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Scp-1404 t1_iqw30co wrote

I presume when they say "It has lain within a burial chamber, undisturbed, for thousands of years" they mean after the grave robbers got to it.

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Fallingdamage t1_iqwvh5w wrote

Seems like every time we come across a new tomb, robbers have already been there. Took mankind thousands of years to find this, but grave robbers beat em to it every time.

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kantorr t1_iqwyl4g wrote

Grave robbers from thousands of years ago who might have had contemporary sources of info about the locations. As well as state sponsored grave robbery by subsequent pharaohs (some pharaohs didn't really like their predecessors)

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Fallingdamage t1_iqwzj4p wrote

"Hey guys I just watched this funeral yesterday afternoon. There was some really nice stuff in there. Lets go move that 15 ton rock out of the way and take it all!"

That and their civilization was thousands of years old, had mastered so many arts, yet in all their millenia never figured out how to seal a tomb properly.

Except maybe Giza. Im sure there is some crazy stuff buried under it.

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kantorr t1_iqx0aq8 wrote

Once the Egyptian kingdom was in it's decline (a hundreds of years period) grave robbery was extremely common and pharaohs and state officials had to find secret places to bury themselves. The on site crews and architects were sometimes killed after completion iirc. In the very early days, pyramid building was a massive public affair because the state had the money to engage in those large structures that could take decades to build. But tombs and pyramids got smaller and smaller as time went on, even settling with burying officials in valley walls rather than constructing whole buildings.

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Fallingdamage t1_iqx4hp7 wrote

There is always a lot of documentation on what we've found and think we know about the inside of the big pyramids, but if we were actually to deconstruct them brick by brick, what do you think we would find? (hypothetical)

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kantorr t1_iqx7cy5 wrote

I am not an expert in Egyptology, but here's my take: For the big, old ones, I'm not sure we'd find much new. There were several purposes for the older, very large pyramids: they were a monument to the pharaohs godly nature and their divine right to rule, they aided pharaoh and others entombed in the passage to the afterlife, and served as propaganda to stand for centuries.

If a pharaoh could not build a lasting tomb, it was a sign of weakness and posed a risk to the pharaohs afterlife. This wasn't a problem in the early period because Egypt was wholly dominant in it's area. Nubia and the surrounding deserts rendered gold, jewels, and stones in untold quantities and the early pharaohs enjoyed this easy abundance of wealth.

The pyramid itself was big on account of it needing to be imposing and monumental, not really for any other purpose. I don't imagine we'd find much additional that we couldnt already with penetrating radar and metal detectors. Grave goods, the sarcophagus, and murals were the most important parts of the entombment. Grave goods, such as figurines, gold, food, clothes, weapons, scepters, were entombed because they were thought to carry over to the afterlife to aid the pharaoh (or whoever was entombed, such as other state officials) on their perilous journey to meet Osiris and spend eternity in the field of reeds. Likewise, the painted murals on the walls of the tomb gave powers and blessings to the pharaoh as well as command of obedience to his ghostly followers. I imagine the wildest find would be evidence of some other variety of these kinds of tomb superstitions.

The newer tombs that had to be built and sealed in secrecy probably would have spent more effort to hide grave goods due to how quickly they might be raided.

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dontneedaknow t1_isggpn7 wrote

Honestly, you could have just said it wasn't aliens. hah. People act like there wasn't likely thousands of people over the millennia who have used the pyramid as a crash spot, with easy access to what's inside, and to bring whatever inside.

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GeneralRetreat t1_iqwyvjx wrote

Not terribly surprising when many of the grave robbers would have been contemporaries of the burial itself. Combine that with corruption among tomb builders or guards and you end up with a lot of 'lost' tombs that were emptied out long before they're rediscovered again.

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mrbear120 t1_iqxsz3k wrote

There was a time shortly after the period where these tombs were created that the Egyptian government hired their own grave robbers to shore up the kingdoms funds. Thats where the bulk of this came from.

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kiwean t1_iqwymd0 wrote

Grave robbers already knew where it was…

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Fallingdamage t1_iqwzd2l wrote

Arent these tombs sealed with giant multi-ton stones or something?

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kiwean t1_iqxskdl wrote

Fair question. My understanding is that they’ve pretty much always been robbed thousands of years ago though.

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The13thReservoirDog t1_iqxuc43 wrote

grave robbers is rich.

Pharaohs ransacked their own ancestors graves and placed the loot inside their own tombs.

even the priests would come back and take some bits, by the time the real bandits got to the tomb, most of it was already gone

then the romans came and took what they could find

thats just how long these tombs have been hidden

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Tidesticky t1_iquywj3 wrote

She looks happy. As would I in similar circumstances. It seems you can't swing a cat in Egypt without uncovering something thousands of years old.

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Dicho83 t1_iqv9s03 wrote

The Egyptian civilization lasted so long, that they had their own Egyptian archaeologists to study earlier eras of Egyptian civilization.

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lendmeyoureer t1_iqvhtc5 wrote

I thought I read somewhere that we are closer to the time Cleopatra was alive than she was to the building of the Pyramids.

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madchad90 t1_iqviw3d wrote

The great pyramid was built 2500 years before Cleopatra was born. The pyramid would have been considered ancient by her.

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aaronupright t1_iqvmwy6 wrote

I believe Alexander the Great is about midway between the Pyramids construction and our era.

​

And I think Herodotus is almost the midpoint of recorded history.

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zsturgeon t1_iqwczzt wrote

I think the quote is that Ancient Egypt was more ancient to Romans than Romans are to us

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FlutterRaeg t1_iqwijon wrote

It's even crazier to realize they were ancient to themselves.

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Harsimaja t1_iqxn9ii wrote

Yes, it gets brought up under every Reddit post on either ancient Egypt or “facts that don’t sound true but are” or anything about bizarre time gaps.

Part of it of course is that people think Cleopatra was just like Nefertiti, rather than an ethnic Greek/Macedonian after natively-ruled Egyptian civilisation was over. Same story as the Aztec empire only being a particular civilisation in the last century and a bit before Cortes, when people assume it stands for all of (actually very ancient) broader Meso-American civilisation, and similar for the even shorter-lived Incas standing for the even longer-lived broader Andean civilisation.

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Phyzzx t1_iqywwl9 wrote

These are fun. Here's another: Tyrannosaurus lived closer to the period of the moon landings than to the period Stegosaurus lived.

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Tidesticky t1_iqvnc6v wrote

And I'll bet there were Egyptian archeologists who studied those eras and later ones who studied those eras and etc

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[deleted] t1_iqw9tao wrote

[removed]

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Saint_Genghis t1_iqwy307 wrote

Ehh, it's presumed to be that old by a small fringe group, current archeological evidence suggests it was created during the reign of Khafre, who also constructed the second largest pyramid on the Giza plateau. It may be older than that, but if it is it would be by a mere couple of centuries to the early dynastic period, definitely not thousands of years.

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Harsimaja t1_iqxn64t wrote

Ancient Egyptian civilisation literally lasted for most of history (in the written sense).

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Dicho83 t1_iqxs2ty wrote

Ancient Egyptian civilization also existed before known written history.

Largely, because some Pharos had writings from previous eras intentionally destroyed or defaced.

So we really don't know how old Egyptian civilization really was, other than surviving references from other post-writen word civilizations....

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Harsimaja t1_iqxsqr0 wrote

Well, Egyptian writing ‘proper’ seems to have developed gradually from proto-writing over the course of the 4th millennium BC, so in a sense we have as good an idea as can likely be well-defined. We don’t have the very earliest ‘fully written’ records (and we’d never be able to prove they were first if we could even clarify what that meant) but we do have some bounds… and since the writing system seems to have gradually expanded to encompass the whole language, it’s fuzzy in reality in any case.

EDIT: I suppose one could argue that the moment Egyptian developed the monoliterals, it was technically a full writing system. Not sure how we’d ever possibly know exactly when that was, though.

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kraeutrpolizei t1_iquzzi5 wrote

You‘ll also likely hit other mummified cats while swinging your cat

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bobrobor t1_iqxbvyi wrote

Well she didnt discover the sarcophagus lol The workers who we’re removing the sand did. People who made the “dangerous” 10 meter journey multiple times before her.

After the shaft was cleared, they lowered her into the already uncovered object and she “was astonished to discover” it.

It’s nice to be the head of a project.

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mrbear120 t1_iqxtpqe wrote

Well shes the head of the project and chose the precise spot and method to uncover it, she just didn’t do the physical labor. She absolutely did discover it.

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bobrobor t1_iqy6f9f wrote

Sort of like how it was Hillary not Norgay that conquered Mt. Everest first?

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Ihavebadreddit t1_iqxrfvg wrote

I think metal detectors work better?

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Tidesticky t1_iqyjkz3 wrote

Cat swinging was big before metal detectors were invented. Not so much nowadays but in poorer areas with excess cats it's still practiced.

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aBlatantAsshole t1_iqz97ht wrote

The small thumbnail I first saw makes her look like a villain posing for a horror movie poster

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[deleted] t1_iqumq9i wrote

[deleted]

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[deleted] t1_iqvl9ui wrote

[removed]

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urkldajrkl t1_iqwdjsv wrote

"But that shaft proved so deep, at 8 metres, that it took a week just to remove all the sand, using a bucket attached to a hand-operated rope winch. El Aguizy then squeezed herself into that bucket and made a dangerous, slow descent down the shaft. At the bottom, she was astonished to find the sarcophagus."

Translation - the workers removed the sand, found the sarcophagus, but pretended they didn't, so she could be lowered in to make the "discovery".

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Fallingdamage t1_iqww9gi wrote

Just like 'climbing' everest... with all the sherpas carrying all your crap and holding your hand the whole way.

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NeuroDiSnek t1_irmjpxp wrote

I discovered new land! I mean, it is my backyard but no one told me it was discovered before.

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silverfang789 t1_iqwdqzj wrote

So he was Rameses' exchequer? Accounting was as important in the ancient world as it is today.

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Thatguyjmc t1_iqxdltf wrote

Ptah-em?

I hardly know em!

(I'll be here all week. Try the veal!)

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JordanMaze t1_iqwc4yo wrote

Dream discovery is funny cause dream did a face reveal

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Immediate_Thought656 t1_iqxokfi wrote

I saw that the Egyptian antiquities dude was getting ready to announce finding Nefertiti’s tomb. If this is that same find, I’m sure he’s bummed it wasn’t Nefertiti’s.

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nothoughtsjustchaos t1_iqxjew7 wrote

Leave 👏 the 👏 dead 👏 to👏 rest 👏 in 👏 peace 👏

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