Inverting the pyramids

guardian.co.uk (Khaled Diab)

The quack theories about my country's history can be very entertaining, with the all-time classic being that only aliens could have constructed something as magnificent and precise as the pyramids. Astoundingly, up to 45% of people who took part in a recent survey believed that the pyramids (and Stonehenge) were physical evidence of alien life. Of course, this poll appeared in the Sun, the same newspaper which reported on an "alien army" that had been spotted over England and Wales. Some Ufologists even claim that civilisation itself was an alien import.

One man of the cloth has come up with an ingenious solution to the mystery of the pyramids which also "disproves" evolution. Maltese evangelist pastor Vince Fenech believes that dinosaurs helped build the pyramids, presumably after being domesticated. There is a certain eccentric beauty to this "Flintstones" theory: the ancient Egyptians didn't have any mechanical heavy-lifting equipment that we know of, so let's give them a biological variety.

But even when human agency behind the pyramids is acknowledged, the credit for them is disputed. The most famous alternative theory is that Israelite slaves built these colossal structures. The late Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, stirred up a furore in Egypt when he claimed, prior to arriving for the first official visit by an Israeli leader to Cairo, that his ancestors built the pyramids.

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