LCP#7: Studies the Six Small Pyramids at Giza. Matt LaCroix Did.

In 1837, Howard Vyse broke into the sealed chambers above the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid and found a workers' cartouche naming Khufu, the find that still anchors the claim that Khufu built it. In episode six of the Lost Civilizations Podcast, Matt sits down with Egyptologist Mohamed Ibrahim to lay out the conventional dynastic timeline and then test it against the evidence on the ground. Mohamed argues that Khufu left no record claiming the pyramid and that the name itself may be a title, while Matt turns to Manly P. Hall's reading of Herodotus and the tomb story. From there they work through the scans that showed a void beneath the Sphinx's right paw, the water erosion on the Sphinx enclosure, machine-like tool marks on basalt and predynastic stone vases, the granite boxes of the Serapeum, the unfinished obelisks at Aswan and the shrine on Elephantine Island.The dating in this conversation is Matt's and Mohamed's own reading. Drawing on Robert Schoch's geology and the Sphinx's alignment with Leo, Matt places the Sphinx at roughly 12,000 years old at minimum and favors John Anthony West's date of around 38,000 years, while Mohamed ties the Sphinx and the Sphinx Temple to the last rainy period before 9700 BC. Matt also shares how a photo he bought at a yard sale eight years ago led him to the step pyramid and T forms he reads in the Sphinx Temple layout, which he sees as the key to the ancient code at the heart of The Missing Key, before closing on the seven Hermetic principles and what the ancient Egyptians recorded about the stars.

Explore the symbols from this episode in The Ancient Code Database: https://thestageoftime.com/acd-iAt the Aswan quarry in Egypt, Derek Olson once pounded red granite with a dolerite stone for a full minute and barely left a scratch. That experience sets the tone for this conversation at Puma Punku and Tiwanaku, the sister sites on the southeast side of Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, where Matt LaCroix and Derek examine precision cut gray andesite, H blocks with no visible tool marks and drill holes so small they defy Iron Age tools. Mainstream archaeology credits the Tiwanaku culture with the work around 1,400 years ago. Matt instead follows Arthur Posnansky, who dated the sites to around 17,000 years ago from their celestial alignments, and in Matt's reading this is a Pleistocene site that later cultures inherited and tried to imitate.The second half turns to the symbol Matt sees repeated across the stonework, a three level inverted step pyramid set above a doorway. In his interpretation it represents a metaphysical realm, and paired with the doorway it marks a gateway between realms, a reading he extends to the Gate of the Sun, the figure of Viracocha, the layout of the Akapana pyramid and the Kailasa Temple in India, with parallels in the Lake Van region explored in his book The Missing Key: Ancient Code of a Lost Civilization. Derek adds the Andean cosmology of the three worlds, and Matt closes with his view that if this was a technology, it could one day be reactivated.CHAPTERS00:00 Trailer01:45 Welcome Derek Olson04:27 How Derek discovered megalithic stonework07:39 Puma Punku and Tiwanaku at Lake Titicaca13:15 Why so much is still unexcavated14:36 Andesite cuts and the Lake Van comparison17:56 Pedro Cieza de León's first account20:13 Arthur Posnansky and the 17,000 year date27:47 Two masonry types at Tiwanaku32:05 Iron Age tools against hard stone34:45 Missing tool marks and the geopolymer question43:28 Moving blocks of up to 500 tons48:18 Micro drill holes and machine cuts50:08 Pounding granite at Aswan54:05 Where did the technology go55:08 The inverted step pyramid at the Moon Gate57:43 The Chakana and a relief from Lake Van1:01:55 Heaven, hell and the underworld1:06:27 The composite step pyramid at Ollantaytambo1:08:04 Water that stops at a touch1:11:22 The fallen gate at Tiwanaku1:13:15 The gateway symbol1:18:40 The 3 to 4 completion model1:21:29 Da Vinci's Last Supper and the middle door1:27:31 What Viracocha is standing on1:29:34 The Akapana layout1:31:27 Kailasa Temple in India1:35:54 Derek's find at the Tiwanaku museum1:37:57 Haldi and the middle door1:42:17 The three worlds of Andean cosmology1:44:52 Why academia has missed this1:51:36 Reconnecting with natural cycles1:56:22 Giza and the middle star of Orion's Belt1:59:53 Closing thoughtsGUESTDerek Olson is the founder of Megalithic Marvels, which he launched in 2017 after a trip to Peru convinced him that a lost civilization shaped its megalithic walls. His interest began in 2012 with a single photo of polygonal precision stonework, and he has since visited ancient sites across Peru, Bolivia, Egypt and Easter Island, sharing a vast library of megalithic images with his audience.Check Derek's Channel out here: @MegalithicMarvels Website: https://megalithicmarvels.com/Tours: https://megalithicmarvels.com/tours/MATTHEW LACROIXhttps://thestageoftime.comBOOKShttps://thestageoftime.com/booksTHE ANCIENT CODE DATABASEhttps://thestageoftime.com/acd-iTHE LOST CIVILIZATIONS PODCASThttps://thestageoftime.com/podcast

When the Spanish reached Cusco, they climbed the hill above the city to Sacsayhuaman and found walls built from stones of up to 125 tons, quarried about three miles away across hills and valleys. They asked the Inca whether they had built them, and the Inca told them the walls were already standing when they arrived.Brien Foerster heard a different answer on his first day in Peru, twenty years ago. Standing on a side street in Cusco in front of a wall so tightly fitted that paper will not slide into the joints, he asked his guide who made it and was told the Inca had, with bronze chisels. He has been visiting the sites that prompted that question ever since.In the fourth episode of the Lost Civilizations Podcast, Matthew LaCroix sits down with the researcher he credits with opening the field to him, and the two walk the Andes site by site through Sacsayhuaman, Ollantaytambo, Ñaupa Huaca, the Qorikancha and Machu Picchu. At every one they find a megalithic core of hard, precisely fitted stone with cruder Inca work and clay mortar built over it or patched into it. The granite at Ollantaytambo came from a quarry at the summit of the mountain, while the rock at Ñaupa Huaca is harder than granite and carries no tool marks. Brien explains why a bronze chisel bends on its first strike against stone like this, and neither man has heard a plausible account of how Bronze Age tools could have done the work.Their own explanation is that an acoustic or vibrational technology softened and lifted the stone, and they present it plainly as their reading of the evidence. Along the way Brien covers the false doorway at Amaru Muru and the elongated Paracas skulls he believes were born that shape.Matt then turns to a symbol he has tracked across several continents, a three-level step pyramid with a wide flat top that he calls the composite step pyramid. It appears at Ñaupa Huaca and Machu Picchu, beneath Viracocha on the Gate of the Sun at Tiwanaku, and on a relief from the Van region of eastern Turkey, where reversing one sequence of carvings produces the same form. He reads it as part of the grammar of an ancient knowledge system.The two disagree about how those builders were connected. Brien thinks several advanced civilizations rose and fell at different times, perhaps unaware of each other, whereas Matt argues they were linked nodes of a single mother civilization, and he makes that case before the close.GUESTBrien Foerster has spent about twenty years exploring megalithic sites full time. He lives in Peru and has visited Machu Picchu more than a hundred times, Egypt more than ten times and the sites of Bolivia dozens of times. He has published 37 books and more than 4,500 videos.Find out more from Brien here: https://hiddenincatours.com/MATTHEW LACROIXhttps://thestageoftime.comBOOKShttps://thestageoftime.com/booksTHE ANCIENT CODE DATABASEhttps://thestageoftime.com/acd-iTHE LOST CIVILIZATIONS PODCASThttps://thestageoftime.com/podcast

In 2017, underwater photographer Tahsin Ceylan was diving off the north shore of Lake Van in eastern Turkey to film carbonate mounds when he came across stone walls on the lake floor. The press reported a 3,000 year old Urartian castle, and the story went quiet.Matthew LaCroix has spent three years working in the Van region with geologist Robert Schoch, archaeologist Hans Oreheim and Tahsin's dive team. In this episode he takes you down with him. On the lake floor is a circle of fitted stone with symbols carved into its first block. Behind it is a causeway, built in layers and taller than a man, that runs east into a part of the lake nobody has explored. The images of it have not been shown before.Matt's argument is that the Urartians did not build it. He goes around the lake site by site, through Toprakkale, Aznavurtepe, Ayanis, Çavuştepe and Kef, and shows the same thing at each one: precisely fitted andesite and basalt at the bottom, Urartian limestone and mud brick on top. At Ayanis the Urartian inscription steps around weathering pits that were already in the stone. At Çavuştepe seven giant T-shaped blocks were thrown off the hill. At Kef the old blocks were hauled downhill for a castle, and one of them has turned to glass.Then he turns to the lake itself. Lake Van has no outlet. Matt makes the case that eruptions of Mount Nemrut blocked the Murat River, that the lake rose over the old shoreline, and that the stone circle once sat on the best overlook of the older, smaller lake. He believes the causeway leads to a city under the eastern basin, and he shows where he thinks it is. Less than one percent of the lake has been explored. The dating is Matt's own reading of the geology and the drilling record, and he lays it out in full.The last part of the episode turns to the carved relief from Kef, which Matt reads as part of an ancient knowledge system, and to what he believes that system means for us now.MATTHEW LACROIXhttps://thestageoftime.comBOOKShttps://thestageoftime.com/booksTHE ANCIENT CODE DATABASEhttps://thestageoftime.com/acd-iTHE LOST CIVILIZATIONS PODCASThttps://thestageoftime.com/podcast

In 1931 the Penn Museum sent a team to Fara in southern Iraq to settle whether Shuruppak, the last city named before the flood in the Sumerian King List, was a real place or a story. They found it, thirteen feet down, under more than five feet of sterile flood deposit with no human occupation in it at all.Seventy percent of the team had already gone home, because nothing was supposed to be under that layer.Matthew LaCroix is joined by Mesopotamian archaeologist Jenn Deyo, who went with him to the Penn Museum archive to read the records that were never published. What sits in those boxes is not a discovery. It is an argument. Erich Schmidt and Samuel Noah Kramer had pulled a city out from beneath a flood layer, and the German and American teams could not agree in print about where it belonged. After 1931 nobody worked the site again. The head of the archive told them the field notes had not been pulled for a researcher since the 1990s.The argument Matt makes is about what we are calling things. The layer being credited to the Sumerians, the world of Uruk and Gilgamesh, is Neo-Akkadian. The Sumerians are the layer underneath it: Shuruppak and the cities named before the flood, thousands of years earlier. Archaeology has lumped two separate time periods together under one name, and the chapter belonging to the actual Sumerians is unaccounted for. That is why the chronology at Fara did not work, and why the paper never came out.The episode works outward from there. Why cuneiform is a writing system and not a language. George Smith cracking the Epic of Gilgamesh in 1872. The damage Zecharia Sitchin did to everyone after him. The Eridu Genesis tablet sitting in Philadelphia labelled as a flood narrative. The ziggurat at Eridu, the largest ever built, still unexcavated and being looted now. The mes of Sumer, and what Kramer may have mistranslated. And the flood read out from Atrahasis, where every craftsman in the city turns up at dawn to help build the boat.Ziusudra, the king of Shuruppak who survives it, is the figure the biblical Noah comes from.Jenn tells her own version of the same story. A cave site in the Ruby Mountains, a cultural layer beneath the Younger Dryas black mat, radiocarbon dates of 11,500 and 12,500 years, and a paper that was never published.Where they differ is on how much time. Penn assigns that lower stratum at Fara to the Jemdet Nasr period, in the first half of the fourth millennium BC. Matt argues for something far older, and he makes that case at the end.GUESTJenn Deyo is an archaeologist with a master's in arid landscape archaeology. She has worked in the field for more than a decade in Sardinia, Jordan and across the desert southwest, and she is the resident archaeologist on the Earth Ancients podcast with Cliff Dunning.MATTHEW LACROIXhttps://thestageoftime.comBOOKShttps://thestageoftime.com/booksTHE ANCIENT CODE DATABASEhttps://thestageoftime.com/acd-iTHE LOST CIVILIZATIONS PODCASThttps://thestageoftime.com/podcastRECORDS AND TEXTS REFERENCEDErich Schmidt, Excavations at Fara, 1931, Penn Museum Journal 22The unpublished Fara field notes, Penn Museum archiveThe Sumerian King List, translated by Samuel Noah KramerThe Epic of Gilgamesh, the Death of Gilgamesh, Atrahasis and the Legend of EtanaThe Babylonian Map of the World, British Museum