I read the same thing. According to a documentary I watched it was mostly built by contractors who lived in tilt-up villages. It sounds a hell of a lot like work-camps in modern times, where you go live at camp for 3 weeks working then come home for a week.
Probably not, it sounds like not only were the workers on the pyramids well paid, they also had daily allowances of beer and if they died during construction they were buried within the shadow of the pyramid. Considering how they viewed pyramids that is a pretty high honor and an easy path into the afterlife.
Until you have the thing about the Jews being space lizards.
We at least got one of the greatest and long lasting memes out of it. It's not all bad.
No comment on the aliens thing, but pyramid shapes are really great ways to build vertically when dealing with masonry because in order to go high you need to spread the weight out over a wider and wider base. You can see that in buildings of the recent past as well - if you go find a masonry tower structure and look at the very bottom levels you'll find extremely thin restrictive hallways despite the impressive girth of the structure. That's because you're walking through what is effectively tunnels cut into a big block of solid stone and mortar that is being used to spread out the weight of the building above.
This.
Fun fact: Herodutus has a small section about Egypt in his book The Histories.
Yes well, these are the same people who are baffled at the idea of a perfect circle being made in a field of crop circles, declaring humans can't do something that precise....and two old dudes with a piece of rope and a wooden plank, demonstrated how a fucking PROTRACTOR works. But hey, beyond human capability...sure.
Not to mention, the people who started the crop circle thing keep telling everyone they did it.
I see no way this isn't exactly what happens. Though given the age of those guys back when I first saw a show about them doing it, which was like 15 years ago, they are probably dead, or so old they aren't really hitting up social media.
Oh yeah the premise makes for great scifi premises when used well, the "precurser race" cliche, whatever flavor it is. But these people have little to no capacity for skepticism and critical thinking, and just assume it's true because....well I don't really know why, but they do. *shrugs* Idiots gonna idiot all day.
I do like the idea of ancient aliens, its fun and a little heart-warming knowing there's a race of Space Egyptians who truly never got over how cool pyramids look out there that didn't immediately enslave us or eradicate us and take our planet.
It's basically a secular religion at this point. A lot of people are looking for easy answers and universal explanations for everything. Aliens give people comfort and they want all their problems to be solved.
I'm aware of the why, it doesn't make it any less stupid. And just like any variation of "invisible people in the sky", it's not good for them, because it leads them to justify crackpot thinking, and take actions based on irrational interpretations of information.
Possible. Even kings in the ancient era knew that bored, unemployed, poor people were high risk for discontent and riots, so giving them something to do was very popular. The fact that a grand building project also left a massive statement of how awesome the king was, even better. If it's a religious building, it makes the king look pious, as well.
Even the expense could be spun in their favor, in a sort of "if they have the resources to build a rather useless pile of blocks, imagine how much they have in total?" type thing.
