What bothers me is that we presume too much about idiomatic usage from such ancient texts.

We currently have a very static language compared to language drift prior to the 20th, which didn't have endless TV, radio, and other sources of repeated language examples which has ossified usage and drift. The same goes for the massive amounts of written text produced in newspapers, magazines, and now the internet.

Prior to these times, most of the world was illiterate, and accent, and usage drifted significantly.

Yet even today, with all this consistency in usage, we get words shifting usage and idioms appearing.

Then we turn around and presume to understand word usage with great certainty from thousands of years ago.

Sure, OK, some things can be derived. But in my opinion, to use an example, "you know nothing John Snow" is understood now, wasn't 50 years ago, won't be 50 years from now.

Among ancient Greek authors, I've read a far better example of mockery mixed with seriousness. Towards the end of the Illiad, the Greek leaders organize a feast where many oxen are roasted. It's followed by sport games. At the foot race, the powerful Ajax is ahead. But Odysseus pleads Athena for help. The goddess makes Ajax slip on bull dung and crash headfirst. In the general hilarity the cunning Odysseus wins the race!

I didn't enjoy much Ovid's books, but Homer was wonderful. The Illiad often surprised me. The human characters and their connections with gods are so intriguing. But it's mostly dark — a hero can seem nice then behead an unarmed prisoner. And I remember vividly when a river was so upset by all the atrocities of the furious Achilles that it flooded the battle ground to stop the massacre.

Idk, neither ovid nor catullus struck me as particularly "serious". Hell, Pygmalion is one of the funniest stories I've ever read in my life. You have to veer into people who are both proud and ideological (eg Cato the Elder) to really get a sense of roman arrogance, IMO. I suppose Seneca might also be a very "serious" roman writer without veering into arrogance.

It isn't just greek/roman writers. We seem to desperately want to think any writer in the past was more serious than I think we can really justify. It gets downright silly when we find artifacts and assume they must have been holy priceless things.

Not that that can't be correct sometimes. Would be interesting to see that quantified.

I think it started when Schleimann discovered Troy based on Homer.

Especially because, I suspect, in a lot of people's minds, the concept of Atlantis much more closely resembles what the author enumerates as the possible (non-fictitious) sources of inspiration for Plato. That is, I certainly don't picture Atlantis in the way that Plato describes it exactly. So in my mind, I agree with the author's assement of Plato's story and conclude that, yes, a place such as that one did exist. The author concedes as much, too, and doesn't realize it.

I think so.

My daughter is an archeologist and this is one of her bugbears, the idea that the Egyptians couldn't possibly have built something so huge on their own. Even though we're pretty clear on it, the originally racist idea that they were too primitive has survived long enough to just become "common knowledge" with the explicit racism receding.

You are right, there is nothing really mysterious about building big piles of rough-hewn limestone, or scraping out soft alabaster jars.

Some of the columns, obelisks and statues are very large and heavy. Moving them would be a serious challenge, but not impossible. Some weigh 100 tons, one or two are much heavier again. The unfinished obelisk in the Aswan quarry is 1,000 tons, which begins to stretch credulity.

Consider that many columns and obelisks were stolen by the Romans: most squares in Rome seem to have an Egyptian obelisk; the Pantheon has single-piece granite columns from Egypt (topped with Roman capitals). However, the Romans did have iron, capstans and pulleys.

But there are several unexplained aspects of ancient Egyptian artifacts:

- Lower casing stones, facing on nearby 'temples' and internal chambers (often below the actual pyramid or mastaba), are built of precise megalithic granite. The granite blocks often fit together with surprising precision, and have features such as 'turning the corner' which require extra, strictly unnecessary, work (interestingly, also seen in Andean megalithic building).

- Granite boxes in lower chambers are large, heavy and precisely machined to high tolerances (flatness, parallelism).

- Vases found in lower tunnels and chambers (esp. under Djoser's step pyramid at Saqqara) are very precisely machined granite (circles, curves, symmetry, thinness) often to a few 1/1000 inch. They usually have two handles, meaning they cannot be simply lathed - and dynastic Egyptians did not even have the lathe.

- There are many single-piece statues and columns made from granite, with precisely machined curved surfaces and remarkably accurate symmetry.

- There are no known tools from dynastic Egypt which can reproduce precise curved surfaces in granite. Copper chisels and sand-lubricated copper saws or tube drills can work cylindrical holes and planar cuts in granite - but they take a very long time, and consume huge quantities of valuable copper. They cannot cut precise curved surfaces, or hollow out vases. Tube drill cores from ancient Egypt show spiral grooves, which cannot be made by copper+sand tools. The dynastic Egyptians did not have the wheel, the lathe, the potter's wheel, pulleys, capstans or any iron tools.

- No lower-level granite chambers, granite boxes or granite vases, have any decoration or writing. No bodies or mummies have been found in pristine boxes, although one or two have been found in chambers known to be opened in later periods. There are no hieroglyphics. Some perfect granite statues do have hieroglyphics carved into them, but these are clearly later and lower quality than the original work (the hieroglyphics are usually just a royal cartouche 'claiming' the artifact).

- It is strange that the most perfect granite artifacts are presumed to be the oldest artifacts. Later dynastic Egyptian periods did not reproduce that level of technique and precision. They worked in softer limestone, and their jars are all soft alabaster. However the oldest artifacts were created, the skills to make them were somehow lost.

- There is no solid dating of the oldest chambers, boxes, vases, obelisks or statues. There is no organic material for carbon dating. The lower chambers are often subterranean, and could have existed before the pyramids. Most archaeological timelines assume that a rough scratched royal cartouche means the whole artifact or building was created by that pharaoh. There is no doubt that dynastic Egyptians used, repaired and extended older structures, but there's no evidence they originated all of them.

- Finally, I tentatively mention the most famous controversy: weathering on exposed limestone surfaces, esp. Sphinx enclosure, but also pyramid temple complexes; and astronomical alignments that make most sense for prehistoric configuration of the equinoxes.

* [Here the word 'granite' means usually red granite, but also quartz, dolerite, andesite, basalt or other very hard igneous rocks.]

** [There is one caveat about their copper, sourced from Sinai and Red Sea coast, which had high impurities of arsenic and nickel that may have made it harder than pure copper, but not as hard as later copper-tin bronze.]

The final 'modern mystery' is why simple questions about known sites are not answered by non-intrusive scanning and excavation. Two of many examples:

- Chambers under the Sphinx and tunnels under the causeway from the Sphinx. There are openings of shafts clearly visible. A drill was put down in front of the Sphinx, it hit red granite, but nothing was done to investigate.

- The labyrinth at Hawara, which has several Greek/Roman eyewitness accounts, and even an old GPR survey validating the story, but it has not been excavated.

The result is that recent surveys are attempted using satellite sensing or other remote techniques that do not require sanctioned presence on the sites themselves. The results are somewhere between fanciful and ridiculous, but a simple GPR/seismic survey would be an obvious corrective to any misinformation.

It's also not a question of money. Firstly, plenty of rich donors and crowd-sourcing would sponsor such work, and secondly, any uncovered sites and artifacts would generate tourist revenue.

You must not be familiar with its architecture to be so dismissive. That’s the hn equivalent of calling Amazon “just a website”

>You seem to be really upset (and frankly insulting) at the prospect of people being curious about the idea that we don't know everything about our history yet.

Scientific Curiosity should never involve insisting something exists without evidence or any intention of looking for it.

This is where hancocks people always fall back to. Science just isnt "Imaginitive" enough to give enough time to their theories. Whereas you meet any scientist in the field and they will tell you how 3 broken pots and a pile of bones translates into an amazing civilisation. I dont think archeologists could survive being even 1 iota more imaginative.

>Skepticism is healthy, but why be dismissive of peoples' interest to consider or search for new evidence?

They should search for that evidence instead of writing 20 books, some of them DEEEPLY racist, demanding other people search for that evidence on their behalf.

>Isn't it more risky to stop developing the science and pursuing the truth?

There are tons of people in the field right now developing the science and pursuing the truth.

>do you have some reason to want there not to have been more developed civilizations pre-younger dryas than we previously thought existed? What's the harm to you in other people asking these questions and going out and trying to answer them?

The person trying to force a narrative on history is Hancock. The danger is that he doesn't hypothesize, he instructs his legion of morons that his word is the truth and they need to buy more of his books to discover said truth.

> What about Gobekli Tepe?

What about it? It's one of the oldest Neolithic settlements we've identified, but otherwise, it's not particularly unusual within our understanding of Neolithic Mesopotamia.

When GP is talking about "material culture", they're (probably) referring to the archaeological definition of culture, which means you need to give an explanation as to what makes an artifact indicative of belonging to a culture. The shape of an arrowhead perhaps, or maybe the kind of style used in painting pottery. Something that lets an archaeologist dig something up and go "aha, this is culture X!" Age isn't one of those characteristics.

But of course the province of pseudoarchaeology is to come up with a theory and work everything into evidence for that theory. Atlantis is old, Göbleki Tepe is old, therefore Göbleki Tepe is Atlantean!

> Skepticism is healthy, but why be dismissive of peoples' interest to consider or search for new evidence? What exactly is the risk?

Most of the people that tend to propose these theories aren't interested in searching for evidence. See for example, Graham Hancock, who has been peddling the same theory for 30 years and has done nothing to actually produce better evidence for it except to whine that mainstream archaeologists don't want to listen to him because they're stuck in their own stupid ways. (Of course, in that same time, mainstream archaeology has thoroughly demolished the Clovis-First hypothesis which was previously disfavored, precisely because the pre-Clovis adherents actually did the legwork to produce better evidence to make it more accepted!) You can also see this with archaeoastronomy, which is borderline fringe--its better practitioners have made some success by listening to the criticisms and persevering in efforts to get better, stronger evidence to buttress their claims. As a basic rule of thumb, if someone's response to criticism is to chide scientists for being rigid in their thinking rather than going out to try to get better evidence, then that's a strong sign they're engaged in pseudoscience and not science.

As for the risk, a lot of these theories bear a deep legacy of overt racism just begin their skin; they've historically been used to devalue the abilities of the people who've made them (e.g., Great Zimbabwe). Nowadays, they've been modified to edit out the basic message of "white people taught everybody how to civilization," so it's no longer quite as overt as their late 19th century ancestors... but you can still see the lingering traces of it in "an ancient civilization taught everybody how to civilization."

"The Richat Structure is the result of natural geological processes." - this is irrelevant

"Other than having concentric circles, it doesn't match Plato's description of Atlantis" - in what way? Be specific.

"and there is no evidence that any large city was ever there." - lol, there has never been a thorough archeological survey, and the surveys that have been done have turned up evidence that points to noteworthy human activity. What about the tens of thousands of axe heads found all concentrated in one spot?

Assuming that the city was destroyed in a significant flood, we need to assume the evidence will be hard to find, and therefore we have to look hard for it before we can say it's not there.

Correction: Island of Atlas

The relevant (unvalidated) theory is that Atlantis was an empire that covered north western Africa (Morocco, sharah, etc) - at least, and which had a port city around where Tangier is today, and a capital city at the richat structure (pre-younger dryas).

The theory comes with several hypotheses which have not been validated or invalidated yet. to invalidate the theory would require significant (strategically chosen) archaeological surveys of the Sahara and the richat structure. The theory is falsifiable, and has not been falsified yet. That doesn't make the theory of Atlantis true, it just makes it undetermined.

I think there is consensus that Doggerland was wiped out by a massive tidal wave generated by the Storegga event. This feels like it deserves mention in any arrogant certaintist article like the one above.

The article would be good if it asserted "we don't know".

Worse, it's one that uses a psychological trick to dodge the burden of proof, because "everybody knows", so if you ask for evidence, you're admitting you're not among the "knowing ones". "Everyone knows" is not evidence.

People used to think Troy was fictional. People (myself included) think Atlantis is fictional. The difference is: Troy was much closer to us in time, and it was found.

The Black Sea Deluge Hypothesis posits that around 7,500 years ago, the Mediterranean Sea breached the Bosporus Strait, causing a massive influx of water into the Black Sea. This event transformed the Black Sea from a freshwater lake into a saltwater sea, resulting in a dramatic rise in water levels. This rapid flooding would have submerged large areas of land, displacing human settlements along the coastline. The catastrophic nature of this event is believed to have been preserved in the oral traditions of ancient cultures, leading to the creation of flood myths, such as those in the Bible and the Mesopotamian epics like the Epic of Gilgamesh. Archaeological evidence, including submerged prehistoric settlements and shifts in the Black Sea's shoreline, supports the idea of this sudden and profound flooding event. The Black Sea Deluge is considered a key historical event that likely influenced the development of various ancient flood myths across the Near East and beyond.

The Black Sea Deluge Hypothesis posits that around 7,500 years ago, the Mediterranean Sea breached the Bosporus Strait, causing a massive influx of water into the Black Sea. This event transformed the Black Sea from a freshwater lake into a saltwater sea, resulting in a dramatic rise in water levels. This rapid flooding would have submerged large areas of land, displacing human settlements along the coastline. The catastrophic nature of this event is believed to have been preserved in the oral traditions of ancient cultures, leading to the creation of flood myths, such as those in the Bible and the Mesopotamian epics like the Epic of Gilgamesh. Archaeological evidence, including submerged prehistoric settlements and shifts in the Black Sea's shoreline, supports the idea of this sudden and profound flooding event. The Black Sea Deluge is considered a key historical event that likely influenced the development of various ancient flood myths across the Near East and beyond.

"most people mean"

implies most people since the King James version was published. Not at all clear that's what author meant; the concept of the world as we now know it didn't exist then.

So very reasonable to conclude that the Great Flood in Genesis was meant to describe a regional megaflood, which innundated the "whole world" meaning all of Mesopotamian civilization.

And there is archeological evidence of ancient cities totally buried in mud, i.e. as you say regional megafloods.

Well, does it make sense to slay a dragon and take a bath in his blood? It is a metaphor but it has a real basis.