I know we’re making guesses, but at least trying to make educated ones.
Why no records of the methods? Well here’s another educated guess. It was considered a sacred art, not to be divulged to commoners or foreigners.
It’s at least as good as anything else out there. Hush-hush explains a lot.
Ha...that, we are. Given the scale of the mystery, I think we're doing okay ;-)
Why no records of the methods? Well here’s another educated guess. It was considered a sacred art, not to be divulged to commoners or foreigners.
Embalming was considered a sacred art, but they left records about that process.
If the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids with primitive methods, hundreds of thousands of laborers would have been involved. The pharaohs would have had to kill them all to preserve the secrets of how they did it. And what of the laborers' wives, their children, the master builders, the priesthood, neighboring kingdoms, and their spies? They would have had to kill them all, too.
Surely, some would have escaped to tell the tale.
What purpose would such secrecy serve, if it required killing a substantial number of their subjects to preserve it? Last of all, if they were such tyrannical megalomaniacs, why didn't they have their names inscribed on every one of these structures?
After all that, they took no credit? I don't think so.
All the evidence points to the ancient Egyptians having moved into the Nile River delta after the Sahara dried out. Upon arriving in Egypt, they merely discovered the ruins of a lost culture that preceded them by centuries - maybe even thousands of years.
They borrowed heavily from the cultural artifacts they unearthed, and inscribed many of the monuments and structures with their own hieroglyphic writing. In later ages, scholars ascribed everything in ancient Egypt to the dynastic Egyptians, chiefly due to that fact.
It's only in recent decades that researchers and scholars have begun to look much closer, and pick apart the true story of the history of that region. That's an ongoing process which will eventually uncover a much grander picture of ancient history than we ever suspected.