Wow, Just Wow

This is so totally removed from any reality.... What is the matter with these people?

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Ninja Wolves and Atlantis

               coin of Chersonos, Thrace

Somebody calling themself "NinjaWolfHybrid" sent a comment to a recent post on this blog:

"Paul, I thought of a straightforward way one could prove if Atlantis was at Richat. If you might help, please reach out                  [email- redacted]"

They don't have much of an internet presence, a dormant blog from 2010, some posts on forums for fantasy board games, photos showing he once had a cute girlfriend, he seems to make a lot of gaming figur3es by 3-d printing, has a few posts on gaming on Reddit, that kind of thing. But since he asked for help, I decided to reply:

"Hi, how can I help you? What's your idea?

Just for the record, there is no way on earth the Richat structure was “Atlantis” (which in any case I am 100% sure never existed). The whole attraction of Atlantis is that there is a story that has so many details, people ask “how can this all be made up? There is so much detail”. Yet the only way they can make it “work” is by ignoring about >75% of the very specific information given [because they can’t make it fit]. There is a fundamental illogicality there.

This is exactly the case with Richat. Plato says EXACTLY where the ISLAND was (and what is there now/was there in his time). Only by ignoring that can you make it 1600km to the SW of there in the middle of a desert (“but maybe he did not really mean what he EXPLICITLY wrote, but … perhaps …. the meaning of those words is something quite different” – ancient Greek does not work like that)

I see you build fantasy worlds. Many of them I think have a lot of detail. Of course anyone can make anything up with as much detail as their imagination can supply. Atlantis is precisely that, an Iron Age fantasy world imagined as set in the heroic Bronze Age.

That is not a “closed mind”, that is looking into something very carefully and making deductions from the evidence as as a whole as well as specifically. Not at all the same thing.

With best wishes.
Paul Barford

Sadly, this is the reply I got (capitalisation original):

" I will tell you if you can substantiate this claim you made in your original dismissal: "Plato says EXACTLY where the ISLAND was."
- [first name redacted] "

So, despite what I wrote, exactly that. Seems to me, reading between the lines, we have somebody who's happy to ignore Pindar being quoted by Strabo, ignores Herodotus and "feels" that those "Pillars of Hercules" mentioned by Plato (a near contempory of Herodotus) were in fact somewhere else than where the contemporary ancient sources quite clearly (unequivocally) place them. And "anyway" (they'll go one to say), the Greek term Ἀτλαντὶς νῆσος "does not MEAN it was an island". It has become fashionable in the "alternative-pasts" milieu to point out that it could have meant a body of land, big or small, largely surrounded by water.

However the Greek term for peninsula [χερσόνησος] already existed in Plato's time and was widely used to refer to.... peninsulae. The term is a compound word derived from khersos ("dry land") and nēsos ("island"), literally meaning "island connected to the mainland". It was current at the time of the Greek colonisation, so we have a number of settlements specifically called "Chersonesos".

Chersonesos Taurica (Crimea): A prominent ancient Greek colony in SW Crimea near modern Sevastopol, founded in the 6th century BCE.
Thracian Chersonese (Gallipoli): The ancient name for the Gallipoli Peninsula in modern Turkey.
Chersonesos (Crete): An ancient city on the north coast of Crete, which served as the harbour for the city of Lyktos.

I can't say I took too kindly to this nonsense: 

What? You gave the impression you were asking for help and I offered it.
I now see that instead you wanted to start an argument. I am at work here. With respect, please go and play amateur-semantic cherry-picking games somewhere else.
Paul Barford

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"Two Sphinxes" on the Dream Stele at Giza? (Just looking at the pictures)

The Dream Stele is a rectangular monument carved from granite, standing about 3.6 metres high and weighing roughly 15 tons. It was erected around 1401 BC (a thousand years or so after the Spinx itselff was carved) to commemorate a divine dream. It originally served as the rear wall of a small open-air chapel constructed in the 18th dynasty by Thutmose IV between the paws of the Sphinx as part of the New Kingdom revitalisation of the Giza site in the New Kingdom (esp. Amenhotep II and Thutmose IV). Evidence suggests that the monument was repurposed from an earlier structure: it appears to be a reused door lintel from the entrance to Khafre’s mortuary temple (the pivot sockets on its reverse correspond to those found at the temple’s threshold), which is important evidence that the temple was already in ruins by the time it was erected.

The stele was rediscovered in 1818 during excavations carried out by Giovanni Battista Caviglia as part of efforts to clear the sand from around the Sphinx. Initially the inscription was intact, but after the stone had been covered by sand again and re-excavated in 1925, the surface of the stone after rapid heating and drying in its newly exposed (and damp) state, flaked off. Probably it had been weakened by wicking of saline groundwater into the lower end of the stone and the crystallisation of salts within micro-cracks (caused by the pounding technique used to shape it).

On the preserved upper part, the lunette contains a depiction of Thutmose IV (cartouches visible) on both the left and right sides presenting offerings and libations to the Sphinx. The Sphinx itself is shown elevated on a high pedestal, in the form of the facade of a temple or shrine, with a door represented at its base (This feature has encouraged speculation that a hidden chamber or passageway might exist beneath the Sphinx).

Top of the Dream Stele, note spalling of granite

The inscription of the offering scene on the left is:

The King of Upper and Lower Egypt, the Lord of the Two Lands, Menkheperure Thutmosis, the appearance of appearances, bestowed with life. Greeting (the god Reharakte) with a Nemset vase (spoken by the Sphinx) “I give strength to the Lord of the Two Lands, Thutmosis, the appearance of appearances”.

In the middle

(spoken by the Sphinx) “I make (it so) that Menkheperure appears on the throne of Geb, and Thutmosis, the appearance of appearances, in the position of Atum“.

On the right

The King of Upper and Lower Egypt, the lord of the Two Lands, Menkheperure Thutmosis, the appearance of appearances, bestowed with life. Making an offering of incense and a libation. Horemakhet (says) “I give strength to the Lord of the Two Lands, Thutmosis, the appearance of appearances”.

In the actual text is given the reason why Thutmose IV was so keen on legitimating himself in relation to this decrepit old complex next to the infilled Valley Temple of Khafre. He's riding across the desert with his mates and then turns back towards the river (to get a boat ride home?):

[...] Then the hour came to give rest to his followers, at the limbs of Horem-akhet [Horus in the Horizon, the name of the Sphinx], beside Sokar in Ra-Setjaw [gateway to the Underworld at Giza], Renutet in Northern Djeme, Mut the mistress of the Northern Wall and the mistress of the Southern Wall, Sekhmet who presides over her Kha, Set, the son of Heka, the Holy Place of the First Time [Zep Tepi] (of creation), near the Lords or Kheraha, the divine road of the gods towards the West of Iunu (Heliopolis). Now then, the great statue of Khepri was lying in this place, great of power and powerful of majesty, the shadow of Re resting upon it. The estates of Hwt-Ka-Ptah (the temple of Ptah – Memphis) and all the neighbouring cities come to it, their arms raised in adoration before him, carrying many offerings for his Ka.

In this text, it seems that the Sphinx is identified as a divine manifestation of the sun god in his various forms, including Horemakhet-Khepri-Re-Atum. In this passage it is centred in a mystic quadrangle of sites from the Temple of Ptah at Memphis, the Gateway to the Underworld at Giza, opposite Kheraha [believed to be at 'Babylon' in Fustat] - the divine road of the gods to the sacred site at Heliopolis on an island in the opening to the eastern Delta.

All this however is the preamble to the principle point.

A number of pseudoarchaeologists (wannabe egyptologists) have proposed that the PICTURE above on the stele "looks like" (ahem) a pointer to there once having been TWO sphinxes at Giza. There they are, they say, two of them. Obvious.

Basically you'll not get far in Egyptology without a knowledge of the glyphs. I don't read them myself - but at a glance even a non-adept can see a very obvious (one would have thought) feature of the inscriptions in the lunette. One reads right to left, the other left to right [you can tell by the way the signs face!]* They cannot be a depiction of a single scene, the two halves of the picture represent two aspects of the same royal action. Duh.

Double duh, because the rest of the inscription is totally clear that there was only one Horem-akhet, one great statue of Khepri to which pilgrimages came. Tuthmose became pharoah by restoring just the one, no mention of a second one.

The "picture" is misleading the glyph-illiterate pseudo archaeologists. Its not a good idea to "read" a text by only looking at the pictures.

* With my antiquities-market-watching hat on, you'd be surprised by the number of fakers [and by the same token, collectors] who've not worked out how to tell which way the signs are facing and thus cannot detect texts erroneously compiled with them going in both directions in the same pseudo-passage, which is a dead giveaway (like the use of non-existent signs).

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The Under-Pyramid Scans Scam Gets Bigger: Attention-seeking Italian Prof Makes New Claim (without checking the context)

Dr. Philippo Biondi has announced on an over-long episode of the Matt Beall podcast (shorter bit here also) that instead of publishing the full methodology and results of his work on the alleged shafts and othersuch nonsense under the Khafre pyramid, he is now messing about looking elsewhere. He says he is "almost certain he has found a second SPHINX beneath the Giza Plateau" and talks about it at some length. He's done some dubious carto-geographical jiggery-pokery to find a location - right under a "small mountain that we arrre obserjving" sticking up beyond the Western Cemetery attached to the Great Pyramid.

And then he produces some SAR scam-scans to show there are voids in it shafts coming down from the top - "just like the Sphinx" (if you believe Edward Caycee). And the plot he shows have the same pixellated rainbow splodges on it that the others havce before they are AI-manipulated to make the images that excite his slackjaw supporters.

Jason Colovito has written about where the idea came from ('Filippo Biondi Claims to Have Found Second Sphinx Under Giza', 3/26/2026). As he says, Biondi is obviously drawing on "alternative archaeology" books to make his claims. The claim is not ancient, it's from 1997. Their source appears to be tour guide Bassam el-Shammaa, whose 1997 book Egypt: Future of the Past claimed that a second sphinx stood on the Giza Plateau. I do not have this book, and Colovito neglects to say whether the tour-guide pinpointed where the "second sphinx" should be looked for. 

I will leave afficionados of whackery the pleasure of working out towards which sites this and the other side of the Atlantic this postulated monument is looking towards (but it ain't the "constellation Leo").

I'd just urge first though looking(as all archaeologists do) at the CONTEXT and the actual evidence on the site, but also seeing what we have on the ground now is part of a dynamic system, which includes taking into account the work of others. If we take a look at the satellite photos (nota bene, Mr Biondi's measurements were taken from satellite data too) we see this "small mountain we are keeping under observation" has a very characteristic shape. It has the shape of an excavation dump, most likely made from tipping the excavated material from wagons running on rails, which is why it is long, parallel0-sides and rises up in that characteristic way. There are other ones south of it. Mr Biondi, PUBLISH the Khafre shaft data, stop chasing chimeras, stop spouting off your attention-seeking, narcissistic, spurious-sensationalist stories without first THOROUGHLY checking them. This is pathetic. 

Useful Online Text

David S. Anderson, 'Understanding Ancient Mysteries: Archaeology, Pseudoarchaeology, and the Importance of Archaeological Heritage'. It is not clear to me whether this is a standalone internet document or the reproduction of a chapter from a collective work. But it is a useful explanation.

Monte Alban, Chile Redated? So, In this case Pre-Clovis Sceptics Maybe had a Point?

An early dating of the site at Monte Verde in southern Chile took a bit of time to be accepted, as the evidence found in excavations 1979-onwards was seen as ambiguous for so long. In particular, the items that were presented by the excavator Tom Dillehay as artefacts made by human hands were not accepted as such by everyboidy who saw them, they were rather difficult to unequivocally diagnose. In the end, in the 1990s, the excavator managed to persuade critical colleagues that there was early occupation of this site that was evidence for an Ice Age pre-Clovis human presence in this part of the Americas, dated at roughly 14,500 years old.

New research is however shaking the foundations of this dating. It now looks as if a recent geoarchaeological study has produced data once again challenging these conclusions 

A study [...] in Science (which has a related Perspective) aims to shatter that bedrock. It suggests the stratigraphic layers at Monte Verde are scrambled, with older wood and other organic material mixed into younger sediments, resulting in misleading radiocarbon dates. The site is just 8200 to 4200 years old, the study concludes. 

That means the site might actually date to the Holocene.  That actually would tie in better with the typology of the stone tools found on (other parts of) the original site. The new study was led by Todd Surovell, an archaeologist at the University of Wyoming working with Claudio Latorre, a paleoecologist at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, whose team found when the examined the evidence from their fieldwork carried out in 2023 that:

" Flooding has since destroyed the site of the original excavation near Chinchihuapi Creek, so Surovell and Latorre’s team examined several places along the creek’s banks where they could see layers of sediments that had been deposited over the course of the landscape’s history. They took samples of wood and other organic material for radiocarbon dating, as well as minerals that can be tested to determine when they were last exposed to sunlight. They concluded that 14,500 years ago, the area was a forest. Later, sediment from a wetland settled over the wood and other debris from the forest floor, followed by volcanic ash from an eruption 11,000 years ago. Then, Chinchihuapi Creek formed, cutting into the landscape and carrying some of the older wood and other organic material into the river channel. Some 8600 years ago, gravel and sand started to fill in part of the creek, sealing the 14,500-year-old organic material inside much younger sediments. The original Monte Verde dates, obtained from that older organic material “are actually good,” Latorre says. "

The results of the 2023 work are already being questioned, and it is unfortunate that the original site was no longer available for excamination and establishing the continuity of contexts across the whole investigated area. 

What is interesting in this particular context of this blog is that the so-called "Clovis-First" debate (a local spat in just a narrow field of the archaology of a distant country the other side of an ocean) is represented as typical of the allegedly dogmatic behaviour of archaeologists worldwide. The casus of the alleged mistreatment of Tom Dillehay is displayed as "what happens to ANY archaeologist who dares to put forward a new idea" in the discipline.  Let us see what happens to this staple of the Pseudo-archaeologists' mantra-narrative as the discussion over Dillehay's site progresses. 

References
University of Wyoming (edited by Sadie Harley), ' Monte Verde fieldwork resets age of famous South American archaeological site' March 19, 2026.

Lizzie Wade, 'Debate explodes over age of key South American archaeological site ' Science 19 Mar 2026.

John Bartlett, 'Archaeological site in Chile upends theory of how humans populated the Americas … again' Guardian Thu 19 Mar 2026.

video interview:  David Ian Howe 'The Peopling of the Americas never made sense until now'. YouTube Mar 19, 2026 (the story of how the project came about is really interesting and thought-provoking and will ring a bell with anyone who's ever worked on sites on floodplains of braided river sediments: here onwards - but you might want to see the 'seaweed' bit before it too). 

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Magic Used in Pyramid Construction?

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