Joe Rogan - Why Egyptologists Won't Listen to Alternate Theories

the specific person you're referring to at the American Association for the Advancement of Science debate, which I just wanted to make the comment. I went into that thinking that was going to be a debate. I came out of it realizing that they were just trying to set me up to put me down and shut me up forever, which they were not successful in doing. Why do you think that they're so reluctant to just listen to the evidence and look at the information and consider the possibility that maybe there had been an ancient civilization? Because it upsets the standard timeline, the standard story, and it also upsets a lot of people's concept of progression. This is something John Anthony West liked to talk about the whole, he called it the Church of Progress, that we've gotten better and better and better. I talk to so many people that think that we are the end all and be all, we're the best that there ever has been. Well maybe we are in terms of certain types of technology. I'm not making any claim that people in the past could ever do what we're doing now, doing a podcast with all the electronics. As I pointed out, that also makes us really vulnerable to things. I would argue that there is a not so remote possibility that they knew things that we don't know, that they may have understood things that we don't understand. They may have had a world view that would benefit us to at least have a feel for it. I mean I don't want to go off on spiritual tangents. I could if I wanted to, or philosophical tangent, but I also have a training as an anthropologist. I have an undergraduate degree in anthropology on top of everything else. I'm fascinated by human approaches to life and the environment and their situation. I'm convinced that we do have things to learn from the ancients, whether it's the really remote ancients or the more recent ancients from only 5,000 years ago, even dynastic Egypt, and that it's not all simply a one-way progress, that there are fits and starts, that there have been high points and low points and high points again. And I'm not frankly convinced that we're at the highest point when it comes to certain aspects. We might be at a high point with certain types of technology, but I'm not convinced that we're at a high point when it comes to... Stone construction. Oh, certainly not with stone construction. So there are types of technology we are at a high point with, much less getting into this philosophical or spiritual or whatever you want to call it. And we don't think of it as technology because we think of technology as being something that's electronic. That's right. That's right. And there are other technologies, and if you ask me how did they build the pyramids, I will tell you I don't know. If you ask me how they constructed the Sphinx Temple, they carved out those huge blocks of stone that can weigh 50 or more tons and move them in such tight spaces with such tight tolerances, I don't know. I mean, I'm not going to... No one really knows. No one really knows. And sometimes people say, you know, you bring in thousands of slaves or whatnot. Well, there's no evidence for that. And where would you have them stand when you're building the Sphinx Temple? Right. You know, there's not enough room to get around. Stones are so big, even thousands of slaves struggle to move them. This is not like something like, nope, just get a couple buddies, we're going to move this couch. Yeah. Yeah, we're not talking about that. No, no, no. And yeah, you can try to hypothesize levers and that type of thing. But this has been said before, and I've seen... I wasn't there in person, but I've seen off the record footage of it when they've tried to just construct a little pyramid with very small blocks. And then they end up using modern machines and they still aren't very successful. I mean... So they knew a lot. No? Yeah, they knew a lot. So there's a real resistance, I find, among a lot of my academic colleagues to want to even suggest that people could have known things in the past that we don't know now. Or if they knew something in the past that we don't know now, it was so trivial that it was worth forgetting, worth not worrying about. So there's this, that concept. I find it amazing. And I hate to be stereotypic, some broad brushing, but many Egyptologists, when I read their works or I listen to them at conferences, et cetera, and I get the impression that they might love Egyptology and studying the ancient Egyptians, but they also have this view that, oh, these guys made wonderful temples and had some fantastic art, but really, you know, they're sort of primitive and ha ha ha, isn't that silly? And you see what I mean? It's like the very thing they... Right, in terms of mummification. Yeah, the very thing they study, they put down in a sense to build themselves up. And to build up this idea of ultimate progress that we keep going up in a linear fashion. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Then you also have in Egyptology, and I want to give you another example of this, not just me bringing in scientific evidence and data and the Egyptologists rejecting it, but just recently in the last couple of years, have you heard about the project on the Great Pyramid, the Big Void? They've been using muography, which is a highly sophisticated technique using muons that come from outer space or come from the atmosphere. They go through the pyramid. You can set up detectors long-term and pick these up. They're sort of like... Think of X-rays technology, but using muons, which are sort of exotic particle that most people are not aware of because they just pass right through us without interacting. But when you've got massive stone, massive stone will block some of them so you can pick up essentially an image over a long period of time. So this is really high-tech physics, very expensive. A consortium of physicists did work on the Great Pyramid. I think it's still ongoing, but they put up tens of millions, if not more, worth of a high sophisticated physical physics equipment, gathered all this data. I've seen the raw data. I have a degree in geophysics, geology and geophysics. I have some ability to evaluate this type of data, whereas I hate to say a lot of the Egyptologists don't. I found that with my own data, when I shared my own data, that not to be nasty, but they didn't know what they were looking at, which is somewhat understandable since it's not their training. You have with the Great Pyramid, just recently in the last couple of years, published in Nature a very prestigious journal. They found what they believe is evidence for a huge void above the Grand Gallery that has never been known before. There we have a picture of it. The Egyptologists have been so resistant to this, saying this is nonsense, there can't be. Basically, there can't be anything new that we don't know about, or if it is, it's just trivial, it's just some space between the rocks, it's nothing important. But what I wanted to say, what's really important, some Egyptologists actually called for the whole project to be closed down because they don't like the results, and they called it quote propaganda. Close down, but you're dealing... Close down the whole scientific project. Not only do they not want to look at the data, they don't want more data collected that might contradict their standard point of view. That's fascinating that someone would actually call for that because this isn't even their field of study. So you're dealing with physical evidence that they're saying is nonsense, but this is not something they study in the first place. So this void that we're looking at here in these images, can you explain to people that are just listening what we're seeing? What you're seeing is what they call the hidden chamber there, but you can see how it's parallel to the grand gallery. The grand gallery is this huge gallery that goes up to the king's chamber in the great pyramid. And that's deep in the pyramid. That's deep in the pyramid. And this hidden chamber is above that. It's above it, parallels it, is maybe close to the same size of it. It's hard to tell until it gets probed, you'd have to drill into it and maybe put a camera in. But I've seen the raw data. My point is I've seen the raw data. I certainly think it's important. They're interpreting it correctly. Now the proof will be in the pudding as they say if they ever enter it or at least put a probe into it. But my point right now is to just dismiss the data is nonsense. To call for the whole project to be shut down is nonsense. Who is calling for the project to be shut down? Some of the Egyptian Egyptologists close to the ministry. My point is they've done the same thing to me. So for instance when we did seismic work and we found the chamber under the left paw of the sphinx, that's never been explored since, at least not to my knowledge. And they just dismiss it and say we know there's nothing there. And that was despite the fact that we also found a chamber at the rump of the sphinx, which I didn't know about at the time but they already knew about. So it confirmed that our data was good because we were finding something they knew about. But when we find something they don't know about and they don't want to be there, they dismiss it and don't want to pursue it further. They have explored one of those chambers, correct? Did they explore the one that's in the rump? The one in the rump, yes. The one in the rump but it turns out they already knew about it. It's probably not super significant. It probably is just maybe a Greco-Roman or late period burial or some kind of excavation. The one I believe is important is under the left paw of the sphinx, which I believe is archive, actually may go back to this very early period because we now have hieroglyphic evidence indicating that. What is the evidence indicates it's an archive? Okay. So recently, and this gets back to the sphinx. Yes. Okay. So we started this portion of the discussion with the sphinx and my initial observations of the sphinx. And one of my observations was that there's something going on with the weathering and erosion on the sphinx. The second observation, this is within the first two minutes at most, was that the head is too small for the body. The head is not eroded the way the core body is. It's not eroded the way the walls of the sphinx enclosure are. It's not the original head. I hate to say it this way, but I knew immediately that was not the original head, just from a geological point of view. And I believe that's now since been fully confirmed that this is not the original head. It was a recarved head. So for a long time, the question has been, in my mind, and we talk about this even on mystery of the sphinx, what was the original head of the sphinx? What was the sphinx originally? We've speculated, and other people speculate it might have been a lion. For instance, Leo, because it faces on the equinox the constellation Leo in the sky, not today, but 10,000 BC or so, more or less at the very end of the last ice age. Now, I've had a lot of colleagues of mine, academic colleagues, say that's nonsense. It doesn't mean anything because they weren't even recognizing the constellations back then. We now have plenty of evidence that at least some of the constellations that we recognize today, Leo, I would put in that category, Taurus is in that category, Orion is in that category. Some of them we don't have evidence for, but the ones I just mentioned, these are constellations that go back well into the end of the last ice age. We have documents of that. We have mammoth bones where you have Orion carved on it. We have Taurus shown in cave walls. We have Leo shown. To me, it's fascinating that some of these constellations that we recognize today were recognized 10,000s of years ago. To me, it's not nonsense that they carved a structure, 10,000 BC approximately, that was facing its own image in the sky. One suggestion was that maybe it's Leo. Initially, Dr. Manu Saifsadeh, another colleague of mine, he recognized initially that there is a title, what's known as a dual title in dynastic Egypt that goes back to the fourth dynasty and even back to the first dynasty with the earliest writing. When properly translated, basically refers to the Sphinx as the guardian of an archive and not the Sphinx as we think of it as a lion with a human head, but as a lioness. There was a name for this lioness, Meht. She was the goddess Meht who guarded an archive. We wrote a paper on that when I say we, Manu Saifsadeh, myself, and Robert Bouval, who you may know up from Orion correlation and some of his work ties in with this, the archaeoastronomy. But we've now found that there is this sign, which we named the JAW sign in honor of John Anthony West. There it is, there's the JAW sign. What you see here is a lioness Meht hit, which was the Sphinx originally based on our reconstruction and interpretation. I can't go into all the details now. Actually people can read the paper. If I could put a plug in, if people go to my website, www.robertchalk.com, they can go. I did a popular summary of the paper and they can also go and download the original paper in the peer-reviewed journal, Archaeological Discovery.