Incredible Precision in Egypt & Turkey _ Hugh Newman & Ben Van Kerkwyk _ Megalithomania

Okay, so hello Ben, how are you doing? Good mate, how are you? It's great to see you again. Excellent, so we've got Ben here from Uncharted X. You can check out his epic YouTube channel, I mean he's got some excellent documentary style format videos up there which are just compelling from Egypt to Turkey to Tiwanaku and beyond. And you've been specializing a lot in kind of technology side of things with, you know, you've been working with Chris Dunn, you've been working with other people and your focus is on these remarkable precision vases. It's certainly become the focus. It was a little unexpected but yeah, I mean I do have, I was a technologist for 20 years in IT. I guess that's the way my brain kind of works at this stuff. It's been the aspect of kind of ancient mysteries that most interest me, although by no means it's the only one. I also like a lot of the cultural stories, a lot of the other evidence that comes, you know, Hamlet's Mill, some of the things that Hancock brings up, you know, ancient stories and things like that. But for sure, yeah, I mean I tend to do these slightly, potentially semi-autistic deep dives into elements of kind of the technological mysteries that you can find in ancient stone work and on these ancient sites all over the place. It's got to be done though. I mean going these deep dives is important, I think. I think you have to get in that way and kind of, because you know, you can easily just gloss over things and just, you know, you don't spot things. You keep looking at the same thing over and over again. You pick up things, you know, on different trips to sites and you see artifacts and you want to kind of, you know, I think it's important to go deep. It's, yeah, and a lot of it is subtle as well. Like there's not, I mean it's the kind of thing that is typically noticed by engineers and machinists and people that sort of work in construction industries, or they're familiar with the material, typically really hard types of stone. I've been lucky to have a number of like really qualified experts in these fields come with me to Egypt. The guy I work with in Egypt, Yusuf Aylins, like he's a stonemason. He's been looking at things from this angle for a long time. That's why Chris Dunn got into it. You know, he saw it. So yeah, that's, I mean, and a lot of it is subtle. You can miss it. I mean, it's anytime you go to Egypt, you go up to the Giza plateau for the first time, it's just overwhelming. I mean, you just see the big things, you know, the pyramids and the giant structures. But I think successive visits and the more time you spend up there, it's like these layers of an onion that kind of get peeled back and you can start to see, well, how come this is different to that? Or where did these marks come from? Or what are we looking at here? And I think that's the devil's in the detail in a lot of ways in these mysteries. And some of these, what you might term technological mysteries have a long history. Things like the tubular drill holes, the striations on drill cores, things like that. I mean, Flinders Petrie back in the late 1800s was the first one to notice it. And it's a strange point, but I think it's a mind-blowing point in terms of it took us until the industrial revolution and where we started to develop like mass manufacturing and engineering capabilities to even notice that there was a mystery here in the first place. And that's when he started to do it. And I mean that, you know, we've been carrying on looking at it ever since. It's one thing with Flinders Petrie actually, it's one thing that fascinated me. I mean, like I think Chris Dunn pointed this out as well, is that only at that time in the early 1900s, as technology was quickly developing, they were actually able to notice that technology in Egypt. You couldn't see it before because it wasn't in your mind to see it as such. Exactly. You don't have the context to understand it. I mean, if you've not cut through stone or like, yeah, use some of these sort of power tools that were starting to come up, even if that was steam driven or whatever, yeah, you just don't have the context to understand what it is looking at. And it really took us until the industrial revolution to develop enough context to realise like, wow, there's something going on here. And he noticed it on lots of artefacts, started to see, okay, there's lathe use. Some of these objects are obviously turned on the lathe in a time period that supposedly was thousands of years before the invention of the lathe, even before the supposed introduction of the wheel, things like that. And when he actually looks at the witness marks on some of these cuts and these holes that we see, it's just, it's astonishing rate of kind of ploughing through very hard stone that in fact, it exceeds the rates at which we do it today with our own modern machinery and techniques. So it's a real mystery. It's fascinating. I mean, and the thing that I like about it as well is that the more you look, the more you look in museums and when you look at sites around the world, patterns emerge. And I'm noticing that when he came to Stonehenge with me a couple of years ago, we had a good look at some of the weird scoop marks that are on the stones in Stonehenge, which are parallels with what's in Aswan quarry, what's in Oriente Tambo or Machu Picchu. I mean, when I start seeing things like that, it really makes me wonder, you know, is this a sort of lost technique that everyone knew about or what? Yeah, or were these the same people that may have had a hand in it, like offshoots of a similar civilization that yeah, we're using the same technique. And that's always been one of the things that people do notice. That's intriguing, right? You see in particularly like megalithic stonework, you have similarities that come at you from all over the world, supposedly from very different time periods, although we don't really know. It's very difficult to date stone, particularly stone that's been sitting out. It's basically impossible. You know, and you see these different construction styles on all of these sites as well. It's complex. All of these ancient sites have gone through, you know, thousands of years of occupation, renovation, potentially multiple civilizations using them and building on them. And then later on, people are quarrying them and taking the stone for other purposes. So, you know, it's a lens you've got to look at this stuff through and try and keep that in mind when you're trying to unravel some of this stuff. Because one of the things that people don't like talking about is geopolymer. So I want to mention something here before, you know, I mean, we can skip this if you really want to, but there's this Joseph de Wittevitz thing of like, you know, everything's sort of powdered, cemented, put back together, formed and everything. But one of the interesting things, and I think I mentioned this year at Stonehenge, there's a tradition at Stonehenge from this book from 1666 that writes about these, what they call the Kangik giants. And they, what they did, they would actually have furnaces and the stone would be turned to powder and they would reform it into whatever shapes they wanted. And this was an old tradition in England. It's a bit like the Cyclops of Greece that they would have underground furnaces where they would be able to shape and manipulate stone. And, but the tradition, there's no traditions really of that in Egypt that I've heard of, you know, where you hear these legends or stories that might give a little clue. But I mean, do you think there's any reality to that? Or do you think it's a way they just try to explain it? I think intuitively there are certainly, I mean, people can land on a, there's some subtle differences, like geopolymer is kind of, I think of that as the idea of like a modern cement, which is a geopolymer, right? It's essentially a slurry or a powdered substance, you wet, it sets and it forms, you know, a hard surface and cement is a geopolymer. Another kind of angle people can take it, and this is like an intuition you get looking at the architecture in places like South America, Sacred Valley of Peru. It's like some sort of form of stone softening where it's not, you're not really a geopolymer, but somehow the stone is being softened like a toffee and it's pushed into place. And that's like just intuitively, given the curves and the flowing design of those stones, it's like, oh, maybe it's like they did that. We don't, if that's the case, we don't have a lot of evidence or any evidence really for how that might've been done. Specifically with geopolymers, I don't dismiss the idea. I try to remain open to it. In fact, there is some good evidence for it in places like Tiwanaku, like there's some interest, and I think it's something that should be looked into further. I do have some challenges with that concept in Egypt, particularly when you're talking about things like granite, you know, granite, it's just not, it's literally what I say about it, it's not how granite works. Like granite, you try and melt it, it actually is, you know, it's a conglomerate or it's made up of all these other constituent minerals that have different melting points, that have different hardnesses, people that have tried to melt it and, you know, they're focusing it, the sun, or they're putting heat on it that it tends to just explode, blow apart. You can't just form it into some sort of lava or slurry and then have it re-hardened back into granite, naturally granite. You know, it takes millions of years of heat and pressure to actually form it. You have crystal growth in the granite, like these quartz crystals actually grow in it. Furthermore, in places like Egypt, you know, and a lot of other sites around the world, we literally have quarries. We have bedrock quarries where there are still objects attached to the quarry that were being carved out. So it seems pretty clear to me that, you know, a lot of this is stone that's coming from bedrock, it's being cut out and transported. You also have machining, you know, witness marks and tools for how it's being shaped. Similarly, the limestone is also a bit of a challenge to me. When people talk about the limestone in particular being a geopolymer in Egypt, it's tricky because it's numelitic limestone, like there are numelites in it. It's fossilized, there are fossils in the limestone. And in fact, in places in particular, I noticed this at the Sphinx Temple, you know, limestone is a sedimentary stone. So it's laid down, these sediment layers get laid down again over millions of years and they harden and you have variations in those different layers in terms of hardness. And you can see that, so in the walls of the Sphinx enclosure, for example. And we know that the blocks for like the big blocks that some people claim a geopolymer, they were cut from these quarries because the ancient Egyptians, whoever built these things, I'm not sure it was the dynastic Egyptians, but the big giant blocks of it that they took out and they, you know, they built these temple, the internal masonry of the temple structures from, you can actually see they lined up those sedimentary layers. So you can see it in the stone from one block to the next, these layers, they actually said, okay, we're going to take these blocks that were next to each other in the quarry and line them up, you see these sedimentary layers. So I don't think if it was a powder or it was some slurry, you wouldn't have fossils, you wouldn't form into these sedimentary layers. So yeah, I have some challenges with it, you know, obviously also all the blocks are a different shape and size, the way we look at, you know, how we use modern geopolymer today, cement blocks, they're all the same shape and size, that's the most efficient way to do it. That's not to say that there isn't any merit to it. I do think that it's an interesting topic for explanation. I think there is some evidence for it in places like Tiwanaku that bears more research going into it and I try to keep an open mind about it. I just want to talk a bit about the vases and I want to just, I want to highlight it really because then I can, because it's a big subject, but I want to then talk a bit about, like, they found some quite nicely polished stone plates at Karahan Tepe. I mean, they're not the same extreme and then I want to talk about the oldest ones from Egypt because I want to draw a connection maybe, you know, so that's the kind of direction I want to go. Yeah, well, Turkey, I mean, yeah, there's some other interesting artifacts come out of Turkey from the Neolithic period too. So one of the things you've been looking at with a few other people as well, I know Chris Dunn's involved in this, is these remarkable vases. Now they're small, they're compact. People just looked at them, thought nothing of them for many, many years, but they've now been scanned, they've now been looked at properly and they're showing extremely high levels of sophistication. But what impresses me, some of them are so old, much older than you think. So can we just briefly explain them, especially the older ones? Yeah, well, so it is a remarkable category of artifacts that come to us from ancient Egypt. It is these stone vases, vessels, you know, some of them are tiny, some of them are small. I mean, you do get them that some of them are like, you know, hip height and there are larger ones too. And it is one of the interesting, I guess, elements about these vases is that they are some of the oldest objects to come out of ancient Egypt in that it's, and this is not controversial, like if you go to any of these museums in the world where they're displayed, which there's thousands of, tens of thousands of them. So they're all around the world. You'll find them in the pre-dynastic section. I mean, it's, a lot of them attributed to the Nakata, the Nakata two cultures, this stretches back to like, you know, 10 to 14,000 years ago. And right up from then to, you know, to the start of the dynastic civilization, roughly 3000. Some of them you say are 14,000 years old, or that's the civilization? No, some of them are. Yes, some of them have been found in sites that have dated between 12 to 14,000, 14,500 years ago. So 12,500 BC. That's insane. Yeah. And you can find these images from these sites. A lot of these sites that date back to that period today are underwater because of the Aswan Dam. You know, and, you know, it's tough to find specific examples there, but there are known examples. In fact, one of the guys involved in the vase scan project, Adam Young, you know, he has a vase that's, there's no controversy around its provenance. It was a vase given to the Czech ambassador, I think, in the 1930s, eventually made its way into private, you know, antiquity market. He has it now. And it dates from a site that's, I think it's 9,000 years old. That's where, that's, you know, carbon dated, that's the site, and the vessel came from there. It's not controversial at all to say that these things are pre-dynastic and that they're pre-dynastic. In fact, you know, they go all the way back, and they kind of edge into the start of the dynastic civilization. You see them attributed to the first and second dynasty, the third dynasty, the fourth dynasty, and then they kind of stop, which is really interesting. The vase industry switches really over to alabaster vessels. Of course, pottery existed throughout this period as well. And it's an admitted thing, like most of these vases which were found beneath the pyramid of Joseph, third dynasty pharaoh, his pyramids at Saqqara, you know, many of those were also attributed to earlier time periods, and they're actually said to be inherited heirlooms, because some of them have these, you know, poorly scratched inscriptions or hieroglyphs on them from kings and rulers of earlier times. So there's like, we know that were being inherited, we know they're older, we don't know how old they are. And I think even these ancient cultures, the Nakarta cultures, these very primitive people, you know, there's no evidence that they could do this type of work, that there's no other stonework, they weren't doing statuary, there's no architecture. They were very primitive burials. It's pottery, it's hand thrown pottery, not spun in a bone and bead ornament. So who knows how old they are, but they had them back then, they were buried with them. I mean, what's fascinating to me, there's, you've seen photos of these, you've seen these stone plates that come from Karahan Tepe in southeast Turkey, these date to around 9,000, 9,400 BC or thereabouts. And some of them look, they don't look the level of precision you might find in Egypt, but they shouldn't be around at that time in that place. They're polished, they've got like perfect kind of perfect grooves, they're perfectly circular. They've got like polished kind of like little dimples and like cut marks. And they just don't make sense. I mean, and there were hundreds of these found all over the place. They found them at Gobekli Tepe now, they found them at all over Karahan Tepe, a whole catch of them. And they're now being found in other places as well. And so people are realizing that these were like the vases, if you like, of ancient Taztepli culture. Wow. Yeah, that's cool. I've not, I have to look into, I've not, I've seen some pictures, but I wasn't aware of that. One thing that's, I mean, there's so much stuff that does come out of Turkey. Something I learned about recently is like, there's actually a number of, a number of sort of what seemed to be lathe-turned and precision-made artifacts coming out of Turkey, some of them dating back to again 9,000, 9,000 years ago, if not more. There's a polished obsidian ring that looks to have been lathe-turned. And there's actually been a tribology study done on it, which is like a detailed look into the machining and how this might've been made. It's this ring that has this lip on it. It's from a Sikli Hoyak. A Sikli Hoyak, that's it. Yeah. And it's like, obsidian's not one of those, you know, mostly obsidian is valued or used by flaking, like flint. You can form sharp edges with it. But this has been turned and machined. It's smooth. Its surfaces are flat. There's been all this study done into the angles and the symmetry and precision of it. It had to have been turned. And, you know, you've got some other vessels and other things that come out of Turkey that seem to be, at least they share aspects with some of these ancient stone vases. And they're, again, they date back to these time periods where, you know, I don't think people were using lathes. Well, we don't think people were using lathes, but whoever made these things were using lathes at the very least. Yeah, that's pretty impressive. I mean, just, I mean, that Sikli Hoyak thing has been around for a while. No one's really, you know, only Andrew Collins has really been talking about it. And yet it can't really be explained. Because Sikli Hoyak is not, that's like after the Tazteplah culture, a little bit, not long after, but the whole site there is really simple. It's like Catalhoyak. It's like kind of mud brick buildings with plaster. And yet they have this sort of beautiful masterpieces of jewelry, which don't make any sense. It's true. And, you know, it's, I think it's a factor that often gets overlooked in this discussion. It's one that I talk about a bit. And it's this concept of just inheritance and reuse. I mean, we are inheriting these artifacts today from these ancient cultures. And I mean, you know, with the vases, for example, like those do find their way into the hands of private collectors and people with the means to have them. You know, they're in museums. And I think it's entirely plausible to consider the idea that the same thing was going on back then. I mean, you just, you just, you can't really, to me, make a technological argument that Neolithic, essentially Stone Age people could manufacture these things when there's literally no evidence they were capable of it. And all of the, all of the other things that we've dug up on these sites and where we found them, I mean, it's very relatively primitive. I mean, it's, it's, you know, it's, it's lithics, it's stone points, it's flaking, it's bone and beads. It's that type of thing. And then they have these artifacts. But I'd say that if you know, if you were in the business of, say, you get out of the Stone Age, you get into like, say, Pottery Age, if you're making pottery, and you're making jars and things like that, you know, and you find you find a hard stone vessel that that, you know, you're playing with stones, it is you're going to, you're going to immediately, intrinsically recognize the value of it and the achievement of it, it's going to become valuable. Those things will filter up to the top of the whatever social structures in place. And the people at the top may value them enough where they want to be buried with them. And maybe that's what we're seeing, when we dig these up in these at these sites and say, well, okay, just because it's buried with him, doesn't necessarily mean that's the guy that either had it made, or that's when it was made. We really don't know. It's a stone artifact, eddy dated. So the vases are a whole thing. There's a whole thing. I mean, I'll put a bunch of links in below, because it's, it's kind of, there's been a lot of kickback against it. And that that makes to me, that makes it a valid thing to study. If you're getting kickback against something as hard as you're getting with these vases, then I think that means you're onto something. Anytime that happens, I take notice. Everyone does. It's like, it's almost like when ancient apocalypse came out and they said, oh, that's the most dangerous thing ever on TV. And millions more people want to watch it because there's kickback against it. And so I think this is why it is, it's a sign you're onto something. And I like that. And also I understand you're going to be going further with this and getting into the Petri Museum, which we tried to, we So the vase scan project is, is ongoing. I haven't made any content in a little while. There's definitely things happening. You're right. It's been an interesting little journey. It was, it was unexpected for me. I don't take credit for it. I mean, I'm not doing the primary work. I'm kind of reporting on it. I'm part of it a little bit, but I'm, I do want to acknowledge the work of like Alex, Alex Dunn, Chris Dunn's son, Adam Young, who was really the driving force behind it in the first place. He's the guy who owns the, the OG vase, original granite vase that we, what we studied. Also Matt Bell, who since we did that work is just, I mean, incredibly, he spent a lot of money acquiring vases and, and, and then, you know, having them scanned and he's, he's driving forward with it. We're working with an Egyptian university to try and, who are interested in this procedure. They're already scanning like artifacts with, you know, photogrammetry just for virtual reality, but it's, they, we're getting them up to speed on the procedure. They are interested. It's a team of engineers, as well as Egyptologists. They've got access to museums, getting them up to speed on the sort of the analysis, the GD&T or geometric distancing and tolerancing work to, to analyse it. It's, it's been fun. And it's, to me, it has represented kind of the most significant leap forward in terms of analysis of sort of this ancient technology, because exactly what's happened, you know, this, this, this high definition, like, you know, structured light scanning, and then later CT x-ray scanning, which goes down to the micron level, and the models that it produces has enabled us to really get a grip on just how precisely these things are made. I mean, you're talking single digit thousandths of an inch, or even better in some cases, in terms of concentricity, roundness, just machining on these vases. It's showing just how remarkable they are. They would be tremendously challenging to try and make in these materials, granite, diorite, you know, other hard stones, even with our modern machines. Certainly, I think it's shining a light on the implausibility of, of doing these by hand or with dudes banging on them with rocks and sticks and sand, which is how they're explained. And the work's progressing. There's, there are more vases that have been scanned that we haven't talked about. These, most of the scans, a lot of them are, we've put out publicly. People can download the scans and do the analysis for themselves. Kickback really hasn't been on the data. Most of the objections, I think, come from people that really don't want this to be true. They just want to think these things are fake. I think we've addressed the provenance questions about it. And again, all the details are in the videos and things like that. But we're also looking, and the goal is absolutely to get museums. And one of the museums that has a bunch of these artefacts, and that is one that enable, you know, you can do research appointments on, and one that we've talked to, is the Petrie Museum on UCL at the University College of London. Obviously, they've got Petrie's core number seven, but they've got a whole lot of vases that are interesting, too. So yeah, the hope is, and we do have a research appointment book to maybe get some photogrammetry, if not structured light scans done of some artefacts there. And overall, just we want to increase the data set here. We want to scan as many vases as possible, because with a bigger data set, we can start to look for, you know, consistency in terms of geometric form, shapes, and just, you know, grow that data set, because the tools for analysis are there. We kind of have a technique mapped out for it now. But I mean, it's moving forward. And this is like, kind of, I think, the trend I hope that archaeology begins and Egyptology begins to adopt, which is, you know, using new technologies to kind of try and understand a bit more about how some of these artefacts were made. We see it happening in the Barabar Caves in India, the great work that Patrice Poillard and those guys have done looking at that. I think this is a technology that can be applied to all sorts of different artefacts. You know, I'm using photogrammetry, we're getting really detailed photogrammetry and LiDAR scans of things like scoop marks and tubular drill holes into stone. So that, you know, that as that database of information grows, and we're able to do more analysis, who knows what is going to come out of it. But I think it's presenting some very challenging questions to that mainstream story of history and the idea that these were primitive people who made them, because that certainly doesn't seem to be the case. And it's something that, you know, engineers and machinists and people that, you know, understand precision and they understand manufacturing, they get that immediately. And it's, you know, it's blowing people's minds. It certainly blew mine. Yeah, yeah, it's definitely doing that for sure. And I think, you know, it parallels with what's coming out of the ground in Turkey and Southeast Turkey to me, because it's showing another level of innovation and sophistication, which people have just not, they don't accept it now, but the proof is out there now. It's there. People are kind of seeing it come out of the ground. Yeah. And the fact that some of these artifacts you're talking about from that era as well, puts a whole different perspective on like who we are and where we came from. So yeah, I'm delighted this work is happening. It's like pushing the boundaries on things. The fact it's getting kicked back always makes me happy. You only get flack when you're over the target. This is it. It's fine. This is it. It's part of the process. And look, it's, questions need to be asked of it. And there are some legitimate questions that are getting asked. There's some disingenuous stuff that's happening as well, which is fine. It's just, I get it. It's part of the game. It doesn't bother me. But yeah, I think it's great. And I hope it's going to keep progressing. I mean, I just, I think the more we apply ourselves and we apply our technology, the more we're going to learn. And eventually, this existing paradigm of the idea that civilization only began once and only began 6,000 years ago, it's going to have to topple at some point, in my opinion. Our past is much longer and far more complicated than we think. And, you know, this is, we're looking sort of in the field here. We're trying to apply new technology to some of the artifacts, these ancient artifacts as it is. I think there's also tremendous evidence coming from other vectors and other adjacent fields of science. I mean, genetics, climate science. I mean, you name it. There's discoveries being made in lots of adjacent fields of science that should be having an impact onto that story of history, but they're not just yet. But eventually, that weight of evidence is just going to become too much. I agree. I agree. Well, it's fantastic talking to you, Ben. I appreciate it. It's good to catch up with you here at the Cosmic Summit, obviously. And I want to thank all the megalithomaniacs for watching. Do check out Ben's Uncharted X channel, his website, his tours and his projects he's working on, because this is like some breakthrough stuff that's taking place. So thank you, Ben. Cheers, mate. I do like hanging out with you. It's a good time. Excellent. Thank you, megalithomaniacs. And we'll see you next time.