Page Content (OCR)
really been engaged in an all-out effort to convince us of some impending disaster. It is not unusual that they should relate their warnings with tales about past civilizations that followed the same woeful path. The Atlantis story seems to acquire another meaning in view of all this. Atlantis could be a part of our future instead of our past. Perhaps we are the Atlanteans. Soon after be became president of the United Arab Republic, the late Gamal Abdel Nasser ordered a giant eighty-foot statue moved from the desert to a park in Cairo. The statue had been standing for uncounted centuries near the famous Steppe Pyramid. A battery of engineers and workmen descended on it, equipped with buildfaers. tractors, and monstrous cranes. They struggled with the project for weeks, first perplexed, then annoyed, and finally humiliated by the discovery that modern technology simply could not budge the mammoth piece of stone. This raised the even more troublesome question: how had the ancient Egyptians moved the statue into 1 a4 : naa Archaeologists have been arguing for years about the methods employed by the ancient stone masons. Some quite moronic theories have not only been suggested but have been widely accepted as the answer. These theories are, as usual, taught to schoolchildren. The mystery is regarded as solved. Nobody asks questions. There are over ninety pyramids in Egypt alone. (There are dozens of others all over the world, the largest of all is located deep in China.) Most of the Egyptian pyramids were once used as the burial places for pharaohs, but the Great Pyramid at Giza was never employed for this purpose, and no one has an inkling why it was built. Some of the gigantic stones in these structures and in the great temples spotted, around Egypt were apparently taken from quarries hundreds of miles away. The popular archaeological theory is that these stones were floated up the Nile on rafts and then moved into place on wooden rollers. Since some of these blocks weigh as much as five tons, this means that in order to float them, the Egyptians would have had to build huge rafts capable of displacing over five tons of water. Otherwise, they would just sink to the bottom with their load. The Egyptians didn't amount to much when it came to building ships. No evidence of these super-rafts has ever turned up. certain seasons of each year. This leads us to the problem of logistics. It would take a complex organization to feed these hundreds of thousands daily and administer to their needs. Various modern engineers and experts have applied their slide rules to the problem, and the most liberal estimate of the time required to construct the Great Pyramid is six hundred years. Strangely, although the ancient Egyptians left profusive records of everything else, no one has ever turned up even a single piece of papyrus describing the planning or building of these massive monuments. The stones were cut and dressed with such perfection that a piece of paper CHAPTER THREE IT'S A NICE PLACE TO VISIT BUT... place to begin with? There are other flaws in these theories. We are told that hundreds of thousands of slaves were pressed into pyramid building during