EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,016 words- 0:00 – 15:00
Ready? Five, four, three,…
- JRJoe Rogan
Ready? Five, four, three, two, one. Mr. Schoch, first of all, thank you very, very, very much for being here.
- RSRobert Schoch
Oh-
- JRJoe Rogan
I've been following your work for a long time now, and, uh, I'm, I'm very appreciative of you and very appreciative of everything you've done. And I've been fascinated by the subject of ancient Egypt, so I'm, um, I really, I'm really psyched, very psyched to have you here.
- RSRobert Schoch
Well, thank you. It's a real pleasure to be here. I've, I've heard a lot about your show. I've heard a lot about you. My, um, of course the late John Anthony West, I think was on with you a couple of times, maybe?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, yeah.
- RSRobert Schoch
He was very proud that I guess you did the only full Skype interview with him. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, that's the only one I've ever done is with him.
- RSRobert Schoch
Yeah, he used to like to talk about that, so...
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs) Well, I just had to talk to him, and, you know, he was in Upstate New York at the time, and it was just, he really didn't have any plans to come down here. And, um, I just, I was very fortunate to one day get him in studio, though. It was really nice.
- RSRobert Schoch
Yeah, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
So, it's been wonderful.
- RSRobert Schoch
Well, his work, um, that DVD series that he did, Magical Egypt-
- JRJoe Rogan
It was re- it was amazing.
- RSRobert Schoch
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And I'd seen your work before that in that Mysteries of the Sphinx thing that was narrated by Charlton Heston.
- RSRobert Schoch
Charlton Heston, NBC 1993.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- RSRobert Schoch
I think in many ways it was the Mystery of the Sphinx that really broke everything open, brought everything to the public attention. I've had many people tell me... I'm not trying to brag or anything, I'm just saying factually-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- RSRobert Schoch
... that this really opened up a new field, if we could put it that way, a new, um, you know, way of looking at things in the popular, among the popular, um, public.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- RSRobert Schoch
You know, press, the popular media, the... But people around the world, versus the academic scholarly journals and the back and forth, that type of thing. You have to remember, I'm a faculty member. I'm at Boston University, I'm an academic. Uh, and many of the academics have pooh-poohed, should we say, over the years, bringing things to the public. But I think it's been important to do.
- JRJoe Rogan
Now, what we're talking about for the people that are uninformed is the idea that some of the structures in ancient Egypt are far older than conventional wisdom or conventional modern-day archeology, modern-day Egyptologists, they would like us to believe that all of this spawned from a very specific time period. And people like John Anthony West and yourself and some other folks like Graham Hancock are proposing that it's entirely possible that there were many different eras of construction in Egypt, and that there are some structures that are far, far older than we think.
- RSRobert Schoch
Yeah, exactly. And this, what I was alluding to is this really opened up with our work on redating the Great Sphinx.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- RSRobert Schoch
And I think you know the story, but maybe just to summarize in the l- smallest of nutshells, John Anthony West, before I met him, he was, became a follower, should we say. I shouldn't say follower, because that sounds wrong. That sounds like it's a religion dogma. But he became interested in the work of the late Schwaller de Lubicz, who died, passed away in 1961. But he had mentioned in, uh, one line that the Sphinx had been weathered by rain. I would say precipitation, as a geologist, not wind and sand. So this, if it were true, and it is true, would put the Sphinx back to a much earlier period, which would tie in with Schwaller's work and John Anthony West's subsequent work that there were indications that dynastic Egypt as we know it, going back to about 3000 BC, was really a legacy of what I call now an earlier cycle of civilization. Uh, something that goes back much, much earlier, which at this point I date back to the end of the last Ice Age. Ice Age ended 9700 BC, just to put it in perspective for people.
- JRJoe Rogan
So when y- when did you first get on board with this?
- RSRobert Schoch
I-
- JRJoe Rogan
Did John Anthony West come to you or...
- RSRobert Schoch
John Anthony West, okay, so the story goes this way. John Anthony West published Serpent in the Sky, his probably most famous book, first edition 1979. He was then looking for someone that could really validate or at least assess, from a scientific point of view, this theory about the Sphinx, which he had just barely sort of touched the surface based on Schwaller that maybe it could be older, but this was really a geological question. He mentions that in 1979 in Serpent in the Sky. John Anthony West went on to become very involved with Egypt, and he started traveling to Egypt, he led tours to Egypt. He wrote The Traveler's Key to Ancient Egypt in 1985, also mentions in Appendix, I think it was, just the, quote, "Older Sphinx Theory," but really looking for someone to at least assess it scientifically. He met a fellow at, in, um, in Egypt actually, at the time, Robert Eddy, who is a PhD English literature, I believe, something like that. But he was teac- teaching in Cairo, American University in Cairo, I believe. Then he came to Boston University. This is late 1980s. I was, and still do, teach at Boston University full time. Robert Eddy and myself got to know each other. Robert Eddy mentioned me as a geologist to John Anthony West, and that maybe this was someone who seems fairly knowledgeable, fairly open-minded about things, you know?
- 15:00 – 30:00
And rainfall for thousands…
- RSRobert Schoch
recedes, um, the softer layers. Some of the harder layers stick out further, but the water also finds its way down crevices and cracks, natural features that are slightly, um, softer, and it forms these vertical fissures. I wanna make the point, because a lot of people get confused, they say, "Couldn't it be rising Nile floods?" No. Geologically, that would give a very different signature on the rock. It's not floods coming up from the bottom. It's actually precipitation and rainfall runoff coming from above and I'm-
- JRJoe Rogan
And rainfall for thousands of years?
- RSRobert Schoch
Well, there's two aspects here. It could be thousands of years, it could be much stronger rainfall, you know, huge flash floods, that type of thing. And part of the story that I hope we'll get to is that initially... I'm jumping around here a little bit.
- JRJoe Rogan
No worries.
- RSRobert Schoch
Um, but initially I was thinking 5 to 7000 BC. That was very conservative based on the geological data, based on the seismic, which we have to get to also. But now I believe we're talking prior to 9700 BC for the original construction of the Sphinx. And we can talk about why the dating. And at 9700 BC, we have the end of the Younger Dryas, the end of the glacial epoch, the end of the last Ice Age. I have now put together the story based on evidence. And when I ever s- I say, if I say I believe something or I think something, it's always based on evidence that I've been piecing together, that what we had ending the Younger Dryas, ending the last Ice Age was a huge eruption from the sun, a huge solar outburst, huge climatic changes which put, among other things, a lot of precipitation, a lot of moisture into the air, which came down as precipitation with huge floods, huge, um, essentially thunderstorms, et cetera. And I think a lot of the initial erosion that we still see on the walls of the Sphinx enclosure go back to that period. So you had the situation where you would get this incredible weathering and erosion, and then it continued for thousands of years after that and was reinforced until you had the Sahara coming in, in relatively recent times, in geologically Holocene times, about 5000-
- JRJoe Rogan
The Sahara Desert, you mean?
- RSRobert Schoch
The Sahara Desert, yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
So, before that, it was some sort of a rainforest?
- RSRobert Schoch
Uh, a savanna to rainforest. It actually varied over time. And before that, it was very, um, fertile savanna, lots of plants there. People have seen it even in popular movies and whatnot how the Sahara at one point had water and all kinds of animals. That's before the end of the last Ice Age, before this, these incredible changes that we have in 9700 BC. So that's where, um, the Sphinx, I think, the original Sphinx goes back to that time period. And that's what the Egyptians called Zep Tepi. This was a first time for them, or what I call an earlier cycle of civilization. The last cycle, the one that we're still part of, in my terminology, is the last 5,000 years. So civilization arising-... re-emerging, I should say, about 3000 to 4000 BC, coming to really what we have now, you know, high technology, et cetera. But before that, there had been an earlier cycle of civilization that was essentially snuffed out, or brought to its knees, if you would, by the end of the last Ice Age. And just to m- map this out, a period from about 9700 BC, this is what I'm reconstructing now, to about 4000 to 3000 BC where we have civilization re-emerging. Between that period, so thousands of years, 9700 BC to, say, 3700 BC, for round numbers, 6000 years, we have essentially a dark period and what I've been now calling SIDA, solar-induced dark age. Sort of ironic, the sun would induce a dark age because it brought civilization back to an earlier stage, if you would.
- JRJoe Rogan
I'm- I'm not sure I follow that. Wh- how did the sun do this?
- RSRobert Schoch
Um, solar outburst. Essentially, coronal mass ejection-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- RSRobert Schoch
... huge eruption, bigger than anything we've ever seen on Earth and-
- JRJoe Rogan
And so that's what caused these massive thundershowers and we-
- RSRobert Schoch
Exactly, it-
- JRJoe Rogan
... nothing in modern history is any remem-
- RSRobert Schoch
Nothing in modern history is even close to this, but we do have isotope data, et cetera, that indicates this has happened in the past, at the end of the last Ice Age, and I'm sure it's happened many times over.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mmm.
- RSRobert Schoch
And you have a lot of markers that indicate this. You have vitrification of rock. Um, in fact, a lot of the markers, and I- I don't wanna be debating the issue necessarily, but a lot of the markers that, uh, people have used for a comet at the Younger Dryas or during the Younger Dryas, really most of them are at the beginning of the Younger Dryas, that's what they're claiming, but a lot of the- the... A lot of the dating is very, very iffy.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- RSRobert Schoch
Um, I- I found it interesting, for instance, someone will use something as a marker for the Younger Dryas and it will give a date of 12,000 plus or minus 4,000 years, so, you know, this is just the way geology is. But I remember, and I can't remember his name. You had a guest on one of your shows. Uh, he was when, um, uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
Randall Carlson?
- RSRobert Schoch
Not Randall Carlson. Uh, I know Randall very well. Uh, he was on with Carlson and Schirmer and... Uh, but he came on by Skype.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- RSRobert Schoch
Malcolm? Malcolm...
- JRJoe Rogan
I do not remember his name.
- RSRobert Schoch
Okay. But anyway-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- RSRobert Schoch
... he was one of the people that was, quote, "comet proponent", and he started pointing it out, a lot of the evidence, uh, microspherules, um, glassy spheres, uh, nanodiamonds.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- 30:00 – 45:00
That kind of stuff,…
- RSRobert Schoch
but I think that there's a very strong case to be made that this is solar, that this is the sun influencing us, which is really important too. Fast-forward to today, here we are, we're on Skype, we're using all these electronic media. What could be more vulnerable to a solar outburst?
- JRJoe Rogan
That kind of stuff, yeah.
- RSRobert Schoch
Oh, and-
- JRJoe Rogan
Our power grid.
- RSRobert Schoch
Power grids. Power grids will be fried. There was a-
- JRJoe Rogan
Oof.
- RSRobert Schoch
And I think we're seeing the beginning of this, or we saw the beginning of this, because again, I'm a geologist, so I think in broad terms few hundred years is nothing. 1859-... are you aware of the Carrington Event?
- JRJoe Rogan
No.
- RSRobert Schoch
There was a major solar outburst, from a human perspective, major solar outburst, from a astrophysical perspective it was nothing. But it was a coronal mass ejection, actually two in a row that hit us in 1859. It's known as the Carrington Event after Richard Carrington who, um, first saw the solar flares, the really bright solar flares that were associated with it. It was picked up on the primitive magnetometers of the time that they had, for instance, in London, et cetera, studied by the physicists of the time. And 1859, there were electronics around. It was called the telegraph system. The telegraph system acted as huge antennae that picked up the s- changing magnetic fields, generated electricity along it, burnt out the telegraph lines, literally set telegraph, um, uh, s- uh, you know, the places where the telegraph operators worked on fire, telegraph stations on fire.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- RSRobert Schoch
That type of thing. Um, if we had a Carrington-level event now, which is really quite minor from a astrophysical perspective, orders of magnitude less than what happened at the end of the last Ice Age, uh, it would fry our grid lines, it would, um, knock out all the huge transformers. It would... Before it did that, bec- as it's coming in, it would probably knock out all the satellites, uh, the GPS systems, communications. I mean, it would really bring us to our knees as a technological society.
- JRJoe Rogan
Is this an article, Jamie? Yeah. From 1859. I can read that.
- RSRobert Schoch
Yeah, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
"The auroral display in Boston. There was another display of auroral."
- RSRobert Schoch
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Uh, "So bright-"
- RSRobert Schoch
Yeah. There you go.
- JRJoe Rogan
"... and brilliant. At one o'clock, ordinary print can be read by the light." Wow.
- RSRobert Schoch
Exactly. Because one thing you get is these bright auroras, these bright, what people think of as northern and southern lights, but in 1859, they saw them around the world.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- RSRobert Schoch
Um, back at the end of the last Ice Age, because they were so powerful, when they become more intense, they take on very discrete structures in the sky. Here's some-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- RSRobert Schoch
... uh, what are known as s- again, northern lights-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- RSRobert Schoch
... auroral displays. But see how it starts to take on a discrete structure on the right there? And to describe it to the audience, do you see how it sort of looks like a person with their hands up in the air?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- RSRobert Schoch
They start to take on more and more discrete structures. Some of them look like people with their hands up in the air and little legs and some of them-
- JRJoe Rogan
And what exactly is this phenomenon?
- RSRobert Schoch
... take on birds' heads. Um, this is basically the high-charged particles, electrons and protons and whatnot, interacting with the atmosphere. Um, and they form these figures. It's electrical phenomenon.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- 45:00 – 1:00:00
And, uh, I do…
- JRJoe Rogan
- RSRobert Schoch
And, uh, I do see changes occurring. Uh, one thing I'll mention, right now, is as of relatively recently, now it's still very, very small, but at Boston University, I've been allowed to found what is called the ISOC, the Institute for the Study of the Origins of Civilization.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- RSRobert Schoch
Which is really just me at the moment.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- RSRobert Schoch
But I want to build it up, and I'd like-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- RSRobert Schoch
... to get ... I'm not trying to sound the wrong way, but I'd like to get people to donate to it, et cetera, et cetera. Um, also, I've, um, uh, founded, with, uh, some colleagues of mine, uh, including some academic colleagues, ORACOL, which stands for the Organization for the Research of Ancient Cultures. So we're bringing it into the mainstream both as a private not-for-profit foundation, as a institute through Boston University, to really be looking at these things in a, when I say professional way, what I mean by that is, you know, evidenced-based way, um, but also looking outside the standard dogmas, the standard boxes, standard paradigms, and the standard vested interests. Because so much science, you know, people say to me all the time, they think science is supposed to be objective. Well, maybe it is supposed to be objective, but who are the scientists doing it? They have all their subjective biases and-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- RSRobert Schoch
... notions and vested interests. And I'm not trying to knock anyone, but ...
- JRJoe Rogan
But it's a fact.
- RSRobert Schoch
It is, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
It, and, and it's just a human fact.
- RSRobert Schoch
Yeah. It's w- we're all humans.
- JRJoe Rogan
And one of the things that happened in that documentary from 1993 that I was kind of stunned by was the reaction, uh, t- by the conventional Egyptologists when you brought up this evidence, where he was very dismissive, almost mockingly, in this weird-
- RSRobert Schoch
Oh.
- JRJoe Rogan
... sort of a way, where he was like, "What, what, what culture? Where is this culture?"
- RSRobert Schoch
Oh, absolutely.
- JRJoe Rogan
"Where's the evidence of this culture?"
- RSRobert Schoch
Absolutely. And that-
- JRJoe Rogan
It was kind of gross.
- RSRobert Schoch
It is, it is, because that really should not have any place in science.
- JRJoe Rogan
He was mocking. Right, he was mocking.
- RSRobert Schoch
With mocking and-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- RSRobert Schoch
... and being called, I've been, I've been called a pseudoscientist.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- RSRobert Schoch
Um, look, I, I ... Again, I don't want to sound the wrong way, but I think I'm as well cred- as well-credentialed as anyone-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- RSRobert Schoch
... I mean, among my academic colleagues. Uh, you know ...
- 1:00:00 – 1:15:00
The one in the…
- JRJoe Rogan
the rump?
- RSRobert Schoch
The one in the rump, yes. The one in the rump, but it turns out they already knew about it. It's probably not super significant. It probably is just maybe a Greco-Roman or late period, you know, burial or, or some kind of excavation. The one I believe is important is under the left paw of the Sphinx, which I believe is a archive, actually may go back to this very early period because we now have hieroglyphic evidence indicating that, um ...
- JRJoe Rogan
What, what does the evidence indicate it's an archive?
- RSRobert Schoch
Okay. So, recently, and this gets back to, um, the Sphinx.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- RSRobert Schoch
Okay. So, we started this portion of the discussion with the Sphinx and my initial observations of the Sphinx. And one of my observations was that there's something going on with the weathering ero- and erosion on the Sphinx. The second observation, this is within the first two minutes at most, was that the head is too small for the body. The head is not eroded the way the core body is, it's not erode the way the walls of the Sphinx enclosure are. It's not the original head. I hate to say it this way, but I knew immediately that was not the original head, you know, just from a geological point of view.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- RSRobert Schoch
And I believe that's now since been fully confirmed that this is not the original head; it was a re-carved head. So, for a long time, the question has been, in my mind, and we talk about this even on Mystery of the Sphinx, what was the original head of the Sphinx? What was the Sphinx originally? We've speculated and other people speculate it might have been a lion, for instance Leo because it faces on the equinox, the constellation Leo in the sky.... not today, but 10,000 BC or so, more or less at the very end of the last Ice Age. Now, I've had a lot of colleagues of mine, academic colleagues say, "That's nonsense," you know, it doesn't mean anything because they weren't even recognizing the constellations back then. Um, we now have plenty of evidence that at least some of the constellations that we recognize today, uh, Leo I would put in that category, uh, uh, Taurus is in that category, Orion is in that cor- category. Some of them, we don't have evidence for, but the ones I just mentioned, the, the, um, they, these are constellations that go back well into the end of the last Ice Age. We have documents of that. We have, um, mammoth bones where you have Orion carved on it. We have Taurus shown in cave walls. We have Leo shown. So s- it's, to me, it's fascinating that some of these constellations that we recognize today were recognized tenths of thousands of years ago. So to me, it's not nonsense that they carved a structure 10,000 BC approximately that was facing its own image in the sky. So one suggestion was that maybe it's Leo. But recently, um, Manou Safzadeh, Dr. Manou Safzadeh, another colleague of mine, he recognized initially that there is a title, what's known as a dual title, in dynastic Egypt that goes back to the fourth dynasty and even back to the first dynasty with the earliest writing. And it, when properly translated, basically refers to the Sphinx as the guardian of an archive. And not the Sphinx as we think of it as a lion with a human head, but as a lioness. And there was a name for this lioness, Mehet. She was the goddess Mehet who guarded a archive. Um, and we wrote a paper on that. When I say we, Manou Safzadeh, myself, and Robert Bauval, who you may know of from Orion Correlation and some of his, his work ties in with this, the archaeoastronomy. But we've now found that there is this sign, which we named the JAW sign in honor of-
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, that's awesome.
- RSRobert Schoch
... in s- honor of John Anthony West. Uh, there it is, there's the JAW sign.
- JRJoe Rogan
Ah.
- RSRobert Schoch
And what you see here is the lioness Mehet, which was the Sphinx originally based on our reconstruction and interpretation. Um, can't go into all the details now. You can... Actually, people can read the paper. If I could put a plug in, if people go to my website, www.robertschoch, and that's R-O-B-E-R-T, R-O-B-E-R-T S-C-H-O-C-H. The main thing is my name is spelled S-C-H-O-C-H. So www.robertschoch.com, they can go. I did a popular summary of the paper, and they can also go and download the original paper in the peer-reviewed journal, Archaeological Discovery, where we argue that what we have here is the lioness Mehet. She has what looks like a bent rod coming out of her back-
- JRJoe Rogan
Pull that-
- RSRobert Schoch
... when people look at the actual image.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- RSRobert Schoch
And then above it is a ax. So-
- JRJoe Rogan
That's an ax?
- RSRobert Schoch
Yeah. It's, it's, uh, a primitive ax. Um, when I say primitive, even for the ancient Egyptians in dynastic Egypt, it would've been sort of a symbolic ax, if you would.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- RSRobert Schoch
Which was a sign of someone who was in charge of things, a overseer, that type of thing. The bent rod, what is that? That's a primitive key. We would now call it a primitive key, but it represents a key. And so it's basically saying that this is the guardian of the archives of Mehet, the locked chamber or vault of Mehet. And we also have images, I see it up on the board now, if you look at, you've got the lioness with the key and you also have a lioness, not in that image, but a different image that we had before. If you look at that, can you see how there's a lioness sort of a diagrammatic sh- uh, shape over what looks like a facade?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- RSRobert Schoch
Okay, if you then go to the stela that sits between the paws of the Sphinx, you have the same image, much more artistically rendered, of the Sphinx sitting over a facade, over what looks like a building. It's not really a building, it's the archive underneath, I believe.
- JRJoe Rogan
So you think there's-
- RSRobert Schoch
Which we-
- JRJoe Rogan
... something underneath there.
- RSRobert Schoch
Which, oh, I know there's something underneath 'cause long ago, in the early 1990s, Thomas Debecki and I, when we did seismic work around the Sphinx, we found the chamber under the paws of the Sphinx. And it's, I'm sure, an artificial chamber. It's very regular. And this, I believe, could well be, I'm hypothesizing, and in science we make hypotheses that are testable. This is perfectly testable. All we have to do is enter that chamber, even if it's just to put a fiber optic down, and we can see-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- RSRobert Schoch
... is it an artificial chamber that's an archive? Hopefully there's still things there, or maybe it was gutted and cleaned out at some point. But here we have the seismic work, one of the, um, seismic maps, I'll call it, tomographic, uh, data. And what's labeled as Anomaly A under the left paw, that is the chamber we found under the left paw that the Egyptologists have wanted to deny ever since. And they don't wanna explore it, and we haven't gotten permission to explore it yet.
- JRJoe Rogan
Why don't they wanna explore? I mean, what, that doesn't make any sense to me.
- RSRobert Schoch
Well, I know, but this is-
- 1:15:00 – 1:24:35
Mm-hmm. …
- RSRobert Schoch
to me when I, as I mentioned, without anyone saying that to me. I had not heard that someone else suggest that. Since then, Egyptologists with, of course, out ever citing me or John Anthony West, have also been suggesting that in some cases. And some have suggested that maybe it was Khufu's face on the Sphinx rather than Khafre's face after we brought in Frank Domingo-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- RSRobert Schoch
... who demonstrated that it's not Khafre's face. Uh, Frank Domingo, if you remember from Mystery of the Sphinx, was a New York City Police Officer, forensic expert, who literally would reconstruct fa- faces, compare faces, that was his business, and to present it in court. Uh, he analyzed the face of the Sphinx and the face of Khafre, also known as Chephren, the Pharaoh. The Egyptologists before our time, before we got involved in this, always said these were the same faces, the face of the Sphinx, the face of Khafre. Uh, Frank Domingo came out very definitively that they're not the same face and they're both competent artists. They're not, frankly, the same ethnicity of face. Uh, and for Mark Lehner to publish in National Geographic that the ... I'll paraphrase, some of the Sphinx came alive when he reconstructed with the face of Chephren or face of Khafre, is just ... That's not science.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- RSRobert Schoch
That, that's, um, you know, wish fulfillment or something.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- RSRobert Schoch
He wanted it to be the face of, uh, a certain Pharaoh. He does a computer re- construction with it having the face of the Pharaoh he wants it to be, and then passes that off as somehow, um, I guess, science.
- JRJoe Rogan
So there's no-
- RSRobert Schoch
But Egyptology is not necessarily a science either. And I'm not saying that in a nasty way.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- RSRobert Schoch
But it's an important point because Egyptology, a lot of Egyptologists classically come more from a, uh, art history background-
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- RSRobert Schoch
... that type of thing. So tying in with the question you asked before, I literally ... It's funny how things work. I literally, when I was in graduate school, took a seminar in sciences and other disciplines. You know, this was because I was being trained as a scientist, and one of the papers we had to read at the time, this is long before I ever thought about going to Egypt, was how Egyptologists are resistant to scientific information and scientific data-
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- RSRobert Schoch
... and how to help, you know, try to overcome that if you're working with Egyptologists (laughs) basically-
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- RSRobert Schoch
... which the answer was it's very difficult. And it's not to put them down because I have lots of colleagues in other fields that are not scientists.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- RSRobert Schoch
Um, but classically, I would contend Egyptology is not a science. It comes more from art history or from linguistic studies, you know, translating hieroglyphs, um, historical studies, and those are all very important academic studies. But you do sometimes get people in a certain field and they're resistant to outsiders from another field.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- RSRobert Schoch
Especially when they think it's a field that's so far apart and so diverse from what they understand, what they know, their own mindset.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, and their mindset is not geared towards scientific data. It's geared towards-
- RSRobert Schoch
Yeah, and I'm not, again-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- RSRobert Schoch
... I'm not trying to be nasty.
- JRJoe Rogan
I under- It's just-
- RSRobert Schoch
It's just-
- JRJoe Rogan
You don't have to explain yourself.
- RSRobert Schoch
Yeah, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
You're not coming across nasty.
Episode duration: 2:54:42
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