The non-mystery of the Dendera Light

One of the things that has always struck me about woo-woo types is how little it takes to get them going.  I suppose when you've already decided what you believe, the amount of evidence you require to support that belief can asymptotically approach zero without changing your stance one iota.

I ran into a particularly good example of that yesterday -- the Dendera Light.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Olaf Tausch, Dendera Krypta 48 (cropped), CC BY 3.0]

The Dendera Light is a motif found in the carvings in the Temple of Hathor in Dendera, Egypt.  The design is of a giant snake emerging from a lotus flower.  It appears in at least six different places, accompanied by texts that are all rather similar -- so its meaning is fairly well understood.  It is part of the creation myth, showing the god Harsomtus (an incarnation of Horus, in the form of a snake) being born and going out into the world.  This is supported by the inscriptions, one version of which reads:

Speaking the words of Harsomtus, the great God, who dwells in Dendera, who is in the arms of the first in the night-barge, sublime snake, whose Chentj-statue carries Heh [the personification of eternity], whose crew carries in holiness his perfection, whose Ba [spirit] caused Hathor to appear in the sky, whose figure is revered by his followers, who is unique, encircled by his forehead-snake, with countless names on the top of Chui-en-hesen, the symbol of power of Ra in the land of Atum, the father of the Gods, who created everything.

The Dendera Light motif almost always appears on lists with names like "Ten Unexplained Mysteries From Ancient Egypt" despite the fact that except insofar as we still have a fairly fragmentary understanding of Egyptian mythology, beliefs, and practices, it's not very mysterious at all.

Why?

First, someone noticed that the oval container (or halo) surrounding the snake was the same basic shape as a Crookes tube, an early version of the cathode-ray tube invented by British physicist William Crookes in 1870:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons D-Kuru, Crookes tube two views, CC BY-SA 3.0 AT]

The second thing was a passing comment by British astronomer and polymath Joseph Norman Lockyer, who had gone to Egypt to investigate the alignment of ancient temples and monuments with astronomical objects.  He and a colleague noticed the absence of soot deposits in the interior of some of the temples -- something you'd expect with the use of torches or oil lamps -- and the colleague jokingly said that this could be explained if the ancient Egyptians had electric lights.  Lockyer, clearly recognizing that it was a joke, mentioned it to a friend, and that was all it took.

In a classic example of adding two and two and getting 318, we have "vaguely oval shape in a religious motif" plus "humorous comment about the lack of soot in Egyptian temples" equaling "the ancient Egyptians had high technology, including electricity and who-the-hell-knows what else."

Therefore, of course, you-know-who had to be involved:

Needless to say, this claim has actual archaeologists tearing their hair out.  Kenneth Feder, professor of archaeology at Central Connecticut State University, who is a vocal debunker of ancient aliens claims and the like (he is the author of The Encyclopedia of Dubious Archaeology) points out correctly that if the ancient Egyptians had electricity and light bulbs, it's a little odd that we've never found a single trace of a wire, socket, filament, generator, or battery -- not so much as a glass shard from a broken bulb.

I get that the ancient Egyptian culture is fascinating and, in one sense, mysterious.  As I mentioned earlier, our understanding of how these people lived and what they believed is incomplete at best.  The monuments and temples and relics we still have today are beautiful and evocative.

But none of that is an excuse for making shit up.

So let's keep a sense of perspective, here.  The inscriptions and designs we don't yet understand do not imply that ancient aliens had anything to do with it.  "We don't yet understand" means only one thing; "we don't yet understand."

And as far as the Dendera Light, I'm afraid that's where we have to leave it.

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Light speed

There's a claim I've now seen three times on social media that claims the ancient Egyptians knew the speed of light.

This is a pretty outlandish claim right from the get-go, as there is no evidence the Egyptians had invented, or even had access to, any kind of advanced technology.  Plus, even with (relatively) modern technology, the first reasonably decent estimate of the speed of light wasn't made until 1676, when Danish astronomer Olaus Roemer used the difference in the timing of the eclipses of the moons of Jupiter when the Earth was moving toward them as compared to when the Earth was moving away from them, and came up with an estimate of 225,300,000 meters per second -- not too shabby given the limited technology of the time (the actual answer is just shy of 300,000,000 meters per second).

But there's something about those ancient Egyptians, isn't there?  There have been "secrets of the Pyramids" claims around for years, mostly of the form that if you take the area of the base of the Pyramid of Khufu in square furlongs and divide it by the height in smoots, and multiply times four, and add King Solomon's shoe size in inches, you get the mass of the Earth in troy ounces.

Okay, I made all that up, because when I read stuff about the "secrets of the Pyramids" it makes me want to take Ockham's razor and slit my wrists with it.  But I was forced to look at the topic at least a little bit when the aforementioned post about the speed of light started popping up on social media, especially when a loyal reader of Skeptophilia said, "You have got to deal with this."

The gist is that the speed of light in meters per second (299,792,458) is the same sequence of numbers as the location of the Pyramid of Khufu (29.9792458 degrees north latitude).  Which, if true, is actually a little weird.  But let's look at it a tad closer, shall we?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jerome Bon from Paris, France, Great Pyramid of Giza (2427530661), CC BY 2.0]

29.9792458 degrees of latitude is really specific.  One degree is approximately 111 kilometers, so getting a measurement of location down to seven decimal places is pretty impressive.  That last decimal place -- the ten-millionths place -- corresponds to a distance of 0.0111 meters, or a little over a centimeter.

So are they sure that last digit is an 8?  Measuring the position of the Great Pyramid to the nearest centimeter is a little dicey, given that the Great Pyramid is big (thus the name).  Even if the claim is that they're measuring the position of the top -- which is unclear -- the location of the top has some wiggle room, as it doesn't come to a perfect point.

But if you're just saying "somewhere on the Great Pyramid," there's a lot of wiggle room.  The base of the Pyramid of Khufu is about 230 meters on an edge, so that means that one-centimeter accuracy turns into "somewhere within 23,000 centimeters."

Not so impressive, really.

There's a second problem, however, which is that the second wasn't adopted as a unit of time until the invention of the pendulum clock in 1656.  The meter as a unit of length wasn't proposed until 1668, and was not adopted until 1790.  (And some countries still don't use the metric system.  I'm lookin' at you, fellow Americans.)  So why would the ancient Egyptians have measured the speed of light -- even assuming they could -- in meters per second, and not cubits per sidereal year, or whatever the fuck crazy units of measurement they used?

So as expected, this claim is pretty ridiculous, and not even vaguely plausible if you take it apart logically.  Not that there was any doubt of that.  The bottom line is that the ancient Egyptians were  cool people, and the pyramids are really impressive, but they weren't magical or advanced or (heaven help us) being assisted by aliens.

No matter what you may have learned from the historical documentary Stargate.

Oh, and for the record, I didn't invent the unit of "smoot" for length.  A smoot is 1.70 meters, which was the height of Harvard student Oliver R. Smoot, who in 1958 got drunk with his fraternity buddies and decided to measure the length of Harvard Bridge in Smoot-heights.  It turned out to be 364.4 smoots long, plus or minus the length of Oliver R. Smoot's ear.

And considering they were drunk at the time, it's pretty impressive that they thought of including error bars in their measurement.  Better than the damn Egyptian-speed-of-light people, who couldn't even get their measurement to within plus or minus 230 meters.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a charming inquiry into a realm that scares a lot of people -- mathematics.  In The Universe and the Teacup, K. C. Cole investigates the beauty and wonder of that most abstract of disciplines, and even for -- especially for -- non-mathematical types, gives a window into a subject that is too often taught as an arbitrary set of rules for manipulating symbols.  Cole, in a lyrical and not-too-technical way, demonstrates brilliantly the truth of the words of Galileo -- "Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe."

Ancient Egyptian helicopters

I find it amusing to note how often woo-woo headlines are phrased as questions, e.g. "Did Aliens Build Stonehenge?"  "Does A Plesiosaur Live In The Hudson River?"  "Is Graceland Haunted By Elvis's Ghost?"

I live in constant hope that one day, I'll open one of these articles, and the entire article will consist of one word: "NO."  It hasn't happened yet, but it's this sort of cheery thought that keeps me going.

I thought for sure that would be the case this morning, when I took a look at an article entitled "Mysteries of Abydos: Egyptian Flying Machines?"  The article that followed (1) did not say "NO" anywhere, and (2) sadly, was serious, featuring the following photograph, a close-up of a panel from the Temple of Seti I in Abydos, Egypt:

There then follows some fairly hysterical (in every sense of the word) descriptions about how the Ancient Egyptians apparently spent a great deal of time zooming about in helicopters, because there is clearly one depicted here.  There is, according to the author, also a submarine and a Back to the Future-style hoverboard shown on the panel, as well as several other "futuristic craft."

Now, at first I was optimistically certain that this had to be an isolated phenomenon; no one, with the exception of the author of the article, could possibly take this seriously.  Sadly, I was mistaken.  I did a bit of research, and was appalled to find that this panel is one of the main pieces of "evidence" used by the von Däniken Descent Of The Gods cadre to support their conjecture that the Earth was the alien version of Grand Central Station three thousand years ago.  Amongst the ancient-aliens crowd, the Abydos helicopter is apparently hugely popular, not to mention amongst those who think that Stargate is a historical documentary.

Which may well be the same people.

The interesting thing is that the whole thing was adequately explained years ago; a French UFO aficionado named Thierry Wathelet took the time to query some Egyptologists about the panel, and put together a nice explanation.  Several of the Egyptologists, evidently fed up with all of the nonsense that has grown up around Egyptian archaeology, told Wathelet to piss off, but a few of them were kind enough to give him detailed information about how the panel had been created, and what it meant.  The simple answer: the apparent helicopter is a palimpsest -- a place where a written text was effaced or altered to make room for new writing.  The "helicopter" is a combination of (at least) two hieroglyphs, and the fact that it looks a bit like an aircraft a complete coincidence.  Wathelet quotes an email he received from Katherine Griffis-Greenberg, a professor of archaeology at the University of Alabama:

It was decided in antiquity to replace the five-fold royal titulary of Seti I with that of his son and successor, Ramesses II. In the photos, we clearly see "Who repulses the Nine Bows," which figures in some of the Two-Ladies names of Seti I, replaced by "Who protects Egypt and overthrows the foreign countries," a Two-Ladies name of Ramesses II.  With some of the plaster that once covered Seti I's titulary now fallen away, certain of the superimposed signs do indeed look like a submarine, etc., but it's just a coincidence.   Well, hallelujah, and kudos to Wathelet for putting the whole thing together, and on a UFO site, no less.  Now, if a UFOologist can summon up this kind of skeptical facility, it shouldn't be that hard for the rest of us, right?

Unfortunately, the answer seems to be "no," and I base this on the fact that my perusal of the first few pages of the 787,000 hits I got from Googling "Abydos helicopter" seemed to be mostly in favor of the theory that the ancient Egyptians spent a good bit of their time sightseeing from the air.  So I guess my search will have to continue for an article whose headline asks a question, and the article itself just says, "No" (or even better, "What are you, a moron?  Stop fucking around on the internet and go learn some critical thinking skills.").  Until then, at least one more ridiculous woo-woo theory has been laid to rest -- at least for the seeming minority of folks who take the time to evaluate the evidence skeptically and scientifically.

Rethinking the Sphinx

Can we get something straight, here?

The statement, "Some radical ideas have proven true" is not equivalent to "if an idea is radical, it must be true."  There are many, many ideas out there that are simply batshit crazy, and the experts think they're wrong for a reason.

And you do not improve your case by bringing up the fact that "they disbelieved Einstein at first, too."

This comes up because of a loony idea that appeared over at the site Ancient Code that claims that the Egyptian Sphinx is 800,000 years old.  And no, I didn't slip and put in too many zeroes.  There are apparently a couple of geochemists over at the National Academy of Sciences in Ukraine who analyzed erosion and wear patterns in the rock from which the Sphinx is built, and concluded that the only possible explanation is that the Sphinx is 200 times older than archeologists are telling us.

This just brings up two questions:

1. You do realize that 800,000 years ago, there were no modern humans?
2. Where did you get your degrees from, Big Bob's Discount Diploma Warehouse?

So at first I thought this was some kind of hoax.  But no, the two scientists, I. Vyacheslav Manichev and Alexander G. Parkhomenko, are apparently serious. "The absolute mark of the upper large erosion hollow of the Sphinx corresponds to the level of water surface which took place in the Early Pleistocene," Manichev and Parkhomeno write.  "The Great Egyptian Sphinx had already stood on the Giza Plateau by that geological (historical) time."

The article, which quotes extensively from their paper, describes their argument, which seems to be based on an assumption that the weathering of the rock from which the Sphinx is built couldn't have happened in 4,500-odd years.  Plus, as the Sphinx is thought to have spent at least part of that time covered in sand and thus protected from damage, there's no way all of the erosion we see can be due to processes that have occurred in that time.  We then hear about the geological history of the area around Giza, including the presence of a freshwater lake 800,000 years ago that could account for the condition of the Sphinx.

No mention is made of the fact that the builders of the Sphinx could have constructed it from rock that was already partially weathered.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But it's only at the very end of the article that they admit the worst problem with all of this:

Some might say that the theory proposed by Manichev and Parkhomenko is very extreme because it places the Great Sphinx in an era where there were no humans, according to currently accepted evolutionary patterns.  Furthermore, as it has been demonstrated, the two megalithic temples, located adjacent to the Great Sphinx were built by the same stone which means that the new dating of the Sphinx drags these monuments with the Sphinx back 800,000 years.  In other words, this means that ancient civilizations inhabited our planet much longer than mainstream scientists are willing to accept.

So, if some model of geological weathering requires that an archeological artifact be 200 times older than anyone thought, it must be all of the other archeological, historical, and biological evidence that is wrong, not something amiss with the model itself?

You'd think this would be a case where most everyone would read this and say, "Yeah, right," and walk away, snickering softly.  But as we've seen before, people love an iconoclast.  All you have to do is claim that you've shown that the fancy-pants ivory-tower scientific experts are wrong about something, and you'll have wingnuts of all descriptions swarming to your defense.  This claim showed up on Reddit, over at the r/conspiracy subreddit, a few days ago, and here are a few of the responses posted:

As someone who has always been into history and science (and the popularly accepted ideas in those fields), lately I've been really interested in alternate, extended human timelines and alternatives to Darwin's theory of evolution (which as described in The Origin of Species, is actually much rougher and less accurate than mainstream education would have you think, don't get me wrong we can watch viruses and even plants and animals adapt and "evolve" on a small scale, but Darwin's theory goes a lot further than that). 

Look into the Thunder Bolt Project, pretty interesting.  A lot of shared culture, mythology, cave paintings can be traced back to electrical events witnessed in the sky, by cultures that never spoke to one another. 

Get into any meaningful science discussion about the true nature of reality, and fairly soon the discussion will go toward "14th dimensional hyper-strings" and "wave/particle duality" or "multiverses".  Point being, is that eventually it all becomes philosophy / metaphysics.  And all of it is beyond our level of comprehension.  This is whats [sic] so frustrating in speaking to the "Bill Nye" science types.  You know the ones, with a simple childlike answer for everything.  They are truly no more inquisitive nor intelligent than the average bible thumper.  Instead of quoting John 3:16, they simply reflexively quote their overly simplistic 5th grade science book.  What's so sad is they go through their life actually believing that they have some sort of lock on the objective nature or reality. 

If all possibilities exist, then what we see as our past and the course of evolution up until this point is precisely the way things had to happen in order that we be here right now, no matter how improbable. That, I believe, is the explanation for the seemingly magical leaps in evolution and indeed the genesis of life in this universe itself.  It happened that way in order for us to be here now, and why we are here now is not a question that we can answer. 

Science and scientists want to have all of the answers, they want to have everyone just bow down and believe, they're worse than the religions, look at how they treated Einstein, first he was crazy, now everyone thinks that relativity is gospel.

The last one is the one that made me facepalm the hardest.  Not only is the author an odds-on favorite for a gold medal in the Olympic Comma Splice Event, (s)he apparently doesn't realize that Einstein has one other thing on his side besides blind devotion: evidence.

Relativity has been tested every which way from Sunday -- pressed harder, honestly, than a lot of other scientific models, because its conclusions are so counterintuitive.  And every time, the evidence has supported Einstein.

And where is the support for there having been modern, monument-building humans in the Nile Valley 800,000 years ago?

*crickets*

I'm waiting.

*more crickets*

Thought so.  You can't just make a claim, and then state that your explanation is the only possibility, so fiat lux and q.e.d. and so on.  It has to explain all of the relevant data, or there's something wrong with your model.

Just being a radical swim-against-the-current type isn't enough.  "Many great thinkers were criticized at first" is not logically equivalent to, "I'm being criticized, therefore I must be a great thinker."

And if any further evidence is uncovered that the Sphinx is 800,000 years old, I'll eat it for breakfast.

Answers, ignorance, and mitochondrial DNA

Something I fight continuously, as a teacher, is the idea that the most important thing is THE ANSWER.

It's the fault of the way education is usually conducted, of course.  Whether because teachers were themselves taught that way, or because of expediency, THE ANSWER is always considered to be the critical thing.  It doesn't matter how you got there; process isn't the concern.  As long as you have THE ANSWER in the appropriate space, you get full credit.

The problem is, by the time students get to high school, I'm expecting that they'll be moving beyond that, and it's often a battle.  I've had more than one student say, "Just tell me what to write down," as if somehow that was going to engender understanding.  My frustration on this point is what resulted in the following actual conversation:

Student:  What do I write down for question #7?
Me:  Whatever you think the correct explanation is.
Student:  But what if my explanation isn't right?
Me:  Then I'll mark it wrong.
Student:  But I don't want to write down the wrong answer!
Me:  Then don't.

In my own defense, I wasn't simply trying to be snarky; it just gets tiring to know that my refrain of "I will not think for you" often falls on deaf ears.

I find myself wondering how deep this inclination goes, and if it's because as a culture, we're taught to expect that there always is a single correct answer.  The biblical maxim of "Ask and ye shall receive" is pretty deeply ingrained.  We're uncomfortable with not knowing.

We're even more uncomfortable where there may be no way to know.

I ran squarely into this with my genealogical pursuits a couple of days ago.  There's a pair of sisters who were amongst the founding mothers of Acadia (as people of French descent call Nova Scotia).  Their names are Catherine and Edmée LeJeune, and they show up in Acadia in the early 1600s.  (I actually descend, on my mother's side of the family, from both of them.)

No one knows where they were born, or who their parents were.  The early records simply aren't complete enough.  This has led to speculation that they may have been Natives -- there are numerous records of early French settlers marrying Native women.  Could it be that the LeJeune sisters were members of the Mi'kmaq, Maliseet, or some other Native tribe of eastern Canada?

The whole thing was a moot point for decades; like I said, the documentation simply does not exist.  This didn't stop rampant speculation on both sides of the question.  Instead of just leaving their origin as "unknown," people seemed to need to fill in the blank with something.

Then, along came mitochondrial DNA analysis.  mtDNA is only inherited through the maternal line, so any matrilineal descendant of either sister should pinpoint their origin.  Matrilineal descendants (several of them) were traced, offered up blood samples, and the results all agreed; Catherine and Edmée were of the haplotype U6a7a, a signature that is characteristic of North African ancestry.

In my mind, this seemed to settle it.  The Moors made significant inroads into southwestern Europe in the Middle Ages, and there are huge numbers of people in Spain, Portugal, and southern France who have North African ancestry.  Catherine and Edmée most likely were born in France.  But that wasn't good enough; the people who had already decided that they were Native weren't content to let it rest.

Enter Dr. Howard Barraclough "Barry" Fell, professional zoologist and amateur archaeologist and linguist, who in 1976 published a book called America B.C.: Ancient Settlers in the New World.  In it, using the cherry-picking lexicography favored by people who aren't actually trained in linguistic analysis, Fell came to the conclusion that the Mi'kmaq orthography, one of the only pre-Columbian North American writing systems, was descended from none other than...

... ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Now I hasten to state that most linguists consider Fell to be a well-meaning but misguided amateur.  (For a particularly insightful take-down of his conclusions, check out this site, courtesy of linguist and scholar Richard Flavin.)  But this hasn't stopped sites like "Mi'kmaq/Ancient Egyptian Connection" from surfacing, wherein we find that the ancient Egyptians made it not only to Nova Scotia, but all the way to Illinois and... Australia!

Now, I know the Egyptians were pretty cool.  But if you're gonna make a claim like that, I'm gonna need something more than a few chance correspondences between words and symbols before I buy in.

But the "have an answer at all costs" crowd wouldn't let it lie, especially once the Mormons got involved, and used Fell's so-called research to support their contention that the Native Americans were descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.

Why can't we just say "we don't know?"  Why can't we focus on the reality -- the Mi'kmaq and other Native groups made their way to North America at some unspecified time in the past, and (more specifically) Catherine and Edmée LeJeune had some North African ancestry somewhere -- and consider how awesome the process of knowing is?  We can actually use blood samples from distant descendants of long-dead individuals to determine the movements of groups of people thousands, or tens of thousands, of years ago.

Cool, no?

Not cool enough, apparently.  We need THE ANSWER.

Now, let me be clear on this: there's something to be said for having a correct picture of what's going on.  But when there's uncertainty, it's critical to be comfortable with a partial answer, and even more critical to understand the whole context of knowledge within which we are working.  In the long haul, I'm happier knowing about mtDNA and the migration of human groups than I would be just to have a final answer to fill in for my distant foremothers' birthplace.

But unfortunately, I appear to be in the minority.