Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. They are some of the greatest wonders in the world, pyramids, and they're found across the globe. Are they simply tombs or much more?
Were they built by ancient civilizations or by something more mysterious? Nobody knows for certain why the pyramids were built. For whom, when, and why? Those remain the questions and if someone tells you they have the answer, they're either delusional or lying. We just don't know. Are they tombs? Are they
Space stations, are they power stations, are they spacecraft? I mean, you name it, every theory imaginable has been brought up about pyramids. Pyramids are energy amplifiers and they are energy machines. There are pyramid structures across the world, the iconic ones of Egypt, but also those in Mexico, Cambodia, Sudan, Greece, Peru and Italy.
But how much do we really know about them? And did many different civilizations independently create the same type of building? Or were they given the blueprints by a mysterious common ancestor? We love pyramids in popular culture because they harken back to this time that we can only imagine. For some of us it relates to the biblical stories we heard, for others it's just imagining these massive societies.
and the only thing left is these huge monuments. So every pyramid represents a fantastic mystery. For something as huge and impressive as the ancient pyramids, there are relatively few answers. It's totally surprising how little is actually known for certain about them. There is evidence for a teacher culture
With the pyramids that have sprung up all over the world, they all are aligned to the cardinal points, they all have a causeway, they all have a mortuary temple, none of them have tombs. So whoever came up with this blueprint passed it on all across the globe. How did they do that?
All the fringe theories about the pyramids, that they were actually built in 10,500 BC, that they were built by aliens, that they were built by Atlanteans, that all the pyramids around the world are somehow united or even speaking to each other, all of this comes under a kind of a pseudoscience which is described as pyramidology. The Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, a huge statement that has survived from time long ago.
But who built it and why? The ancient Egyptians built pyramids as tombs for their pharaohs during the Old Kingdom period. And these were expressions of power and prestige as much as they were intended to be a final resting place for the pharaoh and a storage place for everything that the pharaoh was thought to need as he ascended into the afterlife and took on his kingly role again there.
The chronology of ancient Egypt is in debate because they're all relative dates, not absolute dates. We are fairly sure the pyramids were built in the third millennium BC, and it's a question of where in the third millennium do you want to fix them. When it was erected by at least 2500 BC, outside of today's Cairo, the Great Pyramid was a spectacular structure.
It was said to be covered in sheets of smooth white limestone and possibly topped by a golden triangle. It would have been a truly breathtaking sight. Meredith Brand is an Egyptologist from the American University in Cairo and very familiar with these ancient monuments. We're here in front of the Great Pyramid of Khufu. This massive structure is 93.5 million cubic feet of stone.
It's 481 feet tall and its sides are 71 feet in length. This remarkable feat of architectural engineering has 26-foot tall ceilings and is 150 feet long. There's some exciting research that's been done recently with muon particles. These are cosmic rays that have been measured by a bunch of scientists, and they have found the potential for a void above the Grand Gallery.
Maybe it could be a hidden chamber, maybe it could be some kind of architectural anomaly, but it points to potentially some very exciting features of the pyramids that we don't know about yet. The Great Pyramid at Giza is in many ways exquisitely precise and incredibly well built. It is situated in terms of a couple of degrees of precision on a north-south-east-west axis. It really is an engineering marvel.
So how do we know the Great Pyramid is Khufu's pyramid? We really don't. We know that he venerated it and created a boat and put it in the ground next to the pyramid. We know that his name appears to have been inscribed in some graffiti inside the relieving chamber, but there's no other evidence. In fact, there's only one image of the pharaoh Khufu, and it's a tiny little sculpture in the Cairo Museum.
Is that all that you'd expect for the great pharaoh Khufu, the builder of the Great Pyramid? The Great Pyramid of Giza is in fact the burial place of Khufu. We know that because there are some inscriptions inside the pyramid and we have the papyrus documentation that has just recently been found naming an administrator involved in its construction whose name is now known as Merer. And so if you
want to argue that the pyramids were not built by the ancient Egyptians. You have to contradict and prove that the papyri just found are bogus. The lack of clarity around the date of the pyramid's building, its use, plus the near absence of naming identification and traditional ceremonial goods, has sparked questions about its true purpose.
It is likely that it was something more, some kind of initiation chamber. We simply don't know. The most recent explanation about the lack of inscriptions and relief decoration within the Great Pyramid rests on that Khufu was a god on Earth. So if Khufu is of divine status,
Egyptian tradition prohibits one god from being obeisant to another god. The Great Pyramid of Giza in Cairo is one of the great wonders of the ancient world. Egyptologists agree it was constructed around 2500 BC as a burial chamber of the pharaoh Khufu, but there are some who disagree. Skeptics say the monument is missing several key things: traditional hieroglyphs on the walls,
proper identification tying it to Khufu, and ceremonial burial items. It's really difficult to date the pyramids, especially the ones at Giza. Some have attempted to date them from how the entrance chamber is orientated towards the pole star.
Others have looked for organic materials such as axes and ropes that were found in boat pits and nearby. But that leads to the question, was this organic material, is it from people who were restoring the pyramid or building it? That's what we don't know. Yet the Egyptologists are confident they have the facts right. Dr. Meredith Brand believes that the Great Pyramid is a wonder of the ancient world.
that its origins are entirely human and can be dated to around 2500 BC. We know Khufu reigned in the mid-26th century BCE, but the actual date itself has been a bit harder to pin down. Now obviously you can't do any sort of radiocarbon dating on the stone, but the core of the structure, the stones were built in a more haphazard manner with mortar in between, and some of this mortar has organic material.
So several scientists have collected samples for radiocarbon dating. Now, the results of these samples are a bit complicated. Some of them hit at the right date of Fufu, and some of them are 100 to 300 years older. So this requires more reevaluation and testing to pin down the actual date. But we are pretty confident with the radiocarbon dating that it is somewhere around this time. Hugh Newman is a British megalith enthusiast with some controversial theories.
He believes the Great Pyramid is much older than academics proclaim. Few people agree with him, but he's on a mission to prove his case. Well, there's some ideas about who could have built the pyramids. We're talking about semi-divine god-kings of ancient Egypt called the Followers or Disciples of Horus.
they had the technology somehow to construct the pyramid. And the research that I've been doing connects them with giants from the Bible lands and were involved in the construction of the Great Pyramid, the pyramids of Dashur, the Red and Bent Pyramid, also Dendera.
You start looking at the dating, you look at the Sphinx, and when the whole Giza plateau could have been laid out, it seems like it was designed all as one. And it was a very great mine or mines behind the construction, the geometry, the mathematics, and the whole surveying of these particular areas. I think we are imperfectly informed about why the particular plateau of Giza was chosen.
But one can suggest that it was on a slight rise from which the spirit of the dead pharaohs could overlook their domain. The Nile River in antiquity at the time the pyramids were built came a lot closer to the site so the transport of material would be facilitated.
And there were probably no other pre-burials in the area. And all of those, I think, are contributing factors that led to the decision that this is the spot on which we're going to build these structures.
The Great Pyramid and the Giza Plateau appears to have been laid out in a grand plan aligning the Great Pyramid perfectly north, south, east and west. So there are astronomical alignments associated with the pyramids as well. The three pyramids appear to mirror Orion in the night sky.
What's really interesting to me is the fact that Teotihuacan in Mexico seems to be almost the same. It has three main pyramids and they almost align precisely to the mirrored version of Orion. So if this is the case, you know, is there a mother culture that shared this knowledge or did the Egyptians even travel to Central America? The evidence seems to point that this is indeed the case.
There is no question that the pyramids at the Giza Plateau are aligned. The suggestion that they are aligned with celestial constellations or stars is worth considering because after all, before we had GPS and other sophisticated surveying tools, ancient mariners
set their course by the stars, which were constants. Teotihuacan is a huge pyramid complex in Mexico City. According to some, it is aligned with the Great Pyramid. Sergio Gomez is one of the top archaeologists at Teotihuacan. The origins of Teotihuacan date back to the year 400 BC.
The entire city is perfectly aligned according to a master plan that continues to surprise us. All the buildings of the entire city have the same orientation of 15 degrees, 17 minutes deviated to the east of the north, and there is no other construction in Teotihuacan that does not keep the same orientation. That's why it's amazing.
They built the city according to this orientation so that the whole city would operate as a great astronomic clock, a solar clock. It also tells us that we have signs that Teotihuacan was perfectly planned in all its aspects, not only in terms of orientation but also in terms of the impressive drainage system that continues to operate just as it did when it was built more than 1800 years ago.
Another intriguing element of the pyramid complexes around the globe, in particular Giza and Teotihuacan, is the presence of what appears to be Orion's belt. Is it coincidence or is it somehow the encoding of information about a constellation that was really important to the ancients and perhaps associated with the pyramid builders themselves? We still have much to learn about the pyramids at Teotihuacan.
Who built them? For what purpose? And are they mysteriously connected to the Great Pyramid at Giza? All pyramids have the same characteristics. One, they're orientated towards the cardinal points, north, south, east, west. Two, they have a causeway, a ceremonial path leading to the pyramid. Three, they have a mortuary chamber, a little temple in front of the pyramid where you would worship.
All pyramids have those. So it seems that the deeply mysterious pyramids had other functions, ritual functions that we can only really just make stabs at because we don't have the ancient Egyptian mindset. Their entire life was just standing in line for the afterlife. It was queuing up for the next life. And everything they did
as human beings was about that, and especially about enabling the pharaoh to go off into the afterlife and become God. - The Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent at Teotihuacan is believed to have been at the center of this Mesoamerican metropolis, but mysteries around its origin remain.
Heavy rains recently uncovered an extraordinary long tunnel underneath the pyramid of Teotihuacan. And archaeologists went down and they were puzzled to find bits of pyrite and mica clearly embedded in the wall purposefully. They weren't sure what it was. They happened to extinguish the artificial light and it lit up as if they were outside under the night sky, surrounded by stars.
We don't know who built the pyramids at Teotihuacan. We know that the site was established in around 400 BC and reached a peak a thousand years later. So this is a major, very sophisticated civilization. Their city covers eight square miles. It's carefully gridded. There's at least 2,000 private residences. There are plazas and temples, and everything is linked beautifully in a perfectly solar-aligned avenue called the Avenue of the Dead.
We don't know who did it though, and that's because they left some glyphs, but it's a language we have not cracked yet. We may never know who built Teotihuacan, but we do know that its name means "birthplace of the gods." And were those gods extraterrestrial?
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Is there a connection between the pyramids of Egypt and those discovered in Mexico and other parts of the world?
For some reason, pyramids seem to hold a real grip on the human imagination. Are these pyramids tombs? Are they a means of communicating with aliens passing UFOs? Are they a way of aligning with the stars? Are they a way of launching a king, a pharaoh spirit into outer space? All these theories have been posited about the pyramids. About an hour's drive from the Great Pyramid is Saqqara,
There lies what is believed to be the oldest pyramid in Egypt, the Pyramid of Djoser, also known as the Step Pyramid because of its design.
The so-called step pyramid built for Zozer at Saqqara is kind of like a missing link for archaeologists. Its importance actually can't be overstated, and that's because it's proof that the Egyptians developed the technology to build pyramids, and they did it over a period of time, and the idea that they did not have the technology or the knowledge or the means to build pyramids is utterly absurd.
Marianne Tammes de Mores is an Egyptologist who specializes in Djoser's Pyramid at Saqqara. We are at the funerary complex of the step pyramid of the King Djoser.
who actually built this around 2600 BCE, so that's over 4600 years ago. This pyramid measures at the base 397 feet times 358 feet. It has a height of 197 feet and has a whopping volume of 12 million cubic feet of clay and stone. And we believe that it would have taken around 19 years to build.
When you look at the size of the pyramids, of any of them, they're all huge. The scale, the effort required to construct them. Could a pharaoh really construct their own tomb during their lifetime? And were they tombs? I think the step pyramid complex of Djoser is one of the great, great wonders of the world. They are cutting stone
to approximate the size of a brick. You have to imagine how labor-intensive that is. We admire the huge blocks of the Khufu Pyramid, but now you've got these guys making little tiny bricks out of stone. So it's, the Step Pyramid is just a delight in that sense.
Pyramids around the world, there's some aspects of them which are quite similar and that's why a lot of people think there are these connections between Egypt and Mesoamerican pyramids and so forth. But I don't believe that's the case. I believe that it would be, it's more like an archetypal form. It's a shape that basically connects Earth to the sky and it would have been an easy access to travel to the skies, to travel to the gods. So I believe it's a shape that would have been employed because of those reasons.
We find pyramids all over the world, usually associated with emerging agricultural economies that are becoming big because they are the simplest to build in terms of engineering. It is the most elemental of building structures and the most stable and sturdy.
All of these people are building high in order to get essentially closer to God. And in addition, have God recognize you. So, or the gods, because the gods had to have their attention called to you. Otherwise, you were just this tiny little ant crawling all over the earth. So you can imagine the pyramids were a great big sound saying, hey, here we are.
What was so special about the step pyramid is that it was an intermediary between what was called mastaba slabs, or just flat pieces of stone set on the sand that people were buried underneath in the early stages of the Old Kingdom, and the full-fledged pyramid. Because if you can imagine, just like a child would build something with blocks, successively smaller mastabas were stacked.
And then they decided maybe it would be nice if it was smooth on the outside and sort of got to the point of the pyramid that we recognize today. The step pyramid at Saqqara, archaeologists found an intact sarcophagus that was sealed and had been sealed for thousands of years. And they opened it and inside was nothing. So where were the human remains? Obviously, they hadn't been looted and carted off anywhere.
the thing was sealed. So it does add another layer to the ongoing mysteries surrounding the pyramids. We know from the warring of tunnels and passages underneath the step pyramid that the tomb was rifled, perhaps repeatedly, by tomb robbers in search of treasure. And the body of Zosa was probably a casualty of those depredations.
So we find a sarcophagus in the Step Pyramid, we find one in the Great Pyramid, but there has never been a body of a pharaoh discovered in those sarcophagus. And more importantly, no hieroglyphics go south to Luxor and the Valley of the Kings in proper burial chambers of kings and royalty.
And you have corridor after corridor of hieroglyphics telling the fabulous story of this person's life and all their incredible, boisterous deeds. There's none of that in the pyramids of Egypt, leading us to conclude that they were not tombs. So what were they? Academics and Egyptologists agree that the pyramids were built by ancient civilizations as tombs for their leaders.
they dismissed theories of pyramidology, connecting similar structures found across the world.
But there is a growing group of people who believe the pyramids are much older than science dates them and are much more mysterious. Another interesting theory is that the pyramids themselves are an energy conduit. Another common denominator amongst them was a body of water nearby, leading some to speculate that they were electricity generators of some kind using a technology that we've long forgotten.
Hugh Newman firmly believes that the Great Pyramid in Giza is misunderstood by the majority of academics and Egyptologists. The Great Pyramid, I believe, was a multifunctional system. Fundamentally, I think it's built as a kind of technological machine to produce energy and vibration and also a harmonic fertilizing energy across the land here, utilizing underground water
hydrogen, different chemicals that have been found to exist within it and create something quite remarkable which could have been electricity, it could have been thermal energy, it could have been other types of energy that used to light up places or for power tools, who knows? There are tiny things that the ancient Egyptians produced
that actually show that they were wizards at engineering. For example, in the Cairo Museum, there's tiny little vases and they've got holes drilled in them. How? They were supposed only to have copper tools. You could not do that with copper tools. And they're made of the hardest possible stone. They're granite, some of them. It's like the ancient Egyptians were showing off.
So back in October 2017, I was filming on the Giza plateau. It was towards the end of the day, around sunset, and I managed just accidentally, I didn't see it with my own eyes, but I saw that when I moved the camera around, I caught this orb of light going up the side of Khafre's pyramid. It's believed that it could be some kind of energetic sphere, like a ball of light.
Or it could have been something completely strange, even like a small UFO. Whatever it was, it appeared to be glowing and moving in a very precise way across the face of the pyramid. So I believe it was almost like a byproduct of what these pyramids were all about, which was energy. Although Egyptologists trust their scientific testing, even at the Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent in Teotihuacan, there is still evidence that baffles archaeologists.
We have evidence that during the time when this magnificent building was functioning, they performed some kind of ritual with a lot of fire. It is very likely that in some parts they made great fires. We have precisely in this part some evidence that the fire was so intense that it transformed the surface into a brick.
We know that the Aztecs considered this place as a sacred place, a mythical place. In Teotihuacan, the pyramids are part of the urban planned environment, and we know that they were used for ritual purposes, perhaps as temples. One of the most fascinating things about the pyramids at Teotihuacan is that they're built so close to an enormous mountain.
The pyramids in Egypt are built as a symbolic mountain in their own right. But here, in a different tradition, far removed from that space, you have people building almost like in response to that existing natural mountain, their own mountain. Meanwhile in Bosnia, a massive pyramid shape was discovered by Sam Osmanagic in 2005. While critics believe it's just a mountain coincidentally shaped like a pyramid,
Sam has partially excavated the site and says he has evidence that it is a man-made structure. In the spring of 2005, I first came to little Bosnian town of Visoko in central Bosnia to visit the local museum. And then I saw the largest pyramid complex on the planet. Here we have four sides. We have triangular faces.
perfect orientation, concrete. We have underground tunnels. Geometrically speaking, this is a pyramid. Samo Zmanagic claims to have found five pyramids in Bosnia, which he thinks were built anything up to 30,000 years ago. That would basically put them before the, or even during the Ice Age. Now, many skeptics say that these are just natural hilly formations, but he's adamant that they are manmade.
We are at the northern face of the Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun. Back in 2006, we started removing the soil. Who would expect that one meter below the soil there were rectangular blocks? It is about 4.5 meters long, 1.5 wide, 45 centimeters thick. It is 7 tons in mass.
And not only that, below the first one there is a second row of blocks and third row of blocks and below is the fourth one. One, two, three, four. This is a structure. It's not made by Mother Nature but by intelligent hands. We have sent samples to seven institutes for material. Everybody told us it was an artificially made concrete.
Osmanovic argues that the creators of this pyramid field were an incredibly sophisticated race from the deep past, perhaps from Atlantis or from outer space, and that they possessed technologies way ahead of where humanity was at that point. For example, whereas geologists say that this is just bog standard of layers of sediment,
He says it's reinforced concrete created by this technologically advanced race. - In 2005, Sam Osmanagic discovered what he claims is a huge pyramid hidden within the hills of Bosnia. If it proves to be a manmade structure, it would become the biggest pyramid ever built.
Yet the academic community isn't convinced. When geologists have examined the formations, they found that they are constructed of conglomerate sandstone and clay. There's absolutely nothing to suggest that they are man-made materials. These are geological formations. The debate rages on as to whether or not there are pyramids in Bosnia.
They are so ancient, they could easily be mistaken for hills and mountains. And yet, they're orientated towards the cardinal points. So is the pyramid a construct that's been used time and time again on planet Earth? And are some of them looking so dilapidated because they are truly that ancient? Sam Osmanogic believes his research proves the authenticity of the pyramid.
specifically the tunnels he's found. The potential purpose of the pyramid energy to protect what is the most precious to us and that is our health
We measure different energy properties on a daily basis. One instrument measures the concentration of negative ions. Negative ions are extremely important for this project because they have healing capabilities. More negative ions, they remove various bacteria from our body. The concentration of negative ions here inside this room, we have 28,027, 26,
The regular levels, for example in the cities, are about a few hundred. In nature, like natural surroundings like this one here, about 1,000, 1,500, 800. But in the tunnels, the values reach 10,000, 15,000, 20,000. Making it the ideal condition for our body to start the self-regeneration process, self-healing process.
The pyramids around the globe that we see today from around 3000 BC to maybe 1500 BC, they all have the same characteristics, leading me to conclude that there was some sort of teacher culture that imparted knowledge about how to construct them and why to construct them that has been lost from history. In the last 10 years, we have received
hundreds, if not thousands of testimonials of people noticing the health benefits and improvements. For example, people with the high blood pressure after visiting the tunnels, they come back, blood pressure gets normalized. Even people with very serious diseases show significant signs of improvements.
More tunnels we open, energy flow is getting stronger, energy values are getting higher. Ancients knew that the pyramid energy is so beneficial and it would make really sense instead of building such a huge structure for one dead body, king or pharaoh, you build structure that will serve generations and generations of living communities that will last almost forever.
Have we misunderstood the true purpose of pyramids all this time? Could they be far older than we imagined? Experts say no. Yet there are people who believe these magnificent structures were made to be more than mere burial chambers. The debate rages on.
If you look at the Bosnian pyramids, even though it's a lot older and run down compared to the other ancient pyramids such as Giza and Teotihuacan, it has the same characteristics. So I would say we still need to keep looking, but there's no reason to believe that it couldn't have been a pyramid complex.
To cut Sam Osmanogic some slack, I've been to the Balkans myself and you do find these statues, these Neolithic gods in the region and it has to be said they do look like aliens. They are the most extraordinary sculptures. So it may be that the pyramids in Bosnia are real and it may even be that little aliens built them.
The Bosnian Pyramid Theory is fantastic for the Bosnian economy, not so great for its standing within the worldwide academic community and the constantly updated understanding of our shared human chronology on the planet.