Alex_ander: переводы

→When Menachem Begin, Israel’s prime minister, visited the pyramids, he proudly proclaimed that his ancestors built them. The prime minister had bought into one of the many pyramid myths. When Begin’s ancestors were in bondage in Egypt, the pyramids were already ancient. The Old Testament never mentions the pyramids. It does, however, say that the Israelites built the store cities of Ramses and Pithum, which places the Israelites sojourn in Egypt during the reign of Ramses the Great—a thousand years after the Great Pyramid was built.4 Hebrew slaves hauling blocks is pure Hollywood. The pyramids were built by free labor—Egyptian construction workers who were paid for their services—but slaves building the Pyramid isn’t the only Biblical
nonsense connected with the Pyramid. There’s a story in the Bible that has nothing to do with the pyramids, but in the eighteenth century
somehow it was linked to them.

→In 1992, in an attempt to solve the mystery of the air shafts, a small robot with a miniature video camera was designed and constructed by Rudolph Gantenbrink, a German engineer. Named Wepwawet, after the jackal god who led the deceased to the next world and was called “the opener of the way,” the robot was basically a miniature tank, complete with treads. The idea was to send the 17-centimeter robot through the 19-centimeter shafts to discover
where they went. On its first voyage of discovery, it became lodged in the shaft in the south wall. The enormous weight def lected by the chamber’s rafters had caused some settling of the blocks forming the shaft and in some places the shaft was only 16.5 centimeters, just too small for Wepawet. In its first attempt, the robot only penetrated 12 meters.

→Prior to the eighteenth century, you could get away with this kind of theory because practically no one outside of Egypt had seen the pyramids. Most of the early published illustrations of the Giza pyramids were drawn by artists who had heard about them but certainly not seen them. They had been told that they were on a plateau, and were pointy, so they drew what they thought they looked like. Often they were too steep and too numerous. Finally, in the seventeenth century, when adventurous travelers began visiting Egypt, the theories about the Great Pyramid began to be based on observation, but that still didn’t mean they were sensible.

→There are so many things fundamentally wrong with this theory that it could only have been invented by someone who had never seen the pyramids. Think about it. The pyramid would have to have been built in less than seven years in order to store the grain for the lean years. It might be argued that the pyramids were built as granaries before Joseph arrived on the scene; that they were always Egypt’s way of storing grain. But we still have the problem of where to put the grain inside the pyramid. It’s mostly solid! Even if the few interior rooms inside the pyramid were used to store the grain, that would entail it being carried through narrow, dark passages over slippery inclines and up to a great height inside the pyramid. No, whoever first concocted the Joseph’s granary theory never saw the pyramids.

→Remember the Biblical story of Joseph and how he interprets the pharaoh’s dream of seven lean cows devouring seven fat cows?5 Joseph explains that there will be seven prosperous years for Egypt, but they will be followed by seven years of famine. Based on Joseph’s dream interpretation, grain is stored during the prosperous years so Egypt will not starve during the lean years. Where was all that grain stored? You guessed it—in the Great Pyramid. One of the earliest theories of the function of the pyramids was that they were “Joseph’s granaries.”