's supposedly built, you know, Karnak and Luxon and all those beautiful sandstone hyper-style halls. I think that's all dynastic work, but I think it was built around a core of pre-existing granite work, and that's, there's lots of evidence for that on those sites, and those are topics that I want to get into in future, future videos. Yeah, let's end with talking about kind of resonance and harmonious, You know, you mentioned Chris Dunn, who basically concludes in his books that the Great Pyramid must have been, you know, originally built to provide a highly technical society with energy like this holistic energy device that's harmonically coupled with the earth.

Tell us kind of your thoughts on that side of things when it comes. You've been to Egypt many times now. You've been inside the pyramids. Just anything, energy, harmonics. Give us your theories on that. It's well it's it's a it's a interesting and I look forward to more serious research being done into it. I do think there is something there's something there. I don't know.

I mean look you can get into a water drunk like a water tank and it'll resonate like lots of concrete rooms are resonated so that in frequency. So but there are a few specific spots in particularly the geese of the plateau and in the pyramid that have just a remarked. remarkable resonance to them. And it does seem likely. And as you said, Chris Darn's theory does rely on, you know, he talks about the Grand Gallery housing, these series of Heimholz, resonators, and that's part of the whole theory about that Giza power plant. Now, Chris is working, I'm close with Chris as well, and he's working on a follow-up to that book, based on a lot of the new information that's come out with the Scan Pyramids Project. And I very much look forward to seeing his findings on that. But yeah, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I,

I would go back and say that I absolutely think it was functional. I do think that the best explanation for the Great Pyramid at the moment is Chris Dunn's Geys a Power Plant theory because it does explain every aspect of the pyramid. And he used it to correctly predict what was behind Gaten Briggs door, which is the little slab at the end of the shafts or the northern shaft from the Queens Chamber, which was remarkable. Based on his theory, he predicted what they would find, and that's exactly what they avoid in another little door,

which is what they found when they drilled through it. But I'm not, I think that's the best explanation for it, but I'm not saying, I'm not really convinced that that is the full explanation for it. And I do think that resonance has something to do with it. And, you know, another thing that he gets into and sort of speculates on in his book is the use of things like ultrasonic drilling and tools that used resonance to help work the stone. And that's certainly a plausible aspect. We use some of those tools and techniques today.

We're starting to use them in the drilling industry. We do use ultrasonic drilling rigs to do jewelry, but also to do larger form board drills and things like that to go through materials. So residents seems to have been something that was very familiar to the build of culture, whoever that was. And I think it was definitely a tool in their toolbox. but yeah and in terms of how it'll work at what it does i don't know i i do hope that we do more serious research into into the nature of some of that and um the more the more we do along those

lines the better because i think we we have if we my big problem with i guess the mainstream's approach to just shutting down these arguments and saying this is all nonsense we know what happened it was a tomb you know case closed is that it's it's frustrating because there are so many things we could be doing that we have we have a lot of capability today and if we actually applied ourselves we might stand to learn something like we we could not only move closer towards solving some of these mysteries but we might actually stand to learn something that benefits us and you know slowly slowly i'm we're doing a few of those things ourselves when we go to egypt and and i'm an outside of of egypt um i've got a few interesting things happening that um that could

hopefully peel back a few layers of the onion in terms of precision and machining and and defining the degree of precision and technology that may have been used to create some of these artifacts. There's some interesting work happening outside of Egypt. And yeah, it's kind of sad that nobody's allowed to analyze these artifacts. Nobody's really allowed to go in and do any work or do any experiments. And many of them would be completely benign. Like they're not going to hurt anything. Things like scanning with the high definition, you know, LiDAR scanners, not that iPad versions that we use here and there, but, you know, actually

doing like detailed scans, there's endless uses for robotics to explore lots of different aspects. We've got all sorts of full spectrum tools that we could be using to analyze some of these things holistically as well. And yeah, I, that's what I hope

we can get to to try and uncover that space and just be open to these ideas, like resonance. And not just dismiss them out of hand, because, yeah, as you said, I think it's part of the toolkit. I don't think it's an accident that we find those properties in places like the Great Pyramid or in these chambers beneath the Geese Plateau. As you were sharing, I was remembering inside the Great Pyramid.

I think most people called the ante chamber right before you go into the King's Chamber, that space. That wasn't my favorite part of going inside the Great Pyramid was seeing this little space. You know, if I remember right, you crouch under to get in it. Yeah, stand up. You stand up and it's like. you're in a machine you know the way the grooves come down anything you want to share about that specific piece of the Great Pyramid well yeah that's typically called part of this whole port callous mechanism which i'm not convinced that's what it is um but yeah and i just all i can say is

yeah it's that's that's an amazingly resonant space and just was in there you know last what in november yeah i was i was toning i can hit the tone in there to make it resonate and um yeah i took a a couple people in there and it just blows your mind when you get in there and you do that it's it's a very interesting little space there is you know there is a there is a good history and a good there's there were more stones and there was more stuff involved with that area and there's a good channel out there called history for granite um i know i know that guy as well uh that does explore kind of the history of some of the the granite blocks that were potentially part of that because i were busted up and then you know moved and thrown down the the the the well

shelf down into the grotto and there's blocks for granite here and there around the great pyramid that have these big tube drills in them that were potentially part of that mechanism so it certainly bears further investigation there was something else going on there like this there a you know there seems to have been some sort of overpressure event in in the whole king's chamber that affected that just going in there you can see how the granite changes color as you get around the corner from red to kind of black it's almost been burned and there is some evidence And so that whole chamber has been expanded, like the best part of an inch in all of the walls. But, yeah, I don't know.

It's, I don't have much to say about the anti-chamber other than, yeah, it's incredible. And if you get in there, then that's one of the most resonant spaces you'll ever be in. And it's just when you hit that tone in there, you just feel it vibrating in your chest. It's quite an experience. Yeah. Well, Ben, thanks so much for your time today. This has been a fascinating interview in closing. Is there any projects you're working on you want people to know about and how can they best connect with you, follow you in your research?

Cheers, Derek. Yeah. But if anyone wants to check out my work, it's YouTube.com slash C slash unchartedex. I post everything on my website, unchartedX.com. I'm UnchartedX1 on Twitter and UnchartedX7 on Instagram. Awesome, man. Well, thank you so much. And hopefully we'll do this again in the near future.

Derek, it's been a pleasure, mate. Thanks for having me.