>>16909>they clearly state they restored the Sphinx but never claimed to have built it.That is something I didn't know. So why do they still say Egyptians made the Sphinx? Good source on the claim?
>Also the Sphinx would not have been much of a wonderI was talking about the pyramids and the possible motivation for lying.
if the Greeks and Romans didn't think the Sphinx was a whole body work that was more ancient then them they would have been unimpressed.
Because it was buried?
>pic related>It is they idea someone carved the whole thing that makes it seem impressive but you run into the problem of the stone quality rapidly diminishing below the head that they would have known from digging down elsewhere in the quarry. A.K.A. the mainstream opinion: Egyptians carved the Sphinx in onen go, at around 2500BCE, around the same time they built Khafre's pyramid (because the Sphinx looks like Khafre). See what I mean with self-referential ad-hoc explanations.
>That you seem to dismiss the idea the Maadi could have made a proto-Sphinx.Nope, again,
I literally said the opposite.Hm, looks like I accidentally deleted that post/part of the post or forgot to post. That is my mistake.
What I said (or wanted to say, but didn't, well, not really, cause I just went off)
>>16902>You don't have to go that far back, there was still significant rainfall in the pre and early dynastic period.For me, it's more about showing Egyptologists, liberals and the academia that kowtows are wrong and full of shit, that Egyptologists only care about their own reputation/ego and not about "the truth", while liberals only care about having a cohesive narrative that can be used to support their ideology, and not "reality". Libs will categorically reject anyone who doesn't agree with them, regardless of what the content is Academia/education is just another pillar of capitalism, along with the institution of marriage, banks, police, and a few others. Liberal capitalism has dominated the West, and no longer do we have "democracy" or any kind of vibrant debate about how we should organise our lives. We now have ossified institutions (with a plethora of specialised departments, that keep getting even more specialised and atomised) that manage capitalism/our system and therefore us.
The hierarchical/undemocratic structure of these institutions makes them resistant to change, and therefore less adaptable to changing conditions. Which is why maintaining the status quo and "everything must stay as it is but it can be "improved", again by specialising. A good example is the kitchen, how is it "improved" in capitalism? By creating specialised tools: a blender, juicer, food processor, which all do the same thing essentially (it is a spinning blade, only the shape of blade and container is different).
This specialisation isn't done for specialisation's sake, it has a purpose. The specialisation in institutions is just to create more jobs ("bullshit jobs") for all those academia graduates who are facing a prospect of joblesness because all productive work (in the Marxist sense, not dictionary definition) has been moved out of the West. Productive labour actually benefits from specialisation and division of labour, because generally it means something can be made faster, or improvements can be achieved quicker. This creates more value, and the surplus can be used to support that person.
What happens in institutions is that they become money sinks, they create no value. For example what value can be created from every police department having a SWAT team, bomb squad, armored vehicle, snipers, etc. it costs more. But it helps manage capitalism/us,
Coming back to academia. The atomisation and specialisation of academic departments results in professors having an "ant hill" to defend, they have to fight to maintain their position, while departments compete against each other for funding, professors fight to maintain the position, while students
compete The logic of capitalism is recreated in all of its constituent parts/institutions. For example marriage has become transactional, and an economic decision, rather than anything about love.
Plekhanov in Monist theory of.history says that society, history, what we analyse.with Marxism is made up of trillions of individual actions, from which patterns emerge, like ants' colony intelligence emerges, or our consciousnesses. It's dialectics – lots of.small quantitative.changes, results in qualitative change.
SO! Liberals understand this, that's why it is important to keep any changes to a minimum, maintain status quo on all fronts. Change is allowed only.once it has been appropriated by capitalism and filtered through the ideology so all of its original content is gone or changed, so as to actually support the system, rather than be a threat to it. An example off the top of my head: MLK and Malcolm X, also Nelson Mandela. All supporters of violence and socialists, but that is not.how they are presented. They called Mandela a terrorist and supported the SA government that imprisoned him, but once he's dead and no longer a threat, he was a hero, changed the world blah blah blah
Professors are in a similar position in academia, like.bourgeoisie are in society: it is precarious, they have threats from below, from other professors, etc. And what do you do in society to make your position safer? You organize yourself as a class, stop infighting and focus on maintaining your collective position, while at the same time.keeping the other class in check. What does this mean in practice? Professors support/take on students that agree with them and wish to continue their work, not the ones who disagree or think differently. Between disciplines, they all have this tacit understanding that they
Liberal/bourgeois science is political and individual. Political, because it is the political ideology that determines what science will be done, i.e..which specialised "departments" will be created. E.g. nuclear research and energy, or not. So while the scientific method, as a tool, is politically-agnostic (more or less), the decision where it is used is not.
Back to academia (we're getting closer to egyptology and the point, I promise). These various specialised departments within academia are specialised in the liberal/bourgeois sense, not the socialist sense (rationalisation? Lukacs, not dictionary). This means rather than increasing productivity (more vibrant discussion and a more Feyerabendian approach to science), they become disconnected, all "reporting" to an authority rather than each other ("free association of producers"). Instead of cooperating and ensuring coherence amongst each other, they can only check it against the.dominant ideology to check its "correctness". Again, in a socialist/Marxist country checking against the ideology is OK, because it is a critical ideology (Marxist sense, not "woke" or dictionary sense), change is in-built into its core premises.
In liberalism, one of the core premises is
not changing. That's why Fukuyama could say it's the end of history. Liberalism is philosophically idealist, this means that "progress" to them means going towards a goal, and that goal is
inclusion (dictionary sense, not "woke" sense). Inclusion (and consequent subsumption) of every human, and every living being and non-living thing into itself, i.e. capitalism. How does one include things? Many ways, it could be on equal grounds, comradely, with mutual respect and respect for everything else. On account of our proletarian consciousness, we know, among other things, that we are not alone on a deserted island, but the product of our material conditions and the interaction of things, just how we use various things from nature and through cooperation create value.
In liberalism, inclusion is done not with respect between equals, it is done patronisingly, from the standpoint of a caretaker. They take you in "to help you", just like " job creators" give jobs, and they certainly don't exploit the person they "help". You, and everything else becomes a ward of liberal capitalism. That is why poor people are helped with small handouts, rather than with anything that might actually change their position, because ultimately for liberalism it's better if the person stays where they are, but they can live in an apartment, and enjoy gadgets – toys in a cage.
Liberalism also uses analytical philosophy, because that suits it. Much like Marxism looks at change, so analytical philosophy, and therefore the logic of doing science, is about analysing things at
rest. Where Marxism looks at the whole, the interaction of all the moving parts and the various contradictions that arise out of it at the points where opposites find purchase/friction. Much like bourgeois science is satisfied by dissecting and labeling all the parts of the things they analyse, liberalism too takes things out ("kills" them by removing them from the interactions that make them what they are. It's our relationships, our interactions with other things that make us what we are, and not the various organs that make us up. Cut "our" liver out and you are still you, you aren't now you-minus-liver. There is nothing inherently about it that makes it "yours". It carries a DNA code that allows the organ to grow and determines its
relationship to other organs. But that isn't "you". The ONLY way it is yours, is when it is interacting with the other organs and its part of the whole that makes "you". Outside of that, it is just a piece of meat.
Liberals classify and label everything. Because they mistake knowing what something is made of for understanding. Every academic discipline has their "thing". Just like telecom companies divide the market amongst themselves, so do academia and science institutions divide the world amongst themselves. They all get something to do, a piece of the world to analyse, in other words to classify and control, become "experts" on that one thing and
stay in their lane! With that, naturally, comes the belief that only way to know about something or become an expert, is to be anointed by the current "experts", like I have mentioned professors protecting their position.
In
EGYPTOLOGY (we made it) this is shown in how they are satisfied with classifying all the old.shit thet.find, labeling its date of production, producer, buyer and what it is composed of. That's it. The tools used, the details of work was organised, that's not important. That only becomes important in the little niche that is anthropology (also one of the few places were Marxism is allowed, stripped of its revolutionary content). That is also why the Egyptologists are satisfied with never asking for help from other discipljnes, unless it is to learn one of the aforementioned properties.
Egyptology doesn't have to make their "knowledge" compatible with other disciplines, it needs to be somewhat internally consistent and be compatible with the dominant ideology. And as long as it supports the dominant ideology, it will get support from all the relevant things subsumed by the liberal capitalist system.
By support I don't mean some kind of mumbo jumbo hippie energy shit, but media will write about it, wikipedia authors will write "a fringe theory" before they mention your opponents' theories, and so on. Who tells them to do this? Nobody, or rather their consciousness and whatever ideology they have internalised. Their subconsciousness, the part of the consciousness we don't have access to, that still affects our actions, isn't something we get ready to go out of the factory, it is something that develops as we grow, interact with the world, others, as we're taught, etc. So if you have internalised the dominant ideology, you will recognise it in others, and most people will want to inteeacrlt with whom they are compatible with. And yes, I think a lot.of this "decision making" happens in the part we don't really have access to (but it can be "programmed")
Finally getting to
THE POINT.
I went off on a few tangents, just need to clean up formatting at some point Why do I do this?
I don't give a shit about Hancock or what the particular theory that challenges the dominant view. This Hancock vs Egyptologists is a small contradiction, but a contradiction none the less. We need more of them, and we need to try to increase them, not decrease them. We shouldn't be on the liberals' side. I know he is not a communist, or a revolutionary, but he is increasing contradictions in this one area.
Egyptologists are trying to maintain the status quo, because just like with the bourgeoisie, status quo helps those in power stay in power and continue reaping benefits from their position. While contradictions, struggle is where workers can develop a proletarian consciousness.
We want chaos, because chaos is opportunity. That is why action has to be two-fold: 1) increase contradictions, chaos; 2) build dual power, organise, so that when opportunity in chaos arises there is a movement that can take advantage of it and bring workers to power. Is it a coincidence that the successful revolutions (French, Russian) came on the heels of a war?