this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
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Alien conspiracy theories about the Egyptian or Mayan Pyramids, the statues on Easter Island, the Nazca Lines, etc also have the implicit racist undertone of "well it's not like the actual humans from those primitive and backwards cultures could build it!" Basically, non-white people built something too advanced and white people don't like that.
By comparison, we never see alien conspiracy theories for mediaeval castles and cathedrals. No TV show is saying "so you're telling me that a bunch of serfs who couldn't read and didn't know basic arithmetic could build a castle? Nah they were too primitive it was probably aliens."
Utter nonsense. The reason alien conspiracy theories don't exist about castles and cathedrals is because the construction of these buildings was almost always very well documented and in many cases these documents still exist today. As far as I know there are no testimonies on the construction of the Egyptian and Mayan pyramids other than the structures themselves.
But there were? Just off the top of my head you have Deir al-Medina, which is the village were the workers assigned to the tombs in the valley of kings were assigned to (not exactly the pyramids, but similar enough). We have records of how they complained about bad working conditions and missing supplies, which were usually promptly dealt with because of the importance of the tombs to royal ideology.
Also: what about the texts literally in the pyramids that describe how they were being built and by whom (at least by whom further up in the hierarchy)? It's not like those aren't texts because they're not written in the Latin alphabet. Archaeologists did not, in fact, make up how pyramids/tombs were constructed.
Also, the Mayans most likely had extensive records as well, but we'll never know for certain because the Spanish colonists destroyed everything Indigenous without regard.
Honestly I get angry whenever Western media describes the Mayans or any Indigenous community in the "new world" as "mysterious" or "little is known about them," without the accompanying context of why so little is known about them, as if they're fairies or something. Couldn't be the fact that the colonial powers deliberately tried to erase them right?
Cue a new sticker of "We did that!"