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Egypt
Civilization without Cities?
It was assumed that Sumer and Egypt were the first two human civilizations until the ruins of an equally old civilization that extend for nearly a thousand miles were discovered a century ago in the Indus Valley; this civilization is known as the Harappan culture, after the name of Harappa, its main city. This thriving, urban civilization existed at the same time as the Egyptian and Mesopotamian states—in an area twice each of their sizes.
As we have seen in the preceding chapters, the overwhelming preponderance of verifiable evidence comes down against the ancient Egyptians as the builders of the Great Pyramid.
However, there is yet more strong evidence for this conclusion presented in this chapter.
In fact, the actual situation in ancient Egypt begs the question of whether it was, in fact, a real civilization as we understand the term. The main reasons to support the civilization thesis revolve around the supposition that the Egyptians, circa 2500 BCE, built the Great Pyramid and other pyramids. That unconfirmed belief, once accepted, is then used to argue that they must have had a very advanced civilization.
It has the familiar ring of declarative, circular reasoning. Since, it is postulated, the Egyptians built the pyramids, they therefore must have had the advanced knowledge and building skills that allowed them to build one of the first civilizations since they had the tools and techniques to build the Great Pyramid, and so on, ad infinitum.
Fig. 7.1. Only a few artifacts remain in what was once the city of Memphis.
However, if we remove the pyramids from the list of Egyptian accomplishments, what do we find? They did not invent the wheel and did not even acquire it for a thousand years after the Sumerians. They did not invent metallurgy. They did not invent urban centers; the negative list goes on.
In fact, the fatal blow to the conventional theory comes from historians who have long called Egypt the “civilization without cities.” That begs the question: What characteristics define and constitute a civilization, and does ancient Egypt meet them?
There is something entirely enigmatic about the artifacts that occupy the landscape of Upper Egypt. Among the enigmas, one stands out by its absence: the ruins of ancient stone cities commensurate with the architecture and engineering evident in the monuments and temples. Where are they?
In his website, historian Mike Anderson addresses this issue: “But there was one ancient civilization without a major city until the end of the second millennium B.C., a span of three thousand years . . . Egypt!”1
Equally as enigmatic are the things that we should find but that are, in fact, entirely missing from the landscape. Where are the ruins of the vast, sophisticated stone cities, governmental buildings, and royal palaces that should also occupy the landscape?
When and where did the ancient Egyptian stonemasons learn their knowledge and skills if not on the smaller governmental buildings, palaces, temples, and residences of its citizens? What we find are nothing but massive, overwhelming architectural wonders—stone temples, obelisks, pyramids—and little else of a more approachable stature that was built with similar, if smaller, cut-stone components.
A civilization is more than colossal monuments accompanied by primitive “worker and artisan” mud-brick villages, but that is what archaeologists have discovered in Egypt. Even though both the Sumer and Indus Valley civilizations lacked available stones to build with, they made brick structures out of standardized brick molds that still stand.
It is an artful dodger who claims that the Egyptian hierarchy was too humble to build massive palaces and government buildings to overwhelm the common folk. There is no good reason to ascribe a special status to ancient Egypt where human nature is concerned, though historians and archaeologists do just that.
The lack of not just cities but also of quarried, precision-cut stone buildings and sophisticated urban centers has been de-emphasized by tenured historians. Nonetheless, how are we to envision a civilization that would build cyclopean stone structures, but at the same time neglect to design and construct lasting stone cities, royal palaces, and governmental buildings?
In addition to the fact that by definition, a civilization builds urban centers, there is another, far more serious reason to insist we find them. The designing and building of stone cities replete with homes, palaces, and administrative buildings is needed to demonstrate where their supposed master architects, engineers, and stonemasons learned and plied their trades.
How can we possibly accept the premise that the Egyptians built the Great Pyramid without first seeing many generations of development exemplified in cities and towns?
That is exactly how we approach every other civilization on Earth. We examine them logically and reverse engineer their artifacts and justify them by looking for the technology and skills required to make them, but we don’t do that with Egypt.
Consider the Greco-Roman civilizations, with Athens and Rome. Consider modern New York, London, and Beijing. Cities are the central features of civilizations, and only Egypt lacked them.
The Egyptians were not superhuman magicians, as today’s scholars, including Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass, would have us believe. The latter’s motives, as Egypt’s minister of antiquities, are obvious; he is a nationalist promoting his country, an understandable patriotic motivation.
But the ancient Egyptians were all too human, like the rest of us, and they were morbidly preoccupied by death and the afterlife. The tombs of the pharaohs in the King’s Valley reveal that. On the other hand, they were superb artisans, and they loved their Nile River environs.
Strip the pyramids from the landscape and we see that the ancient Egyptians really were a simple, agrarian society borrowing knowledge and technology from other cultures.
Their tools were primitive, their domiciles modest at best; they lacked any knowledge of plumbing or civil engineering, sophisticated urban centers, and so on. Now, we must consider the fact that the ancient Egyptian civilization lasted for almost three thousand years, the Sumerian and the Indus Valley civilizations for less than one thousand.
Ancient Egypt was never a progressive society; it was a very conservative one. The technological innovation came out of Sumer, not Egypt. It is easy to examine the records and see that Mesopotamia and Sumer were the sources of intellectual output and social change; remove the pyramids, and Egypt is a very distant third place: (1) Mesopotamia, (2) Indus Valley, and (3) Egypt.
By the late fourth millennium BCE, the Sumerian civilization was already organized into about a dozen independent city-states, which were divided by canals and boundary stones. Each was centered on a temple dedicated to the particular patron god or goddess of the city, and they were ruled over by a priestly governor or by a king who was intimately tied to the city’s religious rites.
Some of the cities, like Ur, are even mentioned in the Bible, as is Sumer (the land of Shinar). Even as early as 4100 to 2900 BCE, the Sumerians traded goods with other cultures that were transported along the canals and rivers of southern Mesopotamia. These operations facilitated the rise of many large, stratified, temple-centered cities (with populations of more than ten thousand people) where centralized governments employed specialized workers.
By the time the Egyptians were (allegedly) building the Great Pyramid, some Sumerian cities had populations approaching forty to fifty thousand residents. Egypt produced nothing of the sort. The remains of the Sumerian cities have been excavated extensively and studied intensively. Tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets have been unearthed and deciphered.
American anthropologist Robert McCormick Adams writes that irrigation development was associated with urbanization and that 89 percent of the Sumerian population lived in the cities. One of the more enigmatic features of Sumer is the fact that the Tigris-Euphrates Plain lacked minable metals, rock quarries, and forests, all essential resources in ancient Egypt. Sumerian structures were made of planoconvex–formed mud bricks that were not fixed with mortar or cement.
The cities were provided with towers and stood on artificial platforms; the houses also had a towerlike appearance. Each house was provided with a door that turned on a hinge and could be opened with a keylike device; each city also had a large entrance gate.
None of this extensive urbanization is evident in the ancient Egyptian record. There were semilarge villages but not true cities displaying any level of similar sophistication. The discoveries made during excavations of the Indus Valley over the past fifty years underscore how problematic the lack of Egyptian cities really is.
The people of this Indus Valley civilization did not build massive monuments like their contemporaries. Nor did they bury riches among their dead in golden tombs. There were no mummies, no emperors, and no violent wars or bloody battles in their territory.
Remarkably, the lack of all these is what makes the Indus Valley civilization so compelling and unique, even more so because of the incredible level of sophistication archaeologists have found in the cities excavated since their discovery a mere one hundred years ago.
Fig. 7.2. Typical Indus Valley urban center
Examples: For protection from seasonal floods and polluted waters, the Sumerian settlements were built on giant platforms and elevated grounds. However, archaeologists tell us that Egypt’s main city, Memphis, was reclaimed by Nile floods. If that is true, then it points up the fact that Egypt did not have civil engineers on a par with those of either Sumer or the Indus Valley.
On these Sumerian foundations, networks of streets were laid out in neat patterns of straight lines and right angles. The buildings along the roads were all constructed of bricks that were uniform in size, suggesting there were factories using molds to produce them.
The brick houses of all city dwellers were equipped with bathing areas supplied with water from neighborhood wells. Sophisticated drainage systems throughout the city carried dirty water and sewage outside of living spaces. Even the smallest houses on the edges of the towns were connected to the systems; the principles of personal and public hygiene were obviously well known and of great importance.
According to a report released by the Government of India’s Archaeological Survey:
The salient components of the full-grown cityscape consisted of a bipartite “citadel,” a “middle town” and a “lower town,” two “stadia,” an “annexe,” a series of reservoirs all set within an enormous fortification running on all four sides. Interestingly, inside the city, too, there was an intricate system of fortifications. The city was, perhaps, configured like a large parallelogram boldly outlined by massive walls with their longer axis being from the east to west. On the bases of their relative location, planning, defenses and architecture, the three principal divisions are designed tentatively as “citadel,” “middle town,” and ‘”lower town.”
The Harappans created about sixteen or more reservoir of varying sizes and designs and arranged them in a series practically on all four sides. A cursory estimate indicates that the water structures and relevant and related activities accounts for 10 hectares of area, in other words 10 percent of the total area that the city appropriated within its outer fortification. The 13 meters of gradient between high and low areas from east to west within the walls was ideally suited for creating cascading reservoirs which were separated from each other by enormous and broad bunds and yet connected through feeding drains.
The citadel has yielded an intricate network of storm water drains, all connected to an arterial one and furnished with slopes, steps, cascades, manholes (air ducts/water relief ducts), paved flooring and capstones. The main drains were high enough for a tall man to walk through easily. The rainwater collected through these drains was stored in yet another reservoir that was carved out in the western half of the bailey.2
At the time that Egyptologists claim the Great Pyramid was built, the Indus Valley not only had cities, it also had carefully planned, intensively engineered urban centers that were organized in every detail; whether these facts fit our modern ideas of ancient history and progress or not, the Harappan cities were better planned than our own modern ones.
Nothing like these cities existed in Egypt, not even remotely, at any point in its very long life span—a very telling fact.
The hard truth is that much of modern India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan still lacks the indoor plumbing, street drainage, urban planning, and water-delivery systems that existed in Harappan cities four thousand years ago. How is this to be explained in the context of cultural evolution and the theory of human progress from the simple to the complex?
Of course, the sudden emergence of the Sumerian civilization, the cities of the Indus Valley, and the Giza complex do not fit into the framework of cultural evolution and progress.
The reason we refer to Earth’s earliest civilizations in the context of history’s mysteries is because of that paradoxical fact. The things described above should not exist at the point in time they were created because people were living in mud huts just a few generations before.
In addition, the rest of the world stayed in the late Stone Age or early Neolithic period for a very, very long time thereafter. In truth, the real Egyptian culture was not responsible for the Great Pyramid or the massive temple complexes. Those mysterious edifices were built by an advanced race. There were no cities in Egypt, and the pyramid had a different purpose.
I must leave that hanging for another book, as that lies outside the scope of this volume, which attempts to fully educate and inform readers about the theory of Cosmic Ancestry, which includes the integration of ancient mysteries and modern UFOs.
CONCLUSION
The lack of cut-stone urban centers in the ancient Egyptian record is strong evidence that casts a shadow across the orthodox scenarios invented by Egyptologists. There is no evidence showing that ancient Egypt, circa 2500 BCE, was a “civilization” that was in any way a match for the Sumerian or the Indus Valley civilizations. Remove the attribution of the Great Pyramid to the ancient Egyptians and the basis for claiming they were technologically advanced vanishes.