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Saturday, September 15, 2007

Pharaohs, Part 2

I have a couple of pet theories about Egypt.
  1. In ancient times, before the pyramid building craze got started, say 10,000 years ago, Egypt was covered with trees. Then the Pharaohs came along with their crazy pyramid schemes. Some smart aleck came up with a way to make concrete, so instead of having to cut all those blocks of stone, you could just stir up a batch of concrete and your army of hod carriers could haul it up the hill to dump it in the form. Problem is that making concrete requires heat. Western Europe got into a glass making craze in the middles ages and destroyed many of their forests in their quest to fuel the glass making fires. I think a similar thing happened in Egypt. Their pyramid craze went on for thousands of years, causing them to search out all of the firewood in North Africa. The were so hungry for firewood they even dug up all the stumps, and that is why Egypt and the rest of North Africa is a desert today.
  2. This one is even better. All those hieroglyphics found on the walls of the tombs? They are actually advanced flat panel displays that were frozen when the power went south. Ancient Egyptians actually had an advanced semiconductor / nanotechnology industry. Silicon is made from sand (sand, and most rock, is made of oxidised silicon). They used to have an alphabet and a written language, but then they invented computers, and some prehistoric Bill Gates came up with Windows and those stupid icons, and the foolish Egyptians liked the pretty pictures so much they started using those and abandoned their alphabet and their written language and relied entirely on their pretty icons displayed on their advanced flat panel displays. Abandoning their alphabet was the downfall of their civilization. All the technical knowledge was lost, since no one could read the old documents anymore. All they had to do was point and click. Then one day the power failed and that was it for the pharaohs. And where are the remains of their fancy computers? Well computer chips are made from silicon, and silicon oxidizes and becomes sand. And what does Egypt have a surplus of? Sand! What more proof do you need?

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