If you are waiting for a friend
don't take your heartbeat
for the footfall of his horse's hooves.
(ancient Arabic proverb)
Most people are very superficial in their assessment of certain phenomena. And there is nothing wrong with that, since the human brain has some kind of limitation on the amount of information stored. If you fill your head with insignificant events and phenomena, then sooner or later, as Sherlock Holmes used to say, the moment will come when it will be simply impossible to remember the most necessary thing.
However, when it comes to some more or less in-depth analysis or study of this or that phenomenon, for example, being engaged in scientific activities, there can be no question of evaluating these phenomena superficially. Alas, there is a huge number of researchers, both amateurs and professionals, who (due to their laziness or simply lack of knowledge), explaining certain events, or the origin of some ancient objects, allow themselves unforgivable liberties in judgments, sometimes leading to complete confusion in their scientific research and works.
In practice, it looks something like this: having found an iron statuette from the Neolithic era, such a would-be researcher concludes that the civilization "X" mastered the secrets of smelting iron ore long before the rest of humanity mastered copper. He had no idea that products made of meteorite iron appeared in people about ten thousand years ago.
Another type of such liberties is that explanations of certain technologies of the ancients are made from the point of view of modernity. For example, some researchers believe that the ancient Egyptians could not grind granite in any way, possessing the "backward technologies" of their time. Why? Yes, because we use tungsten carbide saws and the quality of grinding is worse than that of the Egyptians. And they only had brass instruments. How did they achieve this quality of processing? Perhaps they were helped by more advanced civilizations? Etc. Only the author forgets at the same time that in Ancient Egypt these products were made not one day, as could be done today, but several years, and that the degree of polishing and accuracy of fitting the products depends only on the production time. Nowadays, you can make a perfect granite cube using a stone saw in a couple of hours; in ancient Egypt, it took at least a couple of months, and more than a dozen diabase hammers were required.
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There are many misconceptions associated with the pyramids. For example, it is believed that the Egyptians simply could not create such a large structure, since, given their level of development, they could not realize such volumes of stone extraction. However, according to the most conservative estimates, Ancient Rome, in just seven hundred years of its existence, set up temples and buildings in volume as much as seventy times more than Egypt in its four thousand years! Despite the fact that the technologies for the extraction and processing of limestone and marble did not change from ancient times until the 16th century AD.
Another misconception, persistently implanted in the minds of viewers and readers, is that the Egyptians had only copper tools available, and since they are not suitable for processing granite and limestone, then, in fact, we come to the conclusion that the Egyptians could not build pyramids. The absurdity of such statements lies in the fact that no one has ever used copper or iron (and indeed, any metal) for the final processing of stone, which our would-be scientists should know about. 99% of all modern stone cutting tools use either large polymer or diamond cutters, or abrasive compositions. Metal is used only for cutting soft rocks or breaking off very large pieces.
For some reason, our "researchers", talking about the ideal holes drilled in granite by the Egyptians, explain this only by "machines with the characteristics of modern", but do not bother to refer to the primary sources, where the builders (yes, yes, those same ancient Egyptians) describe the process of making holes in stone using ordinary sand as an abrasive. And not so much "modern technologies", but even banal metal drills are not used. Similar experiments were repeated by L. Gorelik, about which he even wrote a book in 2010, providing it with rich photo and video material.
A simple calculation carried out by the Egyptologist Rex Engelbach shows that, on average, an Egyptian stone worker, depending on his specialization, “washed into dust” from 7 to 20 kg of granite or up to 50 kg of limestone or marble per day. In a year, even taking into account two days off a week, it turned out to be about three and a half tons! At this rate, the workers involved only in the construction of the Cheops pyramid could polish all the buildings and statues of Ancient Egypt in no more than fifty years. Taking into account the four thousand years of ancient Egypt's existence, the figure of 50 years of grinding works seems ridiculous.
For a long time, there was another myth that the blocks that make up the pyramids were ideally fitted to each other and the Egyptians themselves could not achieve such accuracy. In fact, it turned out that, firstly, the blocks from which the pyramids are built are connected with a solution and there can be no question of any exact fit, and secondly, the solution in Egypt was used not so much for the functions of fastening the blocks, as for facilitating their slip when laying. The correctness of their fitting did not play any role at all, since the pyramid was still "sheathed" from the outside with special facing blocks, which hid the flaws in the construction.
And the most interesting thing: more than one generation of Egyptologists and those involved in them is trying to change the official chronology of the pyramids. Say, they were built "long before" that historical period to which classical Egyptology relates them. That they are a product of an older civilization from the constellation Orion, and so on … In the end, the scientific world could not stand it and in 1984 conducted a complex of examinations designed to clarify the timing of the construction of the pyramids. The result was unambiguous: all dates are correct and non-negotiable. The "alternatives" immediately declared that all this was a lie, that the data had been falsified, that a more impartial study was needed, etc. etc. The second study led by D. Koch was conducted in 1995. Most of the skeptics' wishes were taken into account, in addition,more advanced methods of radiocarbon analysis were used. The result is the same as in 1984. And it was strange to expect something else. The fact is that on each pyramid it is written by the creators, whose it was, when it was built, who was the architect, and so on …
Despite the fact that in questions of pyramids all the dots have been put on the "i" for a long time, new and new theories regularly appear about certain aspects of their construction or use. This only suggests that interest in the greatest monument of antiquity is not waning even now. Perhaps, in the future, with the development of our means of knowledge, something new will be discovered. The main thing in this matter is to treat new "trends" with a little bit of skepticism, because a person is a gullible creature. It is easier for him to believe in something simple, but wrong, than to prove something difficult, but correct.