Damn History Channel again...

[onager]

This weekend the Former Hitler Channel (currently Larry The Cable Guy Channel) is showing a pretty good 2-hr show about the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World.

"Pretty good" because when it comes to the Giza Pyramids, they just HAD to reach for the woo. The show mostly used academic talking heads, and some pretty good ones.

Then along comes one pontificating asshat - didn't catch his name/title - who claims the Egyptians couldn't have built the Giza Pyramids. Because those Egyptians had "just recently emerged from the Stone Age" and the Giza pyramids "seem to have just appeared in that desert, all of a sudden."

:wow:

No mention at all of the first "step" pyramid in Saqqara, or the Bent/Red pyramids at Dashur - all of which predate the Giza complex. And show unmistakable evidence they were built by hard-working humans and nobody else. e.g., the Bent pyramid kept falling down because the angles were wrong.

Maybe the pontificating asshat worked for the Edgar Cayce Institute...they're still trying to find the Atlantis Hall of Records under the left paw of the Sphinx, AFAIK.

Anyway, if you like ancient history and engineering, the show is still worth watching. And I can't say that about too many History Channel shows these days.

On edit - this show has inspired me to do some Home Archeology, and dig out and watch my DVD copy of that old Sergio Leone masterpiece, The Colossus of Rhodes.

In fact, I think the Colossus of Rhodes is my very favorite Ancient Wonder because it says so much about us human beings - it was basically built as a giant brag (to celebrate a military victory); it consumed enormous resources to create a useless but flashy piece of gimcrackery; and as soon as it was built, ancient engineers predicted it would fall down in the first major earthquake. Which it did, only 56 years after it was built. As a certain not-so-Good Book says: "Vanity, vanity, all is vanity..."