Boulter often touts her phd. But it's not in archaelogy, anthropology, or history. It's in education. Training secondary teachers doesn't exactly make her an expert on Egypt.
A nice debunking of Boulter, Alexandria's guru.
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http://blog.cratchit.org/2011/10/why-do-i-do-this-to-myself-at-beginning.htmlDr. Carmen Boulter has the kind of Ph.D. that renders all scholarship suspect and the most outlandish of folk tales credible... in other words, the practically worthless kind. Whether it be giant quartz "crystals" (Dr. Boulter hasn't bothered to pay attention to anyone who can tell her the difference between a crystal and a rock) that act as giant vibrational warm-fuzzy transmitters, or nuggets of esoteric physics like, "sunlight on water... that is energy," Dr. Boulter hasn't met a scientific theory she wouldn't like to replace with a hearty helping of woo.
One thing that's particularly distracting is her love affair with the phrase "Band of Peace", which she apparently uses to refer to the fertile Nile river valley. Do a little experiment for yourself. Using Google, try searching for the phrase "Band of Peace", excluding the name of her program. Here's the search term, and a link for you. I'm excluding only the verbatim phrase "The Pyramid Code"
"Band of Peace" -"The Pyramid Code"
See anything about Egypt or the Nile in what's left? Right. What these results tell me is that she promoting the hell out of a phrase she dug out of her butt. In fairness, she might have dug it out of somebody else's butt... maybe Hakim's. Either way, the constant repetitions give the viewer the distinct impression that if this program does nothing whatsoever but make this moniker stick, then Boulter will have won her own little private Nobel Prize. It's totally in keeping with her trend of replacing any hard science she may find with shit she made up.
The series makes copious use of Abd'El Hakim Awyan, though it didn't do him many favors. Hakim was a doctor in his own right, yet was credited "Indigenous Wisdom Keeper". Not so great for his credibility, but a damn cool title, nonetheless. I'm so going to have that put on a business card. Hakim brings just the right amount of down-home folklore, but is clearly out of his depth when discussing anything to do with physics. The "sunlight on water" quote above is his.
Hakim makes much of the fact that the Khemetic language had no word for "death" and thus the ancient Egyptians could not have been obsessed with death, despite all the pyramids, mummies, tombs, temples, mustabas, etc. Of course, he says that just before he relates the word for death ("they called it 'Westing', as in 'going to the West'). To be sure, the same "no word for death" claim can and has been said of the Teutonic languages; and English-speaking Christians have a score of words for death, and still believe in resurrection. Also, the origins of words often have only a vague connection to contemporary usage; for instance, a person may collect a "salary", though it's been 2,000 years since Roman soldiers were actually paid in salt. So it was unclear to me what this is supposed to prove. Then came my answer.
"The Egyptians obviously had a very different world view from ours today. They believed in the afterlife and the soul's immortality."
Suddenly I understood why Boulter and co. were having so much difficulty with the subject, and it made me very sad. I then sat through the rest of the episode watching their "scientists" treat with utmost credibility the notion that the ancient Egyptians had a physical means of attaining what the archaeologists themselves reject in their everyday lives. These beliefs are common in today's culture. I thoroughly understand being an atheist. I don't understand in the slightest being so blind to the world around you that you don't see the parallels in what you're studying and the millions of people for whom a central portion of this worldview has persisted to the present day. How was it possible for them to be so perplexed?
That question carries forward just in general. I watched the section on reading hieroglyphs with a sincere desire to shout at the screen, "would you stop acting stupid and just present the information?!" Look, if you've got 4,000 hieroglyphs and only 26 letters, it's not a news flash to say that there's not a 1 to 1 correspondence between glyphs and letters. With that number of glyphs, it's pretty safe to assume that we're not talking about a syllabary either. Rather, you're going to have a concept per glyph, as in Chinese. None of this was news even before the Rosetta Stone was discovered. So why does Boulter pretend that this is a revolutionary new understanding of hieroglyphs?
Perhaps she's led astray by Laird Scranton, a computer programmer and amateur anthropologist who, starting from an observation by others that the Dogon people of Africa believed the star Sirius had a companion star, leaped to the conclusion that all of Dogon cosmology is scientifically brilliant, and that their rock paintings of water and eggs and grain should be interpreted as describing quantum mechanics as opposed to, say, a recipe for cake. He estimates the science of their ancients to be at least 50 years in advance of our own... which has enabled them to build mud huts and paint rocks. I weep for our children of 50 years hence. The forward of Scranton's book, Sacred Symbols of the Dogon, lays out his qualifications... hey, he's a software designer! Computers have symbols! Hieroglyphics are symbols! Therefore he's an expert. You can't argue with that kind of logic.
Don't get the idea that there's absolutely nothing of value in this series. There are bits of real scientific information embedded in the video, particularly when Dr. Boulter is not on-screen. I actually feel sorry for the legitimate scientists who share the screen here and there. And I suppose there's some entertainment value in cataloging the myriad forms of woo that appear here. Sadly, the signal-to-noise ratio is so poor that I can't recommend the show to anyone as an introduction to the subject of Egyptology. Get familiar with the subject first, then come back and see what you can pick out.
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Another debunking of Boulter.
http://www.2012hoax.org/the-pyramid-codeThe Pyramid Code
What is it?
The Pyramid Code is a five-episode documentary series about how the Egyptians really had high technology, knew about 2012, and actually lived tens of thousands of years before Egyptologists say they did. The whole thing is basically a platform for Carmen Boulter (who never forgets to put a Ph.D in front of her name so you know she's a super-serious authority on the subject, though for some reason we're never actually told what her Ph.D is in) and a bunch of other woo-woos to share their new ages hypotheses. As is common with new agers, it soon becomes apparent that they don't actually understand any of the religions or cultures they claim support their views.
Debunking some of their claims
?The pyramids are not at the center of the Earth's landmass.
?This one should be obvious: if the Egyptians really had advanced technology, why don't we find it among their stuff? If they were actually using lightbulbs, we should find old, used lightbulbs, not just pictures in one pyramid. Where are the remains of the lasers they supposedly cut those holes with?
?The reason no mummies are found in pyramids is because they were moved to more secure/hidden tombs later on to protect them from grave robbers. Furthermore, parts of a mummy were found in a pyramid.
?They act as if nobody wants to consider the possibility that the pyramids weren't built by slaves. In fact, it's common knowledge among reputable Egyptologists these days that the pyramids were not built by slaves. In fact, the tombs of the pyramid builders have been found. About the only people who cling to the belief that the pyramid builders were slaves are those who insist the pyramids were built by the Hebrews - a claim which even the Bible does not make.
?The "helicopters" and "planes" were caused by overlapping hieroglyphs.
?They cite the Baghdad Battery as evidence of the ancient Egyptians having electricity. In fact, the Baghdad battery was a late ancient/early Medieval artifact, newer than the pyramids by millennia. Furthermore, it was found in Baghdad, not Egypt.
?The pyramids are not "in the middle of the continent."
?The lack of soot in the pyramids does not require artificial lighting to explain. They would easily be able to do it in the sunlight by putting in the writings and illustrations before building the next floor.
?After talking about the pyramids being some kind of conductor/generator, they show photos of orbs, then mention that they're "often written off as dust particles in the air, but that does not change the fact that they seem to occur more often in particular places at particular times." Then one of their talking heads goes on about how he took flash photos at some places in Tikal, and they showed up in the areas that were more electrically charged. In fact, it has been demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that orbs are nothing more than motes of dust or water illuminated by a camera's flash. If one pyramid had more orbs than another, it would have been due to dustiness. If an ambient electrical charge had anything to do with it, why aren't photos of electrical substations chock full of orbs? (For the record, electrical substations lose enough energy into the air that you can feel it when you get close to them.)
?In episode three, they claim that the ancient Egyptians had a different worldview from us because they believed in the immortal soul. In fact, belief in the soul or an afterlife of some kind is still the dominant view today.
?They try to make it sound like the Egyptians were unique even in their own day for their beliefs about the soul and afterlife. Aside from the concept of a good afterlife for the good people and punishment for the wicked… not really. The idea that the soul outlives the body predates the Egyptians and was found in many cultures.
?The idea of words working as acronyms is not at all foreign to scholars, as the film implies. They're called pictograms and ideograms, and Egyptologists know full well that the Egyptian writing system is full of them.
?One of the talking heads says that the Egyptian word for "year" really means "time of orbit around the sun." They provide no evidence for this. Keep in mind that we are talking about a culture who envisioned the sun as being pushed across the sky by Ra in the form of a giant dung beetle, or a barge sailed by Ra. The Egyptians were unequivocally geocentrists, like everyone else at the time.
?This article deals with the actual religious beliefs of the Dogon as compared to what some people think the Dogon believe.
?At the beginning of the fourth episode, the narrator asks "how can we unlock the code embedded in every object they made?" Every object?
?One of the talking heads claims that we see a lot of matriarchal cultures if we go back far enough. This is based on a presence of female and goddess statues. Unfortunately, female and goddess statues do not imply matriarchy. Take the ancient Greeks, for example - they had plenty of goddesses and loved them dearly, but they were still extremely misogynist.
?It seems unlikely that a matriarchal society, which they claim Egypt was, would have such a high percentage of male rulers.
?They refer to the Hindu beliefs that humans were far more spiritual in a long-ago era. This is true - they do say they that. They also say a lot of other things that would be harder to swallow: like the belief that when humans were at their most spiritual (the Satya Yuga) they were also somewhere around thirty feet tall and lived 100,000 years. Of course, this is left out of the series.
?The whole "feminine = right brain, masculine = left brain" thing is just New Age nonsense.
?Their list of "masculine" vs. "feminine" traits is absurd. For one, ritual and dogma go hand-in-hand and are not in any way opposites. Science and art aren't opposites, either, any more than apple and rectangle are opposites. If anything, dogma and science are much better opposites. The whole thing is nothing more than sexist nonsense and new age dogma.
?Carmen Boulter calls reading, writing, and arithmetic "masculine" and art and music "feminine," which is more sexist new age nonsense. And where does she get the idea that modern people don't think art and music are important? (In my experience it's WAY more popular than science and whatnot. Our society is unbalanced, all right - in the favor of anti-intellectual turds who think we need to "stand up to those experts.")
?The so-called wisdom keeper claims that the red part of the Egyptian crown symbolizes the womb and placenta, and the white part is the thymus. In fact, the white and red crown was a composite of two different crowns: the white crown worn by the king of Upper Egypt, and the red crown worn by the king of Lower Egypt. When the kingdoms were united, the crowns were merged. The "wisdom-keeper" is either mislead by his teachers, or he's lying through his teeth.
?The flail and crook are agrarian, not biological symbols. The flail and crook symbolize that the pharaoh is respectively provider of food for and shepherd of his people. More information here.
?The pineal gland controls hormones. It has nothing to do with stimulating the evolution of higher states of consciousness (whatever that's supposed to mean) or psychic powers. (The Chernobyl kids who had mutated pineal glands had growth disorders, not out-of-control psychic powers!)
?The Ceremony of the Weighing of the Heart did not happen "in the moments after death." It happened only after the soul managed to navigate a treacherous and dangerous journey through the underworld.
?Carmen Boulter claims that the moral of the Weighing of the Heart was that you have to be light of heart to live well. More New Age fluff. The Weighing of the Heart was essentially Judgement - sin caused the heart to be weighed down, and if the heart wasn't as light as the Feather of Maat (Truth), the soul would be punished by some type of torture ala The Divine Comedy or annihilation.
?The documentary tries to make it out like the only reason Egypt reverted to its old ways of religion after the deaths of Nefertiti and Akhenaten was because of the meanie-weenie greedy patriarchal priests. In fact, the former king and queen had tried to replace Egypt's polytheistic religion with monotheism. The Egyptians did not appreciate having their beloved traditional beliefs outlawed and replaced.
?King Tutankhamun did not die, as they claim, of a blow to the head, but of a leg fracture complicated by infection and malaria. King Tutankhamun was a very unhealthy individual and likely needed a cane to walk, so it wouldn't have taken much to kill him. The damage to the skull was incurred post-mortem, possibly by poor handling of the body. (Article.)
?Aside from the fact that the evidence does not point to King Tutankhamun being murdered by the meanie-weenie greedy patriarchal priests, they would have had no motive: Tutankhamun restored Egypt's traditional religious practices.
?In the fifth episode, the narrator rhetorically asks why we consider civilization to be about 6000 years old. That's a young Earth creationist view, which is a fringe belief, not a mainstream belief. Researchers have discovered signs of civilization older than 6000 years, and they don't hide it.
?A talking head claims that scholars try to minimize the age of Egypt because it fits better with the current paradigm of history, and that their current paradigm is that 5000 years ago, man was hunter-gatherer. Uh, no. It's generally agreed that the age of agriculture started around 10,000 years ago. (Though not everyone switched to an agrarian lifestyle at that time.)
?The narrator points out (correctly) that carbon 14 dating can only be used on organic samples. Then she says that simply touching an organic sample contaminates it. Apparently, only people like those who made this documentary are aware of this fact and the Egyptologists who use C14 dating are completely unaware that each and every sample from Egypt has been contaminated by their ignorant fumblefingers. Really, arguments against traditional dating don't get much more pathetic than this. Scientists know how to account for possible contaminants or other things that would give false results. The idea that each and every sample ever tested just happens to be fatally contaminated is beyond silly.
?The theory of evolution does not "make it unacceptable to admit that a culture that lived long, long before us knew something that we don't know." It doesn't. The theory of evolution only deals with biological organisms, not societies and cultures. (Boulter's assertion probably comes from the misconception that the theory of evolution says life is always getting better and more advanced.)
?They point out that in 550 BC, a bunch of great teachers appeared, like Buddha and Zoroaster. Aside from the fact that you can find great teachers all over the place, Zoroaster's exact time isn't known.
?They try to shoehorn the yugas into the 26,000-year cycle they claimed the Mayans knew about; however this is absurd: one yuga cycle lasts 4,320,000 years. That's four million, three hundred and twenty-thousand years. There is no such thing as a "26,000 year yuga cycle" as she later claims.
?There's no evidence that the Mayans believed in a 26,000 year cycle of any kind.
?A talking head talks about how ancient cultures all talk about how things were so much better way back when and how things are getting worse and worse. Two words: nostalgia filter.
?A talking head claims that the only one of the signs that looks vaguely like what it's supposed to is Leo. This is false and misleading: first of all, Scorpio
looks like a scorpion. If I remember right, different cultures include or disclude different stars, and some astronomers dropped some of them. Furthermore, he's assuming that each and every constellation was intended to look like a literal picture of what it was named after.
?"Instead of rote memorization of facts, what would happen if today's society was taught to expand their capacity to know?" For those who don't know, this "knowing" business is what Stephen Colbert called "truthiness."
