The Legends of the Pyramids: Myths and Misconceptions about Ancient Egypt by Jas

Description: FREE SHIPPING UK WIDE The Legends of the Pyramids by Jason Colavito Could the Great Pyramid of Giza be a repository of ancient magical knowledge? Or perhaps evidence of a vanished pre-Ice Age civilization? Misinformation and myths have attached themselves to the Egyptian pyramids since ancient Greece and Rome. While many Americans believe that the pyramids were built by aliens, archaeologists understand that the Giza pyramids were built by the pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty around 2450 BCE. So why is there such a disconnect between scholarly opinion and the popular view of Egypt? In The Legends of the Pyramids, Jason Colavito takes us back to Late Antique Egypt, where the replacement of polytheism with Christianity gave rise to local efforts to rewrite the stories of Egyptian history in the image of the Bible. When the Arab conquest absorbed Egypt into the Islamic community, these stories then passed into Islamic historiography and reentered the West. Colavitos The Legends of the Pyramids lays open pop cultures view of Egypt in movies, TV shows, popular books, and New Age beliefs, detailing how the hidden history of Egypt has grown alongside the official history of archaeology and Egyptology. FORMAT Hardcover LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Author Biography Jason Colavito researches the connections between science, pseudoscience, and speculative fiction, with an emphasis on pop culture. He is the author of numerous books and blogs regularly about history, the supernatural, and popular culture. He is based in Delmar, New York. Table of Contents Note on the TextIntroduction1. Ancient Testimonia2. Why Are the Pyramids Not in the Bible?3. Late Antiquity4. The Early Middle Ages5. Pyramid Legends in Medieval Islam6. The Meaning Behind the Myth7. The Translation of Pyramid Legends8. The Romance of the Pyramids9. The Great Mistake10. The Curse of King Tut11. Mummies in Outer Space12. Race and ReligionConclusionIndex Review This highly recommended book is well researched, entertaining and original. Five stars. * Fortean Times * Long Description Could the Great Pyramid of Giza be a repository of ancient magical knowledge? Or perhaps evidence of a vanished pre-Ice Age civilization? Misinformation and myths have attached themselves to the Egyptian pyramids since ancient Greece and Rome. While many Americans believe that the pyramids were built by aliens, archaeologists understand that the Giza pyramids were built by the pharaohs of the fourth dynasty, around 2450 BCE. So why is there such a disconnect between scholarly opinion and the popular view of Egypt? In The Legends of the Pyramids , Jason Colavito takes us back to Late Antique Egypt, where the replacement of polytheism with Christianity gave rise to local efforts to rewrite the stories of Egyptian history in the image of the Bible. When the Arab conquest absorbed Egypt into the Islamic ummah , these stories then passed into Islamic historiography and reentered the West. Colavitos The Legends of the Pyramids lays open pop cultures view of Egypt in movies, TV shows, popular books, and New Age beliefs, detailing how the "hidden" history of Egypt has grown alongside the official history of archaeology and Egyptology. Review Quote This highly recommended book is well researched, entertaining and original. Five stars. Competing Titles Ancient High Tech: The Astonishing Scientific Achievements of Early Civilizations, Joseph (Bear & Company, 2020), 9781591433828 Excerpt from Book Islamic Legends Come to Europe Another effort to remake the pyramids in Biblical image surrounded the claim, popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that the Kings Chamber in the Great Pyramid was intended as the burial place of the Pharaoh who drowned when Moses parted the Red Sea. Some European travelers like Sandys brought back the story that the pyramids were the work of Queen Daluka after the Exodus, with its quasi-biblical pedigree. At the same time, however, the late Arab legend, current in Egypt in those days, that the Giza pyramids and the Sphinx were guardians against the Nile flood (a bastardization of the older Noachian Flood version) found their way into European travelogues and scientific treatises. The Arabic myth of Surid or Hermes as the builder of the Great Pyramid appeared almost simultaneously in three different parts of Europe during the brief seventeenth-century explosion of European interest in Arabic material--and it was no coincidence. In Britain, John Greaves included the story in the first Western scientific investigation of the pyramids, which he produced in 1646. In Italy not long after, a German Jesuit scholar named Athanasius Kircher investigated Arabic sources for Egyptian history as part of a series of works laying the foundation for Egyptology. In France, the scholar Pierre Vattier made a translation of Murta ibn al-Aff in 1666 which was itself translated into English in 1672, to great curiosity and interest. All three scholars knew one another and were working toward similar aims. Taken together, these scholarly sources helped to inject the Surid/Hermes story into a cultural mainstream still defined by alchemy and the occult and not yet by the full embrace of what we would consider modern science. It was a time, after all, when Isaac Newton could be both the greatest scientist of his day and an occultist with strange ideas about hidden truths encoded in the stars. As a result, when European scholarly interest in Arabic material declined in the eighteenth century, the Surid story would linger on the edges of respectable history, an Eastern curiosity of greatest interest to artists and occultists. John Greaves and the Science of the Pyramids Travelers to Egypt in the Middle Ages brought back reports of the pyramids and the wonders of Egypt, but they rarely went much beyond describing the pyramids as Josephs granaries and the hieroglyphs as mysterious writing or magical formulae. With the Renaissance, however, scholars began to question the received wisdom about Egypt and to start to investigate it in a more objective and rigorous way, albeit from a distance. Pierio Valeriano Bolzani was one of the first in the West to attempt to decipher the hieroglyphs, inspired by the rediscovery and publication of Horapollos discussion of hieroglyphs. Working from Italy, he studied Egyptian artifacts in Rome, and he developed an allegorical interpretation of the hieroglyphs from Horapollos speculative ideas. Despite its inaccuracies, it was an important step in the development of a scientific discipline of Egyptology. John Greaves, an Oxford University mathematician, astronomer, and antiquary, was not initially interested in the hieroglyphs or the mysteries of occult Egypt. Instead, he had a practical purpose in mind when he set off from England in 1637 to visit Egypt as part of a grand tour of the East, ostensibly to obtain rare books and manuscripts, particularly in Arabic. Greaves hoped to investigate Ptolemys Almagest, an ancient Greek book of astronomy that survived only in Arabic, by discovering the exact spot in Alexandria where Ptolemy had taken his measurements. En route, Greaves stopped at Rome, where he met with Athanasius Kircher, who had not yet written his great books on Egypt. (Some believe they actually met on Greavess return trip home.) Kircher had just discovered a century-old Arabic treatise on the pyramids by Jalal al-Din al-Suyui, whom he called Gelaldinus, which Abraham Ecchellensis had obtained in the early 1630s and brought to Rome in 1636, and it is possible that Kircher and Greaves discussed its account of the many Arabic myths about who built the pyramids. Greaves and Kircher hit it off, and Greaves planned to dedicate a book to him, writing out a draft dedication that he never published. He sought after Greek texts in Constantinople and spent nearly five months at Alexandria. While there, he twice visited Cairo and made a scientific survey of the Giza pyramids and engraved his name in one of the chambers. His measurements were the most accurate that had yet been made and served as the start of the scientific study of Giza. He also collected a large number of manuscripts in Greek, Arabic, and Persian before he returned to England and set to work writing up his account of the pyramids, known as Pyramidographia, which he published in 1646 and later revised after readers found some mathematical errors. The book was translated into French, where it helped spark the interest of French scholars in the mysteries of Egypt. The French translator, Melchisedech Th Details ISBN1684351480 Author Jason Colavito Short Title The Legends of the Pyramids Publisher Red Lightning Books Language English Year 2021 ISBN-10 1684351480 ISBN-13 9781684351480 Format Hardcover Subtitle Myths and Misconceptions about Ancient Egypt Audience Age 18 Imprint Red Lightning Books Place of Publication Bloomington Country of Publication United States Pages 240 AU Release Date 2021-08-03 NZ Release Date 2021-08-03 US Release Date 2021-08-03 Publication Date 2021-08-03 UK Release Date 2021-08-03 Illustrations 28 Illustrations, black and white Alternative 9781684351497 DEWEY 932.01 Audience Professional & Vocational We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! 30 DAY RETURN POLICY No questions asked, 30 day returns! 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