I’ve been a bit listless of late, roaming around on Facebook and stumbling onto ‘New Age’ and pseudo-archaeology groups. The danger of such behaviour is, of course, Facebook’s algorithm supplies you with evermore groups of this nature and my wall is pretty darn nutty right now.

I tell myself I’m doing something noble in its own way, trying to answer humbug with actual facts. The world is cracking under the weight of of so many lies, fake news, AI bilge etc, so much so that the very idea that truth exists and can be reached seems to be negotiable concept now. If, I tell myself, I meet people’s misconceptions of history with whatever facts I can then I’ve at least done something, I’m not just wallowing and cursing the world.

But the truth is in the public understanding of ancient history bullshit is winning. I suspect if I went outside right now the first person I asked to would say that a lost, Atlantis-style civilisation is more likely than not. I suspect that wouldn’t have been the case twenty years ago. That person is not stupid or gullible, not particularly, it’s that their curiosity is swiftly and slickly met by the grifter and the bot long before the academic can get their crusty trousers on. Streaming services like Netflix show no duty of care: Graham Hancock can have a seven episode series in which his deeply flawed claims are never questioned for instance. That’s bad, because he routinely portrays archaeology as regressive, dogmatic and even money-hungry, fostering the increasing distrust and hatred of science seen in many areas of our lives.

But my interest right now is not so much with all that dreadfulness so much as the average pseudo-archaeology fan’s psychology. I’m not talking about a casual onlooker so much as the person willing to go on a facebook group and defend Atlantean/alien archaeology style theories because it strikes me they are the lifeblood that keeps the nonsense thriving, who reach for a shovel once vested interests (Hancock et al) have squatted down and laid their semi-coherent turd.

I’ve met a lot of those guys in the past few weeks (and they skew towards being guys, though not always by any means) and by far the most dogged and overconfident are the pyramid boys, the one’s who think a hidden civilisation- whether of this world or another- built the Great Pyramids.

They’ve had a hard time in the last few decades, which may explain their doggedness. In 2013 a papyrus scroll, the ‘Diary of Merer‘ was discovered written by one of the foremen who worked on the pyramids detailing their construction and the movement of the great limestone blocks from Tura to Giza via the Nile. Merer mentions his boss, Khufu, the Egyptian Pharaoh who tradition holds ordered the Great Pyramids’ construction. In light of that (and masses of other evidence, the remains of work villages around the pyramids, the graffiti left by eighteen workmen inside a sealed tomb referring to themselves as ‘the friends of Khufu’, I mean, I could go on…) even the Graham Hancocks of the world have moved on from the pyramids and turned their focus to Gobekli Tepe and other sites.

But the pyramid-heads fight on and that fight is instructional to watch. Incredible scenes come in to play when Merer gets brought up. ‘Copium’ I believe the kids call it. When faced with a pyramid builder talking about building the pyramids their typical reply is ‘Well, he doesn’t say what the large stones his ships are carrying to the pyramid site are exactly for. They might be for the outer wall of the area or a new quay or something.’ Please believe me I never mock this kind of desperation, this bargaining for what part of the pyramids these big-ass stone blocks were for. I let it play out for others, the less committed and more open-minded, to see.

(As for the workmen’s graffiti inside the great pyramid the argument is given, with no primary source evidence, that they were faked by the Victorian archaeologist who discovered it. This overlooks the fact that Howard Vyse, said archaeologist, couldn’t have faked it if he’d wanted to: he couldn’t read hieroglyphs and neither could anyone else in Egypt. The Rosetta Stone had only been excavated two decades before and just a handful of men worldwide could read hieroglyphs. A copy of the graffiti had to be sent to Professor Samuel Birch at the British Museum of (See P259 of this primary source). )

After all this evidence avoidance (which can come in other forms, I give only a couple examples here) the pyramid-head goes on the attack. Typically a load of numbers are thrown at you and you are urged toward incredulity. You know, ‘how could they cut granite with copper tools? How could they move a zillion and twenty blocks in the space of a few decades and fix them with clearly laser-guided precision that we can’t even do today?’

Well, first off, here’s your laser-guided precision:

And here’s granite being worked by copper:

It’s at this point the pyramid-head starts making the argument from authority or, more accurately, the argument from maverick authority. ‘I’ve been studying this stuff for decades/ longer than you have.’ Which is not really an argument, of course, and made ironic given these people claim archaeologists are suppressing alternate theories with academic authority. We see faults in our enemies we only dimly perceive in ourselves.

They may well have been reading up on the pyramids for decades, but I’m guessing from the things they believe and defend that they’ve only been reading a certain kind of book about the pyramids. I’ll hazard most these books are gnarled paperbacks from the seventies with a flying saucer on the cover. The autodidact is a noble creature–I’ve been one myself at times–but it’s all too easy to fall down a logical hole when no one’s there to help you.

And I think that’s the issue at the heart of the dyed-in-the-wool pyramid-head: they’re getting on in years. They started reading books about the mysteries of the pyramids decades past, back in the eighties and nineties when they were teenagers, and so much of their nostalgia and formative years is wrapped up in it. Any new information like the Diary of Merer that might reduce it all to absurd rubble simply has to be denied, or their childhood reading and that tingle it put in their belly to read of Atlantis etc was for nothing. I get it, I really do. Shifting from comforting beliefs is hard, damn hard.

They’ll probably never shift their view, even if you could shove ’em in a two-seater time machine and show them the construction of the pyramids. They are simply addicted to a mystery. It’s not the worst position to be in I guess. But it is sad.

I need to go on Facebook less.