Japanese researchers go back in time to the Pyramids and dinosaurs

Japan Today

4 days ago

By Michael Hoffman
What is it that draws us to pyramids? Their age, their grandeur. Or to dinosaurs? Their age, their grandeur.
This too, maybe: both, despite their age and grandeur, were dead ends. They led nowhere. Future civilizations drew hardly at all on ancient Egypt. Greece, Israel, Rome, India, China were the wellsprings, and still are. Egypt is exotic, little more – as are dinosaurs, which died out to make way for an evolution that, as though acknowledging its mistake, changed course and never looked back.
And yet both exert a magical appeal. What child doesn't go through a dinosaur phase? Pyramids generally are a more mature discovery – adolescent or beyond. Dinosaurs too, sometimes – as with one of Japan's leading paleontologists, Yoshitsugu Kobayashi. Brutus magazine (July 15) pairs him with archaeologist Yukinori Kawae in its celebration of adventurous discovery, which hint we take to link dinosaurs and pyramids.
'Soldiers! From the heights of these pyramids 40 centuries look down on you,' said Napoleon – the conqueror conquered. Some 140 remain, stone ghosts haunting us with an ancientness almost beyond belief. 'Man's first skyscraper,' said historian Daniel Boorstin of the oldest of them, the 'Step Pyramid,' circa 2700 BC.
How did the Egyptians do it? Why did they do it? 'Why' seems the easier question. 'The Egyptians,' said the ancient Greek historian Herodotus 2500 years later (c.484-c.415 BC), 'were the first people to put forward the doctrine of the immortality of the soul' – so the future is in their debt after all, if only through Greece. The point is, death to the Egyptians was no end but a beginning. Life after death required housing after death. The pyramids were it. At first Pharaoh alone was immortal. But slowly – Egypt endured for millennia and almost everything about it was slow – immortality trickled down the social scale, a democracy of eternal life.
As to 'how,' 4,000 years later we're still wondering. Egyptian mathematics were crude and as for mechanics, suffice it to say they invented pyramids before they invented the wheel. Yet the results speak for themselves. Somehow they did it, rulers making machines of men – the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza, says Herodotus, was the work of the forced labor of a hundred thousand men – and yet, adds Boorstin, 'Many ancient Egyptian images survive to show laborers moving heavy stones and shaping sculpture, and foremen directing the work. We do not see whips or any other evidence of forced labor. Egyptologists now are agreed that the pyramids were not the work of slaves' – but of free laborers perhaps taking immense pride in their work.
Kawae, among Japan's leading Egyptologists, doesn't share his views with Brutus on that, presumably because he wasn't asked to, but speaks instead of the hardships of conducting research in a sun-scorched desert under the baleful eye of a hostile Egyptian government deeply wary, he says, of foreign researchers. He manages somehow, 'stone by stone,' and is best known for his 3D models revealing hitherto unknown structural intricacies. We'll surely never know all we want to know about pyramids. Maybe that's why we want to know.
If pyramids were skyscrapers of stone, dinosaurs – the tallest of them – were skyscrapers of flesh and blood. Fantastic beasts. Evolutionary failures they're considered on the basis of their ultimate extinction, but is that fair? For nearly two hundred million years they thrived. Do we have the right to declare them failures? We've been here less than a million years, our long-term future (or short-term for that matter) very far from assured.
Kobayashi's dinosaur research takes him from the snowy wastes of Alaska to the sandy wastes of the Gobi Desert. Worldwide, new dinosaur species are discovered at a rate of 40-odd a year, says Brutus. That suggests rich findings for those who know where to look, but nobody really does know where to look, and Kobayashi speaks of long exhausting dry runs between discoveries.
Alaska seems a surprising hunting ground. Weren't dinosaurs partial to warm and hot climates? They were, and yet Alaska too has yielded its bones. The beasts were more adaptable than was supposed. Kobayashi's work helps cast doubt on something we all thought we knew: that extinction resulted from sun-screening dust kicked up by a meteor strike. If not that what? If dinosaurs and pyramids could only speak!
They can – though in riddles – to those who know how to listen.
© Japan Today