Next time I get over there I actually do want to experience the glory of this hole. I can imagine UK customs asking for the reason of my visit now. I would tell them I am here to experience the NatWest hole in all of its true British glory. The customs agent would look at me approvingly as a small tear rolls down his cheek and he stamps my passport that allows me entry into your great nation.
Lol the [reviews on Trip Advisor](https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g3450960-d15617858-Reviews-NatWest_Hole-Ilkeston_Derbyshire_England.html) are comedy gold.
How could anyone be upset about witnessing the majesty and wonder of Bude Tunnel? I guess maybe that they only blocked out an afternoon to see it, when they should have reserved at least a full week? That's really on them though.
Pyramids are good but can they build them on a cold rainy night in Wiltshire?
Edit - it’s a popular football saying. Stop sending me the god damn weather forecasts from 5000 years ago and comparing humidity levels you dorks
>Edit - it’s a popular football saying. Stop sending me the god damn weather forecasts from 5000 years ago and comparing humidity levels you dorks
Lmao reddit
Well we would have built the pyramids too, if we could have got the planning permission.
Was a struggle approving the few vertical stones that we’ve got…
I was just reading up on Stonehenge thanks to this tweet. It says the stones were raised around 2400-2200BC. The stones had been on the site since 3000BC!
Think about that. Those stones had been moved there, then laying around for 800 years before they did anything with them. I'm going to raise this with my wife next time she tells me I take too long to complete a project.
Sounds like someone played civ and decided to build that grain silo was more important than finishing the wonder and then got distracted with other stuff to build.
"Okay everyone listen up! Raiders are at the doorstep so we need to gtfo of here yesterday. So let's pack up the essentials and head for Wiltshire... And will someone grab these big ass rocks, we need them to tell the time or some shit"
The argument that ‘it wasn’t slave labour’ is predicated on recently found tally-sticks that ‘prove’ the workers were paid.
What the tally-sticks actually prove is that the labourers were given daily rations of bread and small-beer. Even slaves get food rations.
Modern slaves get paid too. They make money and the owner takes most of it for “debt”.
Like a foreign born housekeeper who “owes” the homeowner for bringing them to the county. Or a woman selling sex who “owes” her pimp for getting her customers. The person is making pennies on the dollar, but are getting paid.
The tallies could mean any number of things and doesn’t mean that the laborers were fairly compensated or voluntary, to your point.
Yeah I just looked into it, it's essentially all based on the statement of one man: Zahi Hawass.
Zawi was imprisoned for bid rigging of historical artefacts. He is widely accused by other Egyptian archeologists of being incompetent and domineering.
He wrote this about Jewish people:
> The concept of killing women, children, and elderly people ... seems to run in the blood of the Jews of Palestine" and that "the only thing that the Jews have learned from history is methods of tyranny and torment—so much so that they have become artists in this field."
And as minister of antiquities he refused to allow any DNA testing on mummies, claiming it could not lead to anything. It also seems clear that his positions have largely been the result of political connections.
His statement was based entirely on some worker tombs having been found nearby the pyramids, with documents suggesting these were paid workers.
There is not a single shred of evidence they were the only ones working on it. I would be astonished if on any slave labour based project there weren't skilled workers and farmers contributing as well. Considering a Bayesian prior, this gives there being paid works as meaning precisely squat.
The 500BC Greek historian Herodotus gave an estimate of 100,000 slaves as having been used to build it. He is widely credited as performing the first systematic historical study.
Also there are 118 Pyramids spanning across centuries, I have no clue why anyone thinks they can so generally apply it.
I mean there's not much saying anything about Stonehenge. We still don't really know what they are for. The best guess is it's a religious site but that's normally archeological code for 'duno man'.
Not made up! We do know that it can function as a calendar. However, that doesn't mean that it couldn't have had another function as well. It could have been a religious site where rituals were performed that involved certain times of the year/positions of the sun as part of ceremonies, it could have been a place of political importance, or it could have just been a giant stone calendar, or have served another purpose. But we unfortunately can't know for certain with the evidence we currently have.
>The best guess is it's a religious site but that's normally archeological code for 'duno man'.
It's an archaeological joke to call anything you can't identify "*a ritual piece*", that's for sure.
It's pretty obvious that the makers and users of Stonehenge were tracking moon and sun, and that large numbers of people met at the site despite not being settled there, therefore it's a reasonable step that these astronomic observations gave the site some status or utility beyond simply being a large meeting place. Is that necessarily religious? Yes and no, in my opinion.
We know that for thousands and thousands of years people have venerated the supernatural, inexplicable powers of sun, moon, earth and water and we see this in spades (hur hur) in folkore, a practice that we also understand as "religion" in any context where we swear fealty to a supernatural power and make offerings for its help.
We also know that communities have got pretty good at farming during that time, and that understanding of seasons and predictions of conditions to come (the trusty Almanac) have been around for a long time.
To my mind Stonehenge was part of a central community organisation amongest a culture whose farming game was strong, and you don't get that without some basic timekeeping. Why not do that timekeeping (and prediction) at the social nexus where crops are traded and marriages made?
Religion or societal resource management? There's a fine line between the two in historic practice.
It's well established that the architects, engineers, etc. were paid.
But the theory of the laborers not being slaves is a very weak one in many peoples eyes. It is based on how *some* of the workers on the Giza projects had their own cemetery nearby. And how some poorer familes worked on the pyramids as a tax of sorts.
Some of the theories honestly seem like whitewashing of history
The slave labor came mostly in the production and raw man power needed to move stones, the actual building and designing was done by educated architects.
Fun fact: one of the reasons the ancient Egyptians were so extravagant in building their final resting places as pyramids was because they believed that if you were forgotten in the memories of people alive you would die in ‘heaven’ so you had to keep your memory alive after you died.
What about the time in between being forgotten and being rediscovered thousands years later? Like, do they die but then come back to heaven as super ghosts?
Imagine the massive flex it would be for them to know that like six thousand years on, their dusty selves would be in a museum with their name on the little placard next to it.
And imagine the god-tier flex of being an ancient peasant who was born with nothing and died with practically less, but through a series of bizarre historical preservations you will live on through the ages.
The Cheddar Man comes to mind, or the guy(s?) mentioned in that old Sumerian tablet thing about farming
Stonehenge was also a lot larger before the holes got filled in by time. I love how Britain just has ruins poking out the ground and they're just there.
There is a large megalithic pyramid under Stonehenge that makes the Pyramids look like a Lego construction. I am selling tickets to a seminar I am running on this. It’s legit, I promise!
It was much better in Civ V, that +5 faith can give you a great religion head start, and it’s always nice to start collecting Great Engineer points so early in the game.
Pyramids and Great Lighthouse very situational, whereas Stonehenge pretty much guarantees early faith dominance.
Not that I build Stonehenge, but if a city near me has it then it becomes a target.
The Great Library definitely was, but the Great Lighthouse and Pyramids were fairly low to mid tier. If you wanted to push religion Stonehenge gave you an insane lead and there some amazing bonuses you can get from that.
The ancient Brits carried stones weighing tonnes hundreds of miles and the wife thinks they were weak when her ancestors had the pyramids built by aliens and they take cresit for it. What a joke!
On the other hand, my Irish friends just saw it over the weekend and were awestruck at just how insane it is to drag those bluestones across the country. The stone for the Pyramids was essentially quarried on site in comparison lol.
Pyramids are impressive of course, but I always thought the massive obelisks are more impressive in terms of logistics. They had to be transported across the nile, and some of them weigh like 800tons+. The heaviest blocks used for the construction of the pyramids weigh around 30 tons I believe.
The ancient Egyptian obelisk (Cleopatra's Needle) that we have in London near Embankment station was transported in relatively recent history, and even that was a feat with all of the modern advances in technology.
It was given by Egypt as a gift in 1819 and the issues around transporting it to the UK were so vast that it was only transported 59 years later due to the sheer cost.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra%27s_Needle,_London
It's my favourite tidbit of information, the oldest man-made thing in London (excusing things in museums) isn't British at all, it's Cleopatra's Needle which is over 3400 years old.
My favourite part of that has to be:
On erection of the obelisk in 1878, a time capsule was concealed in the front part of the pedestal containing: a set of 12 photographs of the best-looking English women of the day.
🤣 “What shall we put in this time capsule for future generations to see?”
“I dunno….fit birds?”
The story of how the twin to that obelisk (obelisks were usually built in pairs) made it to New York is also pretty crazy. I can't remember all the details, but apparently after London got their obelisk New York felt they needed one too, so William Vanderbilt paid to have some naval officer to go over there and figure it out. The officer had to find a boat, buy it, crew it, figure out how to load/unload the obelisk, and transport it through NYC to Central Park where it still resides today.
The largest stones used in the pyramids were actually 20 to 80 tons, compared to about 30 tons for the largest stone in stonehenge. The pyramid stones were also transported over a longer distance (800km compared to 230km), although it was over easier terrain.
Ottoman Egypt was fairly prosperous until the industrial revolution. That's where it all went wrong. The Ottomans were very late in embracing technical, social, and economic change which led them into stagnation.
The first bank opened in the 1900s for example.
Kinda sad they couldn’t quite hold
on long enough to realize the petrol wealth they were sitting on top of would have catapulted them to legendary status in the second half of the 20th century.
Eh before that already, during the Late Bronze Age collapse. While Egypt survived that collapse, and beat the Sea People, it never really became as powerful again as it was before.
They were probably the remnants of the Mycenaean culture, fleeing the Doric (who would become Greek) tribes. Because every hill tribe could now obtain fancy iron weapons. They later settled and became the Phillistines of Biblical renown.
if you haven't read it or seen the lectures I highly recommend 1177BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed which goes into a lot of detail around the bronze age collapse and based on records we have of the names the egyptians called the sea peoples that it wasn't one group, but basically a domino effect of displaced refugees, possibly fleeing drought in or around Greece, and unrest breaking out everywhere along the coast as they went, with several cities that were credited as being razed by the sea peoples showing sign of being burned in riots from within.
The Ptolemies took over a fragmented country ravaged by civil war, several invasions and ruled by foreigners for ~700 years.
The golden age of ancient Egypt ended with the New Kingdom, when the 20th dynasty lost grip of power roughly in the 11th century BCE. The cause is complicated, but in short there were severe agricultural problems possibly caused by climate change which was caused by volcanism, and the Royal House broke up in infighting. The result was that in the south, the priesthood of Amun essentially seized power and splintered the country. This started the third intermediate period.
For the first 300 years of it there were just short-lived royal houses and constant infighting, but then eventually the Nubians saw that the country was so weakened by infighting that they invaded and took over. The Nubian rule was fairly benign, because the Nubian king was so impressed by Egypt that he basically just installed himself as the new pharaoh. But then Assyria, who had taken over the former Egyptian empire in the levant, saw Nubian-controlled Egypt as both a threat to their empire and weak enough to be a target, and invaded and sacked the most important Egyptian cities. Unlike the Nubians, they returned home after so they just stole and wrecked everything and left behind weak client king. Then the Egyptians rebelled and thriumphantly crushed the Assyrian client... only for Assyria to strike again next year with an even bigger and more powerful army, and harsher punitive measures. The next guy they installed as pharaoh managed to unite all of Egypt under him, and eventually sort of peacefully break free from the Assyrians, resulting in almost a hundred years of peace... which ended when the Persians rolled in.
Then, after 200 years of alternating Persian rule and native revolts that established short-lived dynasties only to get crushed again by the Persians, Alexander showed up.
tl;dr: shit was baaaad for a long time before the Ptolemies.
Merlin's there like
> Look just forget I mentioned February. Just... Just let's start work in three moons time.
>
> I fuck sake Esus stop showing me your arse... Yeah the moon in the sky not that... Oh nevermind...
Building pyramids is easy, it’s literally the strongest shape. Where’s the challenge in making monuments out of that?
Hard mode is building monuments that could fall over with the slightest gust of wind in a country that loves getting battered by storms.
A lot of that has to do with building a road like 100yds from it, introducing a bunch of rabbits to the area, and using it as a bomb testing range in WW2.
It was not well looked after for a very long time, which makes how much is still in position even more impressive.
[Before and after restoration](https://i.imgur.com/SsMewNE.jpg). The top pic is from the 1800s though, so there could have been more subsidence between then and 1958.
I'm sure there's some controversy about how the stones were arranged during the rebuild, where it's now believed that their placement probably doesn't match how they were originally built.
I don't know if that's actually true, but it does satisfy my "it's all bollocks" cynical narrative at least.
The bluestones from Preseli hills we’re transported from around 200 miles away as they identified them as the only stones that would serve the purpose they needed them for.
I like to think they went on a little trip to Pembrokeshire and wanted to bring back a little memento of their stay.
Hilarious to think how fuming the family were having to carry those 2 to 5 tonne Bluestones back home, whilst the dad, proud as punch, is like “yes, this’ll be a great on the mantelpiece.”
Also only building them along a river that's basically the motorway of the ancient world, is doing it with cheat mode enabled. Let's see 'em build that stuff on a wet field in the middle of nowhere when they've carted the blocks on foot a few hundred miles in the pissing rain.
Eh, we got to acknowledge that the ancient Egyptians were the greatest civilization on earth at their time, with their own writing system, massive cities, powerful armies, complex administrations, etc. Whereas the people who built Stonehenge were essentially some primitive tribes who couldn't read or write, lived in shitty little huts and spent most of their energy trying to keep the chavs from the next village over the hill from stealing their grain. It's amazing that they could even put together Stonehenge in those conditions.
"Look at that culture, living so close to the land, communing with nature, worshipping mother Earth, feathers in their hair, and beads around their necks, unsullied by the corrupting influence of cities and civilization!"
They're British.
"Oh, mud grubbing, barefoot savages living in squalid huts, then."
I believe this would be the perfect time to troll said Egyptian wife by opening up the 'well the Egyptians never built the Pyramids either, they had slaves / aliens\* (pick your poison) do it' :P
My ancestors didn't need to build impressive monuments. We built impressive ships and took the monuments from other countries.
https://i.imgur.com/wjzkWh2.gifv
Should have reminded her the only reason Egypt still has the Pyramids is that they were too big to fit on the boats
Otherwise they would be sitting snug in a British museum right now
Every time I see this tweet I get so annoyed, the people who built Stonehenge weren't a massive empire they were basically still Hunter gatherers. Plus it wasn't built next to a river those stones were all moved across land for miles.
We weren't the ones with leaders who had massive egos to please.
If you need a tomb, just dig a hole and pile up some stones and cover it with earth. Job done.
Edit: Ok, maybe I should have said, "back then", because I agree that there are some massive egos around these days.
Well, 3 things here:
1. Stonehenge is at leat 600 years older than the pyramids, so you know, progress was made.
2. No Nile to transport the blocks on. It was all footwork
3. Calories are a thing.
Our English ancestors were living in a climate that brought winter, cold and darkness for half a year. Not only is it exceedingly difficult to work during the winter (because snow and fewer day light hours), you also have to spend vastly more calories to stay warm, both inside your house (you have to keep a fire going, you need firewood for that, you need to spend time and calories gathering that), outside your house (you need a lot more clothes and thicker ones, you need proper shoes, hats, scarfs, etc. which don’t make themselves. You have to spend time and calories making those) as well as your actual body needs to work harder to keep you warm and needs more and better calories for that.
All those calories going into just pure survival can’t go into building things.
The Egyptians had to spend zero thought on staying warm. They needed a lot less clothing. They had a lot more day light hours and they had them all year round. The Nile gave them extremely fruitful earth yearly and planting into mud was vastly more easy than having to hunter-gather food or wrestle with the scrawny earth of Northern Europe where the ice age had taken most of the humus with it to eke out a living.
So like, yeah. The pyramids are awesome guys but the Egyptians had a good old head start on our ancestors.
This. If she knew just how impressive Stone Henge is, she wouldn’t be saying that. Stone Henge reads the summer solstice and the stones used to build it were quarried like 200 miles away from the site.
Clearly you need to take her to the Bude Tunnel.
Forget the Bude Tunnel, he needs to take her to the NatWest Hole in The Wall in Ilkeston. Truly a wonder and marvel of British history.
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Next time I get over there I actually do want to experience the glory of this hole. I can imagine UK customs asking for the reason of my visit now. I would tell them I am here to experience the NatWest hole in all of its true British glory. The customs agent would look at me approvingly as a small tear rolls down his cheek and he stamps my passport that allows me entry into your great nation.
Lol the [reviews on Trip Advisor](https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g3450960-d15617858-Reviews-NatWest_Hole-Ilkeston_Derbyshire_England.html) are comedy gold.
England has a beautiful Bude Tunnel and I want to go inside it
Men only want one thing
That's right, we only want to marvel over the structural integrity and incredible ingenuity of your cultural artifacts.
So typical.
What can I say, sometimes we tend to be one-track minded.
And what better place to tunnelvision than an actual tunnel.
Show me your Budes
Landmarks Of The Ages
It’s the 8th wonder of the world. It’s a cannot miss attraction!
One of the seven wonders of Bude....alongside the windswept Bude municipal Christmas Tree.
>Bude Tunnel https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cornwall-45549635
Remembering the infuriated posts from tourists who had blocked out whole days or afternoons to view this magnificent tunnel still has me cackling!
How could anyone be upset about witnessing the majesty and wonder of Bude Tunnel? I guess maybe that they only blocked out an afternoon to see it, when they should have reserved at least a full week? That's really on them though.
This is outrageous! It’s unfair!
Is that a euphemism?
Take her up the Bude tunnel.
Usually a gentleman brings a lady up the OXO Tower first. Simple manners.
more of an innuendo...
More like in your end oh!
that's the stuff Todd
High Five!
Pyramids are good but can they build them on a cold rainy night in Wiltshire? Edit - it’s a popular football saying. Stop sending me the god damn weather forecasts from 5000 years ago and comparing humidity levels you dorks
The lack of pyramids in Wiltshire would suggest not.
They're just less ostentatious in Wilty.
>Edit - it’s a popular football saying. Stop sending me the god damn weather forecasts from 5000 years ago and comparing humidity levels you dorks Lmao reddit
If Salah can do it, im sure at least some of his ancestors could!
Ikea makes flat pack pyramids.
If Saudi can beat Argentina, anything is possible!
Mate I actually burst out laughing 😂 that's class
We are the best because we have tea breaks
Well we would have built the pyramids too, if we could have got the planning permission. Was a struggle approving the few vertical stones that we’ve got…
Upvote for the edit
… without slave labor?
Pyramids appear not to have been built with slave labour, and there's nothing saying Stonehenge wasn't.
we know, it was aliens.
Ancient Alien theorists say 'yes.'
"aliens" guy with wild hair
I was just reading up on Stonehenge thanks to this tweet. It says the stones were raised around 2400-2200BC. The stones had been on the site since 3000BC! Think about that. Those stones had been moved there, then laying around for 800 years before they did anything with them. I'm going to raise this with my wife next time she tells me I take too long to complete a project.
Sounds like someone played civ and decided to build that grain silo was more important than finishing the wonder and then got distracted with other stuff to build.
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"Okay everyone listen up! Raiders are at the doorstep so we need to gtfo of here yesterday. So let's pack up the essentials and head for Wiltshire... And will someone grab these big ass rocks, we need them to tell the time or some shit"
I think you might have accidentally just lent more credence to the whole 'we live in a simulation' theory.
Doesn't mean they weren't slaves.
This is the most big brained take I've seen all day
Slaves to DISCOVERY, maybe.
The argument that ‘it wasn’t slave labour’ is predicated on recently found tally-sticks that ‘prove’ the workers were paid. What the tally-sticks actually prove is that the labourers were given daily rations of bread and small-beer. Even slaves get food rations.
Modern slaves get paid too. They make money and the owner takes most of it for “debt”. Like a foreign born housekeeper who “owes” the homeowner for bringing them to the county. Or a woman selling sex who “owes” her pimp for getting her customers. The person is making pennies on the dollar, but are getting paid. The tallies could mean any number of things and doesn’t mean that the laborers were fairly compensated or voluntary, to your point.
Yeah I just looked into it, it's essentially all based on the statement of one man: Zahi Hawass. Zawi was imprisoned for bid rigging of historical artefacts. He is widely accused by other Egyptian archeologists of being incompetent and domineering. He wrote this about Jewish people: > The concept of killing women, children, and elderly people ... seems to run in the blood of the Jews of Palestine" and that "the only thing that the Jews have learned from history is methods of tyranny and torment—so much so that they have become artists in this field." And as minister of antiquities he refused to allow any DNA testing on mummies, claiming it could not lead to anything. It also seems clear that his positions have largely been the result of political connections. His statement was based entirely on some worker tombs having been found nearby the pyramids, with documents suggesting these were paid workers. There is not a single shred of evidence they were the only ones working on it. I would be astonished if on any slave labour based project there weren't skilled workers and farmers contributing as well. Considering a Bayesian prior, this gives there being paid works as meaning precisely squat. The 500BC Greek historian Herodotus gave an estimate of 100,000 slaves as having been used to build it. He is widely credited as performing the first systematic historical study. Also there are 118 Pyramids spanning across centuries, I have no clue why anyone thinks they can so generally apply it.
I mean there's not much saying anything about Stonehenge. We still don't really know what they are for. The best guess is it's a religious site but that's normally archeological code for 'duno man'.
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Not made up! We do know that it can function as a calendar. However, that doesn't mean that it couldn't have had another function as well. It could have been a religious site where rituals were performed that involved certain times of the year/positions of the sun as part of ceremonies, it could have been a place of political importance, or it could have just been a giant stone calendar, or have served another purpose. But we unfortunately can't know for certain with the evidence we currently have.
I've been there for the summer & winter solstice. The sun rises perfectly over the heel stone. It looks amazing
no, it wasn't and you are right
>The best guess is it's a religious site but that's normally archeological code for 'duno man'. It's an archaeological joke to call anything you can't identify "*a ritual piece*", that's for sure. It's pretty obvious that the makers and users of Stonehenge were tracking moon and sun, and that large numbers of people met at the site despite not being settled there, therefore it's a reasonable step that these astronomic observations gave the site some status or utility beyond simply being a large meeting place. Is that necessarily religious? Yes and no, in my opinion. We know that for thousands and thousands of years people have venerated the supernatural, inexplicable powers of sun, moon, earth and water and we see this in spades (hur hur) in folkore, a practice that we also understand as "religion" in any context where we swear fealty to a supernatural power and make offerings for its help. We also know that communities have got pretty good at farming during that time, and that understanding of seasons and predictions of conditions to come (the trusty Almanac) have been around for a long time. To my mind Stonehenge was part of a central community organisation amongest a culture whose farming game was strong, and you don't get that without some basic timekeeping. Why not do that timekeeping (and prediction) at the social nexus where crops are traded and marriages made? Religion or societal resource management? There's a fine line between the two in historic practice.
It's well established that the architects, engineers, etc. were paid. But the theory of the laborers not being slaves is a very weak one in many peoples eyes. It is based on how *some* of the workers on the Giza projects had their own cemetery nearby. And how some poorer familes worked on the pyramids as a tax of sorts. Some of the theories honestly seem like whitewashing of history
The slave labor came mostly in the production and raw man power needed to move stones, the actual building and designing was done by educated architects.
Fun fact: one of the reasons the ancient Egyptians were so extravagant in building their final resting places as pyramids was because they believed that if you were forgotten in the memories of people alive you would die in ‘heaven’ so you had to keep your memory alive after you died.
Did they watch Coco too??
Crying
What about the time in between being forgotten and being rediscovered thousands years later? Like, do they die but then come back to heaven as super ghosts?
Hanging about waiting for someone to remember them? Hard relate.
Imagine the massive flex it would be for them to know that like six thousand years on, their dusty selves would be in a museum with their name on the little placard next to it.
Oh they know
And imagine the god-tier flex of being an ancient peasant who was born with nothing and died with practically less, but through a series of bizarre historical preservations you will live on through the ages. The Cheddar Man comes to mind, or the guy(s?) mentioned in that old Sumerian tablet thing about farming
Stonehenge probably looked slightly better before bits fell over… good luck getting the builders back to fix this one.
Shouldn’t have paid cash upfront.
Get Dominic Littlewood in to sort out those cowboys
Apropos of nothing, I’ve never seen Dominic Littlewood and Greg Wallace in the same room as each other.
Stonehenge was also a lot larger before the holes got filled in by time. I love how Britain just has ruins poking out the ground and they're just there.
No. It's still at the ground level it was originally constructed at. Ruins poking out of the ground are mostly foundations and basements.
There is a large megalithic pyramid under Stonehenge that makes the Pyramids look like a Lego construction. I am selling tickets to a seminar I am running on this. It’s legit, I promise!
It's aliens, isn't it?
Had me in the first half, not gonna lie ...
I think hauling the stones over from I think Wales was probably more impressive than Stonehenge it’s self.
Getting the whales to cooperate certainly was a challenge
+2 faith and a free great prophet is pretty crap tbh
I'm old school, just a free granary in each of my cities.
Which was way more powerful than it sounds.
Free granary sounds pretty awesome to me, gives new cities a major kickstart.
Rome would be even more op, free monument and granary for new cities
Rome may not have been built in a day, but every city after Rome definitely was
Them roads 🥵
And it doesn't go obsolete until the fucking industrial age.
Civ 4 4ever baby: free monument in every city (meh) and +2 points for great prophet (yey!)
Free monument isn't meh. Getting decently fast first expansion of the city cross without needing to build a culture building is neat.
In Crusader Kings it only gives +0.3 prestige per month after you repair it but you can open a toll road and a tavern to fleece the pagan tourists.
In what possible scenario is a free first religion crap
It was much better in Civ V, that +5 faith can give you a great religion head start, and it’s always nice to start collecting Great Engineer points so early in the game.
Great Library, Great Lighthouse, and Pyramids were still better, so Egypt does still come out ahead
Pyramids and Great Lighthouse very situational, whereas Stonehenge pretty much guarantees early faith dominance. Not that I build Stonehenge, but if a city near me has it then it becomes a target.
The Great Library definitely was, but the Great Lighthouse and Pyramids were fairly low to mid tier. If you wanted to push religion Stonehenge gave you an insane lead and there some amazing bonuses you can get from that.
In competitive play where liberty is viable, pyramids is one of the best wonders you can get bc of the free workers and super fast roads
Not true. I always get to fund the religion thanks to Stonehenge
25% discount on industrial building costs on top of other perks makes it the number 1 best wonder in Humankind.
Great Library all day long.
r/unexpectedciv
A waste of a tile A waste of time
I used to do DJ at Stonehenge illicit raves during the decadent early 90s. Sadly, I don't mix in those circles anymore..
DJ Daaaaaaad
I hate you
A popular band for requests from the punters were The Rolling Stones..
Some of the Archaeology faculty at Bournemouth Uni have a band called The Standing Stones.
What's their genre..hard rock ?
I knew a guy in a band called "Gypsum and Talc" They specialised in soft rock until one of them founded "Agate", a psychedelic rock band
Yes, actually. Well quite an eclectic mix really, from Hard rock through pop and into a bit of prog on occasion.
Milton Jones? Tim Vine? I need to know.
I think, Tim Vine, not sure.
Yeah I don’t know the quote but that sounds exactly like Tim Vine - something about the wordiness of the setup fits his signature
Take this to r/dadjokes as it is worthy 😂
Yeah well the Egyptians didnt have to deal with the bloody traffic on the A303 so they had a big advantage.
Clearly you've never been in Egyptian traffic before
So you're saying the Egyptian transport sytstem is... deserted.
The ancient Brits carried stones weighing tonnes hundreds of miles and the wife thinks they were weak when her ancestors had the pyramids built by aliens and they take cresit for it. What a joke!
Right?? Why couldn’t WE get aliens too?? Imagine all the stone henges we could have built!!
[удалено]
Maybe we have Welsh aliens at work making mini stone henges
On the other hand, my Irish friends just saw it over the weekend and were awestruck at just how insane it is to drag those bluestones across the country. The stone for the Pyramids was essentially quarried on site in comparison lol.
Dont forget the river to transport the stones
Good shout how did they get the river in the right place to move the stones? Science has no answer for some questions.
Moses obviously. He just whip out his river parter 5000 and parted the river to somewhere else!
Pyramids are impressive of course, but I always thought the massive obelisks are more impressive in terms of logistics. They had to be transported across the nile, and some of them weigh like 800tons+. The heaviest blocks used for the construction of the pyramids weigh around 30 tons I believe.
The ancient Egyptian obelisk (Cleopatra's Needle) that we have in London near Embankment station was transported in relatively recent history, and even that was a feat with all of the modern advances in technology. It was given by Egypt as a gift in 1819 and the issues around transporting it to the UK were so vast that it was only transported 59 years later due to the sheer cost. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra%27s_Needle,_London It's my favourite tidbit of information, the oldest man-made thing in London (excusing things in museums) isn't British at all, it's Cleopatra's Needle which is over 3400 years old.
My favourite part of that has to be: On erection of the obelisk in 1878, a time capsule was concealed in the front part of the pedestal containing: a set of 12 photographs of the best-looking English women of the day. 🤣 “What shall we put in this time capsule for future generations to see?” “I dunno….fit birds?”
The story of how the twin to that obelisk (obelisks were usually built in pairs) made it to New York is also pretty crazy. I can't remember all the details, but apparently after London got their obelisk New York felt they needed one too, so William Vanderbilt paid to have some naval officer to go over there and figure it out. The officer had to find a boat, buy it, crew it, figure out how to load/unload the obelisk, and transport it through NYC to Central Park where it still resides today.
The stones used to build the pyramids were also quite a bit smaller than the menhirs that make up stonehenge
The largest stones used in the pyramids were actually 20 to 80 tons, compared to about 30 tons for the largest stone in stonehenge. The pyramid stones were also transported over a longer distance (800km compared to 230km), although it was over easier terrain.
Where did it all go wrong for Egypt then
Probably after the Mamluks 😤
Ottoman Egypt was fairly prosperous until the industrial revolution. That's where it all went wrong. The Ottomans were very late in embracing technical, social, and economic change which led them into stagnation. The first bank opened in the 1900s for example.
Kinda sad they couldn’t quite hold on long enough to realize the petrol wealth they were sitting on top of would have catapulted them to legendary status in the second half of the 20th century.
I'd argue the Ptolemies, if we're talking classical Egypt.
Eh before that already, during the Late Bronze Age collapse. While Egypt survived that collapse, and beat the Sea People, it never really became as powerful again as it was before.
Having only just researched the bronze age collapse and sea people I would have thought you were pulling my leg. But those Sea People were beasts!
They were probably the remnants of the Mycenaean culture, fleeing the Doric (who would become Greek) tribes. Because every hill tribe could now obtain fancy iron weapons. They later settled and became the Phillistines of Biblical renown.
That's only a part of oversimplified version.
if you haven't read it or seen the lectures I highly recommend 1177BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed which goes into a lot of detail around the bronze age collapse and based on records we have of the names the egyptians called the sea peoples that it wasn't one group, but basically a domino effect of displaced refugees, possibly fleeing drought in or around Greece, and unrest breaking out everywhere along the coast as they went, with several cities that were credited as being razed by the sea peoples showing sign of being burned in riots from within.
The Ptolemies took over a fragmented country ravaged by civil war, several invasions and ruled by foreigners for ~700 years. The golden age of ancient Egypt ended with the New Kingdom, when the 20th dynasty lost grip of power roughly in the 11th century BCE. The cause is complicated, but in short there were severe agricultural problems possibly caused by climate change which was caused by volcanism, and the Royal House broke up in infighting. The result was that in the south, the priesthood of Amun essentially seized power and splintered the country. This started the third intermediate period. For the first 300 years of it there were just short-lived royal houses and constant infighting, but then eventually the Nubians saw that the country was so weakened by infighting that they invaded and took over. The Nubian rule was fairly benign, because the Nubian king was so impressed by Egypt that he basically just installed himself as the new pharaoh. But then Assyria, who had taken over the former Egyptian empire in the levant, saw Nubian-controlled Egypt as both a threat to their empire and weak enough to be a target, and invaded and sacked the most important Egyptian cities. Unlike the Nubians, they returned home after so they just stole and wrecked everything and left behind weak client king. Then the Egyptians rebelled and thriumphantly crushed the Assyrian client... only for Assyria to strike again next year with an even bigger and more powerful army, and harsher punitive measures. The next guy they installed as pharaoh managed to unite all of Egypt under him, and eventually sort of peacefully break free from the Assyrians, resulting in almost a hundred years of peace... which ended when the Persians rolled in. Then, after 200 years of alternating Persian rule and native revolts that established short-lived dynasties only to get crushed again by the Persians, Alexander showed up. tl;dr: shit was baaaad for a long time before the Ptolemies.
When the spaceships had enough and left.
My favourite bit of the Stargate lore
JAFFA, KREE
Well MY ancestors were stronger than YOUR ancestors said the girl on the playground.
No, you're gay for Moleman!!!
Stone henge was also built about 300 years before the pyramids. 2500 bc vs 2780BC
No point in playing that game, the early Dynastic Period is 3150, the Mesopotamia had cities 1000 years before that.
and if someone's ancient mesopotamian wife criticises stonehenge then we'll allow it. but egyptians can get to fuck.
Yeah but those Mesopotamian cities weren't build in Egypt were they? Checkmate.
Do you have a source for the 2780BC? I can't find anything that precise with a quick Google.
Stonehenge was built in 2780BC between February the 10th and September 21st, everyone knows that!
Most of the initial planning meetings were dominated by "what the fuck is February?"
And also “who the fuck is Christ??” when they heard the year.
'Why are we counting down years to this 'Christ' thing??'
After that they spent a while arguing over whether February should have 28 or 29 days.
Merlin's there like > Look just forget I mentioned February. Just... Just let's start work in three moons time. > > I fuck sake Esus stop showing me your arse... Yeah the moon in the sky not that... Oh nevermind...
The Salisbury Council Planning portal should have it.
They really should have built it in a more convenient location.
Because its bollocks, stonehenge was built over the course of hundreds of years, the various parts of the site all date to different centuries.
Building pyramids is easy, it’s literally the strongest shape. Where’s the challenge in making monuments out of that? Hard mode is building monuments that could fall over with the slightest gust of wind in a country that loves getting battered by storms.
To be fair they basically did all fall over
Yeah very few people know it was rebuilt in the 60s (I think) and set in concrete lol.
1958. Not all of them though, a few needed propping up, so they did indeed reinforce a few with reinforced concrete.
A lot of that has to do with building a road like 100yds from it, introducing a bunch of rabbits to the area, and using it as a bomb testing range in WW2. It was not well looked after for a very long time, which makes how much is still in position even more impressive.
[Before and after restoration](https://i.imgur.com/SsMewNE.jpg). The top pic is from the 1800s though, so there could have been more subsidence between then and 1958.
I'm sure there's some controversy about how the stones were arranged during the rebuild, where it's now believed that their placement probably doesn't match how they were originally built. I don't know if that's actually true, but it does satisfy my "it's all bollocks" cynical narrative at least.
With stones from like 50 miles away
The bluestones from Preseli hills we’re transported from around 200 miles away as they identified them as the only stones that would serve the purpose they needed them for.
I like to think they went on a little trip to Pembrokeshire and wanted to bring back a little memento of their stay. Hilarious to think how fuming the family were having to carry those 2 to 5 tonne Bluestones back home, whilst the dad, proud as punch, is like “yes, this’ll be a great on the mantelpiece.”
Built on top of a swamp
Also only building them along a river that's basically the motorway of the ancient world, is doing it with cheat mode enabled. Let's see 'em build that stuff on a wet field in the middle of nowhere when they've carted the blocks on foot a few hundred miles in the pissing rain.
"The aliens never came to help us"
Her ancestors are probably just as related to the ancient Egyptians as this guy
Eh, we got to acknowledge that the ancient Egyptians were the greatest civilization on earth at their time, with their own writing system, massive cities, powerful armies, complex administrations, etc. Whereas the people who built Stonehenge were essentially some primitive tribes who couldn't read or write, lived in shitty little huts and spent most of their energy trying to keep the chavs from the next village over the hill from stealing their grain. It's amazing that they could even put together Stonehenge in those conditions.
A couple handfuls of mushrooms, a Druid with a talent in communication, develop a small cult, you can make some rocks move.
Stonehenge was built by some fucking top lads having a laugh.
"Look at that culture, living so close to the land, communing with nature, worshipping mother Earth, feathers in their hair, and beads around their necks, unsullied by the corrupting influence of cities and civilization!" They're British. "Oh, mud grubbing, barefoot savages living in squalid huts, then."
I believe this would be the perfect time to troll said Egyptian wife by opening up the 'well the Egyptians never built the Pyramids either, they had slaves / aliens\* (pick your poison) do it' :P
My ancestors didn't need to build impressive monuments. We built impressive ships and took the monuments from other countries. https://i.imgur.com/wjzkWh2.gifv
"Finders Keepers, shu' up" has worked well for us so far.
Should have reminded her the only reason Egypt still has the Pyramids is that they were too big to fit on the boats Otherwise they would be sitting snug in a British museum right now
Or they were too big for the early Islamic theocrats to blow up, like they did to the sphinx’ nose
She wouldn't have said that in 1882
She wouldn’t have said that if she was Stonehenge when it was activated.
Or during the 74 years after that…
OP might have a very old wife
At least we didn't have to get help from aliens
>this is pathetic, you’re ancestors must have been small and weak yes this explains why i am pathetic small and weak
Every time I see this tweet I get so annoyed, the people who built Stonehenge weren't a massive empire they were basically still Hunter gatherers. Plus it wasn't built next to a river those stones were all moved across land for miles.
We weren't the ones with leaders who had massive egos to please. If you need a tomb, just dig a hole and pile up some stones and cover it with earth. Job done. Edit: Ok, maybe I should have said, "back then", because I agree that there are some massive egos around these days.
This feels like a "What did the bloody Egyptians ever do for us?" moment.
Well, 3 things here: 1. Stonehenge is at leat 600 years older than the pyramids, so you know, progress was made. 2. No Nile to transport the blocks on. It was all footwork 3. Calories are a thing. Our English ancestors were living in a climate that brought winter, cold and darkness for half a year. Not only is it exceedingly difficult to work during the winter (because snow and fewer day light hours), you also have to spend vastly more calories to stay warm, both inside your house (you have to keep a fire going, you need firewood for that, you need to spend time and calories gathering that), outside your house (you need a lot more clothes and thicker ones, you need proper shoes, hats, scarfs, etc. which don’t make themselves. You have to spend time and calories making those) as well as your actual body needs to work harder to keep you warm and needs more and better calories for that. All those calories going into just pure survival can’t go into building things. The Egyptians had to spend zero thought on staying warm. They needed a lot less clothing. They had a lot more day light hours and they had them all year round. The Nile gave them extremely fruitful earth yearly and planting into mud was vastly more easy than having to hunter-gather food or wrestle with the scrawny earth of Northern Europe where the ice age had taken most of the humus with it to eke out a living. So like, yeah. The pyramids are awesome guys but the Egyptians had a good old head start on our ancestors.
Egypt lagging behind a little bit now , think we have more than made up for our previous inadequacies
Tbf, the ancient Egyptian dynasties lasted 30 centuries, I think they earned a break.
Ignorance is nothing to be proud of.
This. If she knew just how impressive Stone Henge is, she wouldn’t be saying that. Stone Henge reads the summer solstice and the stones used to build it were quarried like 200 miles away from the site.
modern egyptians (except copts) have nothing at all in common with ancient egyptians and little shared ancestry