No-one Sees this Site! Finding Advanced Stonework at the Ancient Egyptian Site of Mendes.

Ajouté : 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Well, dang.

[00:00:03]It was seeing pictures of this thing that originally got me interested in the site. And they definitely said no a bunch of times, but can eventually Well, we got permission to come out here. Not with a big group, just a few of us. But this thing's cool.

[00:00:15]>> It's big box. It is.

[00:00:18]>> Yes.

[00:00:20]This one looks amazing.

[00:00:21]>> This does, huh? Yeah. The tactile sense and the feeling on this is quite incredible. The smooth the polish on this is amazing. And you can see the the chisel marks. I think it's difficult to say that you can use this dating to date the whole statue.

[00:00:35]>> Oh, >> you know what this is?

[00:00:42]>> This is this is right. Nice. It is.

[00:00:44]Yeah.

[00:00:46]>> That tells you how old this place is.

[00:00:51]>> Doing the jobs.

[00:00:52]>> There it is.

[00:00:53]>> It's pretty That's pretty.

[00:00:56]>> That's it.

[00:00:56]>> Yeah.

[00:00:59]the entire side. I think the guy is very impressed too >> that we found that stuff straight away.

[00:01:03]>> We are We are We know what we're looking at.

[00:01:05]>> Yeah. What you doing, kitty cat? Rolling in the mud with one eye. And we just found something interesting here.

[00:01:12]>> The polishing the polish.

[00:01:14]>> I'm getting all these goosebumps.

[00:01:17]He's super excited.

[00:01:21]I >> can already see him.

[00:01:24]Yeah.

[00:01:28]Oh yeah, >> this one looks circular.

[00:01:30]>> It does. Yes.

[00:01:46]This is Teleruba, ancient Mendes, which was at one point thousands of years ago the capital of the 16th gnome or province of the ancient Egyptian civilization.

[00:01:58]Nobody visits this place these days. But when we managed to get permission to come out here, what we found along with the very long history of Mendy's proved to be quite remarkable and I want to share some of that with you all today.

[00:02:12]Ever since seeing this grainy black and white photo on Facebook of the amazing nouse at Mendy's a few years back, I've wanted to get out here and see this place, which really isn't an easy proposition.

[00:02:25]>> It's a big box.

[00:02:27]>> Yes. Is >> Mendy's is definitely not open to the public. There's just no tourism infrastructure out here and it's about 4 hours drive from Cairo out into the middle of a rural part of the northern delta.

[00:02:41]Luckily, however, I have very good colleagues in Egypt who in turn have very good relationships with the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, as do I. I work with ministry officials closely on everything that I do in Egypt. And we arrange a lot of special permission accesses into closed sites like Mendy's. For example, on the last trip we had in Egypt, we had arranged a special permission access into KV5, which is the largest tomb in the Valley of the Kings. said to be that of the Sons of Ramsy's II and it has more than 130 chambers and passages discovered in it so far.

[00:03:18]>> KV5 KV >> Sons of Ramsy's 2 >> largest tomb out on the plate. Yeah. 120 rooms and passages apparently. So >> Oh.

[00:03:39]Oh yeah. This is the stuff of what they found here.

[00:03:46]>> It goes pretty cool.

[00:03:57]>> It is getting dusty. Yeah.

[00:04:03]Ram says the sun's off.

[00:04:11]Yeah. Yep. Slippy slip.

[00:04:14]Let's go.

[00:04:16]Oh, yeah.

[00:04:22]It's been excavated, explored, and cleared for the last couple of decades, and it's very much closed to the public, and a real privilege getting access into here. We're going back to Egypt again this December of 2026 for another special permission focused trip. Stick around to the end of the video if you want to hear a little bit about it or check out the link in the description below.

[00:04:44]It's these sorts of opportunities like getting into the Sphinx Temple or into KV5 that keep me consistently coming back to Egypt and the chance to get out to see Mendy's was an equally exciting opportunity. After several months of back and forth with the ministry, we were eventually granted permission to take a small group out to Teleruba for the day, complete with tourism police escort in late February of 2026.

[00:05:09]I just arrived in Egypt a couple of days prior for what turned out to be about a month-long stay, and myself along with my usual crew of compatriots, Kyle and Russ Allen, and my Egyptian brothers, Yousef and Mo, were getting ready to head out. Just before we left for the site, we grabbed Joe, who was my quite jet-lagged friend of about two decades now. He just arrived at the hotel direct from the airport, as in he had literally just walked into the lobby, and we all turned around and jumped straight back into the van and set out for Mendy's.

[00:05:40]This was Joe's first time in Egypt, so this whole thing turned out to be quite the welcome to Egypt experience.

[00:05:47]Barreling out into the mayhem that is Cairo traffic and then heading up into the countryside and through all the little local towns is a pretty surreal experience if you've never been somewhere like this before. You combine that with jet lag and it's more of a fever dream, but it sure is pretty entertaining for me to watch happen. I mention this because as we walk around and explore Mendy's, you'll hear me talking and explaining things. And I'm mostly speaking to my mate Joe, to whom all of these topics are fairly new. You >> can hear the kitty cats.

[00:06:20]>> So far so good.

[00:06:21]>> Come on.

[00:06:22]>> Yeah.

[00:06:24]>> Been following this whole time.

[00:06:26]>> We did the entire site. I think the guy's very impressed >> that we found that stuff straight away.

[00:06:31]>> We are We are We know what we're looking at.

[00:06:33]>> Yeah. So, Taloba.

[00:06:36]>> Taloba.

[00:06:37]>> Taloba. Ancient Menddees.

[00:06:39]>> Ancient Mendes.

[00:06:40]>> Mendes. Neb.

[00:06:42]>> Turbar. Neb.

[00:06:44]>> The house of the soul. House of the soul.

[00:06:47]>> The ancestors of Egyptians.

[00:06:48]>> This was the capital of was it the 16th gnome?

[00:06:51]>> Yes.

[00:06:52]>> Of ancient Egypt.

[00:06:53]>> That is mentioned in the white chapel in Carak. You know the white chapel. We go back to Carak.

[00:06:59]>> There are all the names of the provinces. It's mentioned as the 16th gnome.

[00:07:03]>> Uh-huh.

[00:07:04]>> Yeah. But it's it's much older than that. As we saw and as some of the documentation as well.

[00:07:12]>> Well, right. There are >> It definitely looks like some reuse.

[00:07:17]>> Yeah.

[00:07:17]>> Going on. We've already found some vase fragments.

[00:07:20]>> Yeah. That that is and and even lithics.

[00:07:23]>> Lithics. Yeah. And just amazing um stonework. The the polished stonework, the belt, the the bullnosses, cornises.

[00:07:32]>> Yeah.

[00:07:33]>> Just superior level stone finishing on some statues and some surfaces.

[00:07:38]Pretty impressive.

[00:07:40]>> First time out here.

[00:07:41]>> Some good stuff laying around.

[00:07:42]>> Tough to get to. And plus look at Oh my god.

[00:07:45]>> Look at this thing though.

[00:07:48]>> Wow.

[00:07:48]>> Because Mandis is the name of that ram that that represent the soul of the ancestors of the ancient Egyptians.

[00:07:57]>> Mandis is the name of the ram.

[00:07:59]>> They call him Ba as well.

[00:08:01]>> Ba.

[00:08:06]>> But like what kind of ancestors like >> from the time of Ra? Okay. So they >> from the zepi >> zepi >> zepi.

[00:08:15]>> Yeah. There is also a religious story mentioned about this place unifying both Ozirus and Rah.

[00:08:22]>> Oh >> yeah.

[00:08:24]>> Yeah. You said it's like heaven and earth coming together almost.

[00:08:27]>> Yeah. Because is more with the earth cycle you know >> the green that comes after every flood becoming alive again. And of course, Ra is representing the astral cycle. H. So it's like when both cycles came together.

[00:08:49]Now if you've never heard of Tel Ruba or ancient Mendy's, I don't blame you. I certainly didn't know much about it either. I think it's quite a testament to the sheer scope and scale of the civilization of ancient Egypt that sites like this which is you know it's a massive site it's roughly 250 acres and it has a remarkable range of ancient artifacts and architecture on it as you'll see it's left mostly dormant and pretty much unknown in modern times you put this site in any other country in the world and it would become a major tourist destination so Mendy's itself is located in northern Egypt. It's called lower Egypt. It's in the Nile Delta which is to the north of Cairo. As I said, it's quite a large site. In fact, Tela Ruba is the largest surviving city mound still in the delta, which is saying quite a lot because there are several other very large sites in this part of Egypt. Places like Tannis and the Temple of Bastet, both of which are huge and amazing in their own rights.

[00:09:52]both of which I've visited and explored and documented in previous videos. I've linked those below.

[00:09:59]The original site of Mendy's is thought to have measured some 3 km from north to south and roughly 8 or 900 m, most of a kilometer really, east to west, giving it a total area of what's thought to be more than 650 acres. These original boundaries stretch far further than what is the current archaeological site, which is roughly 1.5 by about 0.5 km.

[00:10:27]It's an area of around 250 acres. Still large, but nothing like the original site. This whole area today is surrounded by farmland, rural roads, and small local communities.

[00:10:40]Going here and looking at it from the satellite, it really does remind me a little bit of Tiwanaku, which is high on the altar plano of Bolivia in that Tiwanaku is also surrounded by farmland.

[00:10:51]And in both cases, I'm sure the farmers working these neighboring fields occasionally hit ancient artifacts and large blocks of stone. I know they certainly do so in Bolivia. One wonders what might be found if those local land owners started to dig in their basements, as I'm sure does happen.

[00:11:08]Documentation on Mendy's is fairly sparse, at least as far as what you can dig up online. The Wikipedia page for this site is very short, and the entry for it in the Oxford Encyclopedia of the ancient Egyptian civilization is likewise brief. It's less than a full page, but it's quite tantalizing in its details, particularly considering what we found on the site. Those details, which we'll get into, only serve to increase my curiosity about Mendy's. And I've ordered two somewhat rare books, I suppose, that deal with Mendy's. They come from Bernard Bothma's 1963 to 1980 campaign of excavation and research on the site. This is now editing, Ben, as I'm making this video. Of course, I'd written the script and recorded it earlier. And wouldn't you know it, as I'm recording and I guess making the video, editing it up, these books did actually turn up. They're actually quite amazing. I wanted to take just a moment.

[00:12:03]I've set up a little rig here. you'll see a picture of it, but they are quite large. As you can see, this is the Mendy's one book is is a big one.

[00:12:10]They're quite interesting books. Volume one here primarily deals with the ancient maps and the cgraphy surrounding Mendy's. And then, you know, essentially the the geology and the the surveying work that's been done as part of the expeditions uh led by Donald P. Hansen. you can see here and then also this these books have been edited by Bernard Bothma. So you typically see these two guys get the credit for uh the work here. They were doing this for the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University as well as the Brooklyn Museum. And uh some of these pictures and the images in these books are just fantastic. You can't find these pretty much anywhere else. Uh here you can see the Nouse as it stood in 1964.

[00:12:54]the piece at the top. H we'll talk about it when we get into the now section in the video, but the piece at the top is uh obviously not missing at this point, but some of the information that's in this book is is quite interesting.

[00:13:07]Particularly the maps of the Nile Delta, several of which have been drawn up from antiquity. They tend to show a lot more detail of what this land must have been like during ancient times because they will show a lot of the tributaries or the small rivers that flowed through the delta as the water flowed north into the Mediterranean. And today, most of these subsidiary channels of the Nile are either silted up or they've dried up.

[00:13:30]They've meandered. They've moved away from their original sites, which indeed is something that did happen to Mendy's.

[00:13:35]So, I'll show you some of these resources in here, but I just wanted to quote a little bit from the expedition that was done in the 1960s by Bernard Bothma uh from the editorial preface because I think this really is gives an interesting overview to Mendy's. Quote, "On a memorable day in May 1956, Jean Yanette, Alexander Bowie, HW Mueller, William K. Simpson and BV Bothma visited Mendy's for the first time and stood in awe, facing the great nouse, the largest ever carved in ancient Egypt. Most Egyptologists have heard that there was once a great site which Heroditus called Mendes, and that there were tells or coms in the delta marking the places where a temple or town had stood in antiquity. But nothing in the teaching of our archaeological mentors had prepared us for this overwhelming site. The long hills at first appearing so low in the flat landscape, the gradual rise in terrain, the view of the remains of the gigantic enclosure wall, and finally the height of the massive tell itself when one had scaled it and gazed out over the rich landscape far out to the distant horizon.

[00:14:43]Mendes, like Memphis, is a geographical term which can be applied to a specific site as well as to an entire region. The Mendesian gnome, the Mendesian branch of the Nile are both named after the place which Herodotus quoting Pinda called Mendes in Greek. Situated about 90 mi north of Cairo between the modern towns of similawine and Mansura, Mendes is the last major archaeological site in the Egyptian delta to have remained largely unexplored. The town has a long history.

[00:15:15]We cannot at this time state when it was first settled since the lowest levels have yet to be excavated, but antiquities from the early Old Kingdom circa 2700 BC have been found and the place was occupied well into the Christian era around AD 800. End quote.

[00:15:32]So here you can start to see some of the maps from antiquity or at least maps that have been redrawn according to sources in antiquity. This for example shows you Egypt, lower Egypt as according to Herodotus circa 450 BC. You see Lake Moira and the volume down here in the south. Then you see up here in the delta uh the large cities of Mendy's as well as these which we'll discuss in a little bit. We also have maps here that are drawn from these sources according to Strao, according to Tommy the geographer, according to George of Cyprus and then photographs or reproductions of actual existing source maps. And again, you can see here this this proliferation of subsidiary channels from the Nile that all ran up through the delta in these periods many many centuries ago. They were very thorough in finding all of the sources.

[00:16:19]These maps go on and on and on down through time right into the you know the classical era right up until the Renaissance right up until recent centuries. And then we get to some of the actual results from the surveying work and the excavations that were undertaken in the 1960s up until around 1980 here with a new map of Mendy's. You can see these two sites here. This is Mendy's to the north here and this is Telto, also known as Theuise. These two sites are separate sites. They're only separated by a few hundred meters. I'll talk about them a little bit in the video here coming up. Also, as you can imagine, this book contains some amazing photographs that you really can't find online anywhere. Uh, this, for example, is a great shot from the from the top of the tail showing you the enclosure wall.

[00:17:05]This is the broken down remnants of a massive mud brick enclosure wall that surrounded this. Uh, you'll see pictures like this where there are boxes or sarcophagi made from granite that are still partially buried in the ground.

[00:17:17]Um, they're still there today and you'll see that from my footage when we were on the site. And then of course there is the great and amazing Nouse that still sits at this site. We'll talk more about the Nouse, but it's it's got to weigh at least 150 plus tons uh as it stands today. It's about 8 m tall. There were once four of these on the site, which we'll get to. The second book thankfully isn't quite as large as the first volume. Uh this one's really interesting in that it contains all of the historical accounts of Mendy's. So, as we'll talk about, there were a lot of people that knew about Mendy's. This was a a large city that attracted the attention of a lot of historians and travelers and geographers in antiquity.

[00:17:54]Guys like Herodotus, like Strao, like Plenny. And the site wasn't only visited in antiquity, it was also visited throughout classical times, right up until what you might call our modern times, the 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th century.

[00:18:08]Anyway, I just wanted to introduce some of the information that is contained in these excellent books. And you will see more images and data from them as we go through this visit to Mendy's.

[00:18:18]The earliest dated remains at Mendy's, at least so far, stretch back into pre-dynastic times. According to academia, there was a settlement here as far back as the Nicarda 3 civilization, which is roughly 3,400 BC. And Mendy's is thought to have been a large and flourishing location throughout the entire Old Kingdom with a necropolis covering over 150,000 square meters. It was however much more than just a necropolis. There were levies and a harbor here even in pre-dynonastic times as the site was located on the Mendesian branch of the Nile. Obviously, the Mendesian branch is named after the site itself, Mendes, which itself is a Greek name that's derived from the word used by the ancient Egyptians to describe the site. Who knows what it was actually originally called whenever it was first settled. In later times from the classical Greek Roman period right on down to our current millennium, Mendy's was also sometimes referred to as a combined entity with a nearby sister site which is the ancient city of these which is also known as Tel Tami. So in these historical accounts that I share here coming from these books the site is sometimes referred to as these or Tel Tamay. It can be called Tel Ruba or also Mendy's. And they all generally refer to the same place, the same artifacts in these accounts. It should be noted that although these accounts put these and Mendy's together, technically Teltomay or Themese is a separate although quite nearby ancient settlement. There is some evidence on the site that suggests that Mendy's at the end of the old kingdom suffered some fire and destruction as the Egyptian civilization went into what's known as the first intermediate period. And coming out of that, there are very few traces of the Middle Kingdom to be found on this site. And by that I mean there are very few inscriptions or records that relate to the Middle Kingdom. There just weren't any inscriptions found on things like statues or architecture that suggest the names of Middle Kingdom rulers. And of course, this is based on that wellestablished and somewhat logically inconsistent axiom of Egyptological dating that goes along the lines of he who wrote on it must therefore have built it.

[00:20:46]As time progressed, the site was certainly known to be flourishing and very prosperous during the New Kingdom of ancient Egypt. Artifacts and structures bearing the cartes of rulers like Thutmos III, Ramsy's II, Marin Petar, and Ramsy's IV have been found here amongst others. It was likewise quite a large and busy settlement in the periods following the new kingdom, particularly in what's known as the Seite or late period. And there is much evidence for the 26th dynasty's presence here. We'll get into the details. Mendes was marked for destruction and was in fact destroyed by the Persians around the year 340 BC. After that, it was then rebuilt by Tommy II in around 275 BC. It became then a hub for perfume and wine manufacturing again quite prosperous and a large site. It had trade routes that extended throughout the Mediterranean.

[00:21:41]After 200 BC, however, something changed. The tributary, the Mendesian branch of the Nile that serviced Mendes, weakened and eventually disappeared entirely. After this happened and in the very later phases of the dynastic Egyptian civilization, it's thought that a priesthood survived on this site for a while. We know that at some point during the Roman occupation, some of these structures were eventually converted into Christian churches. But by mid- Roman times, because there was no river near the site, Mendy's was ultimately abandoned and it's not thought to have been occupied again. During antiquity, however, Mendy's was quite wellnown and as the capital of one of the districts of ancient Egypt, it was visited and documented by figures like Herodotus, Deodoriculus, and Strao, who all wrote accounts about it, as did also a number of other Coptic and Arabic historians.

[00:22:35]Mendy's was often associated in those times and in those accounts with the worship of goat or ram oriented gods like the Greek god Pan. The Mendesian goat cults were then later linked to deities like Baomet. And if you know anything about Pan or Baffomet that certainly you can imagine the reputation that Mendes might have had. Although the ancient Egyptian versions of these goat gods were notably less uh let's say sensational. They were much more sacred and peaceful deities. I'm actually quite interested in the symbology here, the ram deities. As if you've ever been to Egypt with us before or you know anything about places like the temple of Hatheror at Danderea, you'll know that the constellations the zodiac as well as cosmic phenomena of things like moon cycles and the procession of the equinoxes are very well represented in ancient Egyptian culture and symbology particularly in places like Dendera. The age of Aries the ram is the celestial age in that great cycle that immediately preceded our current age. The age of Pisces the fish which began more or less at year zero is generally represented by Jesus. So you know all of those people driving around with Jesus fish stickers on their cars are at least astronomically correct. When they the ancient Egyptians were conducting the worship of a ram god at Mendy's during the new kingdom. We were absolutely still in the age of Aries the ram. After the accounts from the ancient sources, the Greeks, Romans, Coptics, and Arabs, the site was also then visited and written about by quite a few travelers from the 18th century on down to our modern time. Napoleon was here in the late 1700s, early 1800s with his knights and his sages. They came and visited and documented the architecture and artifacts of Mendy's. And all of that is reported in the multi-olume tone that is attributed to him. It's a book called description dela Egypt. And I've just got to say what a resource this book is.

[00:24:43]I'd highly recommend checking it out.

[00:24:45]You can look at it on services like archive.org.

[00:24:48]It was evidently just a massive effort to put together. These are all handdrawn illustrations and it's some of the earliest scientific documentation of the artifacts and architecture of ancient Egypt and it's just a phenomenal read.

[00:25:04]In terms of modern explorations and excavations, Mendy's was first visited by August Marriott, the French Egyptologist in 1867, who carried out some minor excavations there and more work took place under the guidance of Edward Neville in 1892. Neville, interestingly, is the same chap who uncovered or at least excavated the mighty Assyriion at Abidos.

[00:25:30]Edward Neville made some very interesting remarks on his discoveries at Mendy's, things that I think really put some of these artifacts into context in terms of how old they might be, and we'll get into those later. Not much work was done on the site in the 20th century, however, up until about the 1960s. From 1963 till around 1980, New York University ran seasonal excavations on the northwestern part of Mendy's.

[00:25:56]This was done under the direction of Bernard Bothmer and Donald Hansen. And the two volume set that I've put on order here were made as a result of their work and research on the site.

[00:26:07]After these excavations, digs recommenced at Mendy's in the 1990s, being done by the Universities of Washington and Illinois. And after that, yearly digs were still taking place, run by the University of Toronto right up until around the year 2000.

[00:26:23]I don't know when activity at Mendy's ceased. And in our time now, the year 2026, it doesn't seem like there are any current archaeological efforts underway at Mendy's. But I could be wrong. I visited the site for a day in the winter in Egypt, which is the dig season. It's way too hot to be working outdoors in summer, trust me. And apart from the locals and our ministry inspectors who came with us, the place was a ghost town. Again, it's funny to me. if you put this site in any other country in the world and it would gain far more attention. Not only that, but as you'll see from our visit here, it appears, at least to me, that we've barely even scratched the surface of what might be just below the ground. It's a massive site, and as we walk around, you'll see plenty of very interesting artifacts that are still almost entirely buried.

[00:27:15]There are also hints and fragments of what must have been just colossal singlepiece ancient architecture made from stone that likely once stood here.

[00:27:24]So, let's get into the site visit and I'll explain further as we explore the ancient site of Mendy's. Just for a bit of context about where we are on the site, we entered in through this set of buildings in the northwestern corner with a lot of artifacts, boxes, statues, things like that just sitting around outside. This is a pretty common thing when it comes to sites like this. It's often these artifacts that are just too big, too heavy to be taken away easily.

[00:27:48]They're left just outside. It's the same thing happens at places like Bastad as well as Tannis. It's something of a small impromptu open air museum. This is a great example of a the imitation part of that Tale of Two Industries. All of these boxes that we're finding here out at Telroa like this, you can literally see the chiseling, the handmade marks. There's lids and stuff here.

[00:28:13]more like big boxes here.

[00:28:16]Um, very much made for human size, >> you know. You can see the chisel marks.

[00:28:24]You can you can see the pounding and the bruising on the stone surface even when it got pretty smooth. This is a lid.

[00:28:32]Quite a large box. That's uh it's actually the lid for what is a pretty big um legit sarcophagus, I'd imagine. Yeah, it's actually well made out of granite.

[00:28:45]But again, there's a big difference on the surface finish here. Even as it it feels and looks smooth, but it's not the same thing as the as the polished smooth surface, the mirror finished smooth surfaces that you see the serumier boxes on some of the statues and some of the other things. The top surface here, you can see the bruising on the stone from hammering and pounding.

[00:29:06]The inside is not a big sharp corner. It doesn't have a very fine radius, the big wide radiuses. It's definitely made by hand. But all of this stuff back here, good example of the imitation in the Tale of Two Industries. There is also a small what's called a storage museum here. Unfortunately, we weren't able to get a look inside this. Maybe that's something for the future. But this served as our entryway into Amendy's.

[00:29:32]Wow, they got stuff everywhere here.

[00:29:34]This is cool.

[00:29:47]This is really rough with that chipped out.

[00:29:49]>> Yeah. This is like that limestone, huh?

[00:29:51]This is like the >> This is the It's almost Yeah. Just big flakes of it coming off.

[00:29:56]>> Cutest.

[00:29:57]>> And this is the thing I love to see is like the the hand This is what handmade work. This is what a handmade This is the big difference that Taylor to Industries will keep banging on about.

[00:30:06]This is what you get with the handmade like hand hammered granite. It's still hard to do, but it's nothing like the boxes we're going to see.

[00:30:14]>> It's the big difference.

[00:30:17]>> It was a huge thing will always be in the >> Yeah.

[00:30:25]>> This is known as the 16th gnome.

[00:30:28]>> The 16th gnome in the capital, right?

[00:30:30]Mendes. This is the >> Misen in the ancient time it was called also >> the polish in this one looks amazing.

[00:30:40]>> This does. Huh? Yeah.

[00:30:43]>> And it's it's a rare type of granite too.

[00:30:45]>> Oh that's that is super nice.

[00:30:49]And even with the pleading here you can >> like the polish in between the pleat.

[00:30:55]>> Oh yeah.

[00:30:55]>> You see this is this is the >> you can feel it like you can feel the legs and the polish. It smells.

[00:31:01]>> This is one of the things that I This is and I'll point this out on the trip, Joe, but this is this is the other interesting thing. You see like the difference is is the belt line like that the hammered hieroglyphs which is typically how they date them.

[00:31:13]>> But you look at the difference the finish on like the belly button and this surface and this is and this >> internal surface here, >> right? And you can >> right and you can see the the chisel marks like >> this is a whole different result to this.

[00:31:26]>> So it's like it's hard to date. I think it's difficult to say that you can use this dating to date the whole statue. It seems like this writing could have been done later. Certainly done more in a more primitive fashion than how the rest of the statue's been done.

[00:31:38]>> Okay.

[00:31:42]>> Also with the really polished stuff, the the polarized glasses like bring it out.

[00:31:46]>> Yeah.

[00:31:48]>> There are a couple of things going on here. Firstly, this statue and some of the other stonework you'll see on the site clearly do show quite a superior level of polishing and finishing in the very hard stone. The surfaces reflect light, which is all the more remarkable considering they're at the very least thousands of years old and have been exposed to the elements for most, if not all, of their life. The finishing and polishing of extremely hard stone like this, particularly when it's done on complex surfaces that aren't flat, but rather have curves, contours, and corners, is in and of itself a signature of advanced capability far beyond that which can generally be achieved with the primitive hand tools ascribed to the donastic Egyptians, which in their case is rocks, water, and sand. In our time, we have to use machines to achieve polish like this. A key point here is that this result doesn't exist in isolation. It's in the comparison to other stonework that we can quite clearly observe there are two vastly different industries at work here.

[00:32:52]There's lots of statues, slabs, boxes, and other stonework that doesn't have anything like this finish. Even though you can clearly tell there's been an attempt made likely with the affforementioned primitive methods. I've talked about this a lot over the years in my content. It's in a lot of my videos and I generally like to demonstrate it to people at places like Luxor Temple where the difference in finishing and polishing is extremely tangible between the statues. It'll be a video that I make in the near future.

[00:33:26]>> Over here.

[00:33:28]>> Yeah, this is different, right? Yeah.

[00:33:30]>> And these other ones can be much older than this one.

[00:33:44]This finishing topic crosses over to that of the inscriptions, the crudely hammered hieroglyphs that are used to date the artifact. It's patently obvious that these were done in a most primitive fashion, likely with a flint or a stone chisel, and they have none of the sophistication or finesse that was used to shape the other aspects of the statue. I really don't think that you can use inscriptions like these to reliably date and relate artifacts like this statue. What's more, in many cases, we know that the inscriptions were added far later, and that statues like these, those that have the characteristics of advanced technology in their construction, were likely never intended to have been inscribed in the first place.

[00:34:26]There is clear proof for this. Take this statue at Carach. The beltline, belly, and pleated skirt are unadorned with any writing. Maybe Ramsay's just never got around to defacing this one. We can also see that on several statues like this one at Luxor, the inscriptions have been added over the top of existing features like the sheath of this knife, which is not something that you would do if your original tent was to have writing on that spot. On other statues, we can see how these stone surfaces have been later flattened and then polished in a most inferior method so that writing can then be added.

[00:35:06]>> Clearly here it looks like they removed older inscriptions in order to add the newer one.

[00:35:11]>> Should feel the polish on this relative to this. So nice. Look at this.

[00:35:15]>> And then they were never able to reach the same leveling again. Feel this the side of this relative to the back.

[00:35:27]>> It's a world of difference.

[00:35:30]>> Looks like a counter top.

[00:35:31]>> Yeah. Beautiful. Right. So obvious when you touch the sides relative. And you see these this all of this is added later.

[00:35:39]>> Just the polish versus the hammered finish here.

[00:35:42]>> Not polished.

[00:35:50]deep enough where they give that shadow and light.

[00:35:55]>> This is cool, too. If you actually go back and forth here, you can see the reflective surface here and how it just finishes here. Like you go this way, just stone reflecting light and then stone, no reflecting light. Like that's you sort of go this way. Yeah, >> on still more of these statues, we can observe multiple styles as well as quality levels to the inscriptions themselves. And there are even some artifacts with the names of multiple rulers on them spread over hundreds, if not thousands of years.

[00:36:29]>> But yeah, the polish all across this is just >> Yeah, this is spectacular. Yeah, black granite on it. Look >> at the grain in this stone too. It's >> the grain in this stone as well.

[00:36:42]>> The grain.

[00:36:43]>> Yeah.

[00:36:43]>> Yeah. Look at the >> the pattern in the >> So the granite here from much further destination.

[00:36:52]>> Yeah. This isn't as I mean this could be what hammety hammer man. This is black granite. Yeah >> black granite. But this is Yeah. This doesn't look like >> this is a different >> This looks more like the cyanide also from the eastern desert. Yeah. But it could be found in Aswan. But this one, >> this is different.

[00:37:07]>> This is a rare type of granite.

[00:37:08]>> Yeah. Look at this. Uh, it's like granite.

[00:37:13]>> The tactile sense on the feeling on this is quite incredible. The smooth, the polish on this is amazing.

[00:37:20]>> This is a really nice piece.

[00:37:22]>> This is the name of Nectu.

[00:37:24]>> Nectu.

[00:37:26]>> Yes. But uh, look, I can notice that the titles here is all related to the Benu bird.

[00:37:32]>> The Benu.

[00:37:34]Yeah. The Benu, the one >> the Benu bird.

[00:37:36]>> The phoenix. The one that stands on top of the pyramid. It's on top of an obelisk. You see?

[00:37:41]>> Yeah. Yeah.

[00:37:42]>> And that's his city right here.

[00:37:45]>> From here, we walked out behind these buildings and found what basically looked like a trash heap of discarded stone fragments just next to the remnants of the huge mudbrick enclosure walls that used to surround the entire site. As always, the history in places like this is nuanced and layered, and it wasn't long before we started to uncover some of those layers. As they say, one man's trash is another man's treasure.

[00:38:09]And in this pile of trash were some remarkable clues to the very long story of occupation. Here amongst the varied stone types like granite, limestone, sandstone, diorite, alabaster, and more, we found something most unexpected. Something that definitely ties Mendy's into a far longer timeline.

[00:38:32]>> Yeah, the pink granite here.

[00:38:37]>> Chunk of a bowl or >> handle there.

[00:38:42]>> Oh yeah.

[00:38:52]>> Sandstone.

[00:38:54]some of it. Yeah.

[00:38:55]>> Yeah. So, typically the donastics would have um built in sandstone a lot. Like the later periods, they would use sandstone a lot.

[00:39:02]>> Much softer, much easier.

[00:39:07]>> Yeah. This looks like uh the remnants of >> a mud brick.

[00:39:11]>> You need to see that.

[00:39:13]>> Oh, yeah. Alabaster piece.

[00:39:14]>> Yeah. I mean, >> that's nice, dude. Yeah.

[00:39:18]>> I love this place. I mean they have the same technology actually for the zos or the >> diorite nice diorite nice. Yeah.

[00:39:25]>> This is from the old This is from the pyramid builder. Nobody else used it.

[00:39:32]>> They have it here also the same the same material in Sakara under the pyramid.

[00:39:43]You see it?

[00:39:45]>> That's crazy.

[00:39:47]>> Oh yeah. That's nice.

[00:39:51]This is a probably a fragment from a statue.

[00:39:54]>> I mean, that's Look at this.

[00:39:58]It's part of Oh, yeah.

[00:39:59]>> That looks like slate or Yeah, >> that looks like sle.

[00:40:02]>> Feel that. Feel the polish on that.

[00:40:06]>> Oh, look at that. Where's that? Where's that uh alabaster bowl?

[00:40:10]>> Right here.

[00:40:14]>> We're doing the job.

[00:40:15]>> Yes, there it is.

[00:40:16]>> It's pretty That's pretty close. That's it. That's it. Yeah.

[00:40:34]This was like >> so a lot of bash.

[00:40:53]Oh yes.

[00:41:04]You know what this is?

[00:41:07]>> I mean this is diide. Yeah.

[00:41:10]Nice. This is part of >> this is diorite. Nice. It is. Yeah.

[00:41:14]>> That tells you how old this place is.

[00:41:16]>> The same.

[00:41:17]>> Yeah. That's alabaster. Yeah. That's similar under the bed.

[00:41:19]>> We didn't burn >> this. Yeah. I was I was looking at that one but I doubt it a little bit. But now that we see this >> for sure >> then we know we have layers here from the oldest >> times.

[00:41:31]>> So far >> there is like all the layers here.

[00:41:36]>> Yeah.

[00:41:36]>> Of history.

[00:41:37]>> This is Kalasite. This is alabaster.

[00:41:40]>> Yeah. It's alabaster underneath the step pyramid.

[00:41:42]>> Yep. Same pieces. Yeah.

[00:41:43]>> And here also. Yeah.

[00:41:48]>> Wow.

[00:41:48]>> Wow. Yeah.

[00:41:51]Yeah, >> I think >> pieces everywhere here.

[00:41:55]>> Yeah, you haven't been here before, right, Yousef?

[00:41:59]Look, >> brother. By the way, this Victor here, >> he's surprised.

[00:42:05]>> I'm surprised actually by all the pieces is more interesting. It's for them like a garbage.

[00:42:11]>> I know. I know.

[00:42:12]>> [ __ ] crazy, >> you know.

[00:42:15]>> I mean, I feel like I'm in Sakara.

[00:42:18]>> Oh, >> yeah. Beneath the step. feel like I'm in Zeus or under the Zeus from >> Mhm.

[00:42:23]>> Well, this piece here that this piece is >> that's really cool.

[00:42:26]>> Yeah, this piece.

[00:42:33]>> This is slate. It's not bazalt. You can see it's in density.

[00:42:37]>> We have the bazalt right behind us over there.

[00:42:39]>> Oh yeah. Basalt here.

[00:42:41]>> Yeah.

[00:42:42]>> We got um rose granite cortisite. Yeah.

[00:42:46]Look at this diorite. Nice.

[00:42:49]>> And diite. Nice.

[00:42:50]>> Nice.

[00:42:51]>> Calite.

[00:42:52]>> Yeah. Beautiful piece of calite. Yep. Or alabaster.

[00:42:55]>> Older calite. That looks like the third diamond production.

[00:42:58]>> You said there's quartz here. Maybe >> that looks like almost quartz. Huh.

[00:43:02]>> Plates.

[00:43:03]>> Rock crystal >> plates. What kind of the the >> Oh, this is definitely That's a plate. Yeah.

[00:43:09]>> Yeah.

[00:43:10]>> Yes.

[00:43:10]>> That's a dish.

[00:43:17]>> Yeah. Yeah, it looks like alabaster. It >> looks like >> white color site.

[00:43:20]>> White color site. Yeah.

[00:43:25]>> Yeah. That reflects that ancient machining.

[00:43:27]>> And this is hollow, right? This is probably a hole.

[00:43:31]>> Oh yeah.

[00:43:32]>> But look at this is the base of one of these.

[00:43:34]>> It's like a base of one of the >> of a of a >> Yeah, exactly. Look, >> that's how they used to.

[00:43:41]>> Oh, this is from the ancient vases.

[00:43:44]>> Yeah.

[00:43:45]>> Yeah. I mean, it is. I can well this you see the long >> definitely a layer here from the pyramid builders.

[00:43:49]>> This is the >> from the materite from the >> red mountain.

[00:43:55]>> Yeah, stuff everywhere chunks.

[00:44:02]>> Amazing.

[00:44:04]>> So yeah, safe to say we were like kids in a candy store here rumaging around in the discarded trash of thousands of years of civilization.

[00:44:12]In these refuge piles, however, we found definitive evidence that the amazing ancient hardstone vases were here. And these are typically only seen on old kingdom sites that go back into pre-donastic times, places like Giza, Sakara, or Abusia.

[00:44:28]The key signature here is the witness mark from a tubular drill made into the otherwise beautifully polished hard stone of what must have been a decently sized vase or perhaps plate.

[00:44:39]We only have a fragment of this tool mark, but that's enough to recognize it.

[00:44:43]Across my content, I have many hours that covers these amazing artifacts and the recent discovery of just how precise they are, as well as the evidence for genuine sophistication in their design and manufacture. There's a lot of context surrounding the vases, which incontrovertibly go back thousands of years before the beginnings of the donastic Egyptian civilization, and I won't attempt to cover all that here again. If you're interested, check out the videos linked below on the vases and the vasecan project. In particular, my last video, which was a 2-hour long wrap-up of everything up to that point.

[00:45:17]Now, you may have recently heard some people asserting that precision stone vases are modern fakes. This is nothing new. Critics and skeptics of this work have been looking for ways to deny and dismiss the evidence coming from the vasecan project ever since it started being released publicly a couple of years ago. Well, as usual, these recent claims are also baseless and very much incorrect. If you're interested in what's behind that statement of mine, I'm not going to go over it again all here. It would take too long and that's not the point of this video. But I do have a 7,000 plusword article on my website that I put together a few days ago. It gets right into the origin of these recent fake claims, point by point, statement by statement. You can read it via the link below in the description or just go to my website uncharted.com.

[00:46:07]>> But this thing has layers and layers at it. It's a big site and we just found something interesting here.

[00:46:14]>> But the polishing here I feel is better more than Egypt. Even >> the polishing polish getting all these goosebumps.

[00:46:24]>> He's super excited.

[00:46:26]>> Oh yeah, that thing's got like look almost like sore cuts on it on the side there. I can't just strike. No, it's just a marking. Holy [ __ ] >> Yeah. Feel the bottom.

[00:46:33]>> Oh, wow.

[00:46:34]>> Yeah.

[00:46:35]>> Woo.

[00:46:36]>> [ __ ] >> Yeah.

[00:46:37]>> I say [ __ ] >> [ __ ] >> Do you feel this?

[00:46:43]>> And this is this is the pyramidian.

[00:46:45]>> Yeah.

[00:46:46]>> It looks like It does look like Yeah.

[00:46:48]>> It is the kind of granite that has the olivine in it. That green color.

[00:46:52]>> Olivine.

[00:46:53]>> Yeah.

[00:46:54]>> Yeah.

[00:46:54]>> Sometimes it's one of the minerals in there.

[00:46:58]>> Yeah.

[00:47:00]Wow.

[00:47:00]>> Radius on there, too.

[00:47:03]>> Yeah. Look at that. Oh, yeah. See this?

[00:47:06]You see the radius that's cut into this?

[00:47:09]>> Like the one falling on its side in Elephantine Island.

[00:47:13]>> Yes. And well, see you have the bullnose.

[00:47:15]>> Exactly.

[00:47:15]>> You got the bullnose.

[00:47:16]>> Yeah. And then the arch and then the >> the corners. Yeah. So, bullnose and a corn.

[00:47:21]>> Probably going to be >> the niche.

[00:47:25]>> And will we see the same? This is the thing. We see the St. Abbya in the new area at Abbya. You see bullnoses cornice.

[00:47:32]We see this on the sphinx temple, the valley temple. This is at Carac. This is the builders, pyramid builders 100%.

[00:47:40]>> I would say definitely after the combination of stones we saw here and the shards from the ancient vessels.

[00:47:46]>> Yeah, >> that's this just documents how old this site is.

[00:47:49]>> Yeah, >> it's a primordial site.

[00:47:54]is >> little kitty cat.

[00:47:57]>> Kitty cat.

[00:47:59]>> What you doing kitty cat? Rolling into the mud >> with you one eye. One good one. Still got one good one.

[00:48:09]Apart from the obviously superior nature of the polish and finish on this stone.

[00:48:13]It's an interesting find for its form alone. It looks like part of the pyramidian shaped top of a shrine or nouse. Existing examples of these cut from single blocks of granite can be found in the central chamber of the temple of Horus at Edfu and more famously several of them are found on Elephantine Island at Aswan. Some Egyptologists date this style of stonework to the New Kingdom period and later, but I don't really think that's correct. As I said to Joe on site, these stylized features of bull-noses and cornises are found also on old kingdom sites. In particular, a newly excavated area at Abusia has revealed the presence of both bullnoses and cornises cut into blocks of granite as well as uncovering several new tubular drill holes.

[00:49:05]You can also find these forms bullnoses and cornises on other Old Kingdom structures like the valley and morttery temples at Giza. I documented those finds at Abbisere and the link in terms of form in this video. It's linked below. But the point here is that these forms definitely go back to the oldest known periods of ancient Egypt. And this is very relevant when we get to the still standing large Nouse at Mendy's.

[00:49:31]I can see the Nouse over there sticking up.

[00:49:39]There it is. Walking over towards the Nouse, we got a sense for just how much remains to be explored and excavated at Mendy's with the black granite ram sarcophagi still embedded into the ground. Got some more coffers and things here.

[00:50:00]>> There's no loss of technology brother here. Huh?

[00:50:02]>> It's all handmade.

[00:50:04]>> It's all handmade. You can see you can see the all the lines. Yeah.

[00:50:08]>> Oh, this Yeah, you can see A lot of black granite.

[00:50:12]>> Yeah, >> that's why we only see little fragments because here granitic stones would be very rare because you know it's brought from far away. So it will be heavily recycled.

[00:50:24]>> Yeah, a lot of it is definitely being recycled.

[00:50:35]This is This is definitely chiseling in here.

[00:50:46]>> This is the secret to the bar.

[00:50:48]>> The bar. The ram.

[00:50:51]This thing >> just buried in here.

[00:50:55]Then we came across the excavations of a megalithic temple foundation with remnants of what must have been colossal granite columns with some fragments still in good condition. There once was a temple.

[00:51:25]Wow.

[00:51:30]This is the palm shaped pillar. You can see how they drawing the palm leaves on it. Carving the palm.

[00:51:43]These Joe are the signs of recycling that the inheritors were being recycled in these. So this wedge into when they wanted to split the pieces of smaller pieces for reuse and you can see over there.

[00:52:02]>> Yeah.

[00:52:03]>> They were trying to take this piece probably because it's round and it can work as a millstone or something like that.

[00:52:10]>> Late period. This is dated to the late period.

[00:52:12]>> Yeah. Some nice pieces though. Solid.

[00:52:16]>> This is not >> Oh, this is super. This is not I mean this is >> they date this the same way you date like carak and >> bastet but >> this is >> but this this this is superior. Like this is >> Yeah, I know. But I'm just saying the finish on this is also the >> I am sure also even in >> this is recycled.

[00:52:38]>> Yeah. Yeah. 100%.

[00:52:42]Yeah. So, these may have been repurposed and recut. You can see this has been quarried.

[00:52:46]>> That's Yousef was saying how they're splitting them.

[00:52:50]>> Yeah. So, you see the quarry marks.

[00:52:51]>> This piece right here might be off of that.

[00:52:54]>> Probably these would have been big columns >> right here.

[00:52:56]>> And they would have quarried.

[00:52:58]>> Yeah. They would have been quarrying pieces probably for millstones out of here.

[00:53:03]>> Yeah. It looks like here do they >> look like they broke it like a flat piece off the >> That's a good shot of you right there.

[00:53:13]>> But it's like they were like we're going to make a millstone.

[00:53:16]>> Yeah, >> but then it's broken up here. I don't know.

[00:53:19]>> Yeah, they've taken a piece off a flat piece up off up here.

[00:53:22]>> Well, you know what else they did this for? Like this is like reminds me of the the tomb of Ra at Giza where they took a column end base and they flattened it off to make it well to make an off they make it a table. They make a flat surface to try and then >> inscribe >> onto it.

[00:53:39]>> Yep.

[00:53:40]>> So recycling.

[00:53:41]>> So the granite quaries from here, it's a long way. So it's hard to get if you have a local source of stone.

[00:53:48]>> There it is.

[00:53:49]>> When it's all perfectly pre-shaped.

[00:53:50]>> Yeah.

[00:53:51]>> Well, your 3/4 of it is. Yeah. And then you just you split it and all you got to worry about is the one face.

[00:53:55]>> You want a millstone, you just got to split it once.

[00:53:57]>> Yeah.

[00:53:59]>> It's a pretty good millstone.

[00:54:01]>> Yep.

[00:54:03]It was seeing pictures of this thing that originally got me interested in the site.

[00:54:10]>> I saw it and then um sent it to my people here and Mo and Yousef and they had to try and figure out how we could get out here and they definitely said no a bunch of times, but whatever worked their magic and eventually became a permission. So, well, we got permission to come out here. Not with a big group, just a few of us. But this thing's cool.

[00:54:35]Wow.

[00:54:36]>> Huge.

[00:54:43]>> It's It looks a lot like the a bigger version of the box at Elephantine Island with it has that pyramidian almost shape on the top.

[00:54:53]>> Feel like it would be a place to like set a statue or something.

[00:54:57]>> It's probably some sort of offering. I'm sure that's what it was used for.

[00:55:02]here. Jesus, >> look at that plinth that's on.

[00:55:08]>> Oh, wow.

[00:55:09]>> Wow.

[00:55:11]Holy crap.

[00:55:15]>> Well, dang.

[00:55:21]>> Yeah. There's a lot that we can discuss about the great nouse of Mendy's. It's been the central artifact here for at least the last several hundred years and we have documentation and measurements of it going back to the 1700s when Napoleon's sance recorded it during his Egypt expeditions.

[00:55:38]Firstly, it is carved from a single block of granite and measurements from the past have it at some 23t 4 in just over 7 m in height and 12'8x 11 ft 3 in width and depth roughly 4.8x3.5 m respectively.

[00:55:56]At around 2.8 tons per cubic meter for granite that means that the quarried block of stone at the finished dimensions that is without any extra padding on it would have massed just over some 278 tons. Obviously we know from previously quarried work and unfinished blocks that the stone extracted from the bedrock would often have around a foot if not more extra stone on it in all dimensions. So, I'd say that it's a safe assumption that the unfinished quarried block of granite would have easily weighed more than 300 tons.

[00:56:30]As this box stands now, I'd estimate it to be around 150 tons conservatively.

[00:56:36]Obviously, it's had some damage over the years.

[00:56:39]>> It's quite the quite the box. That's why the fall down by >> a chunk from the top of the box, the pyramidian, fell down some 5 years ago, according to the inspector here, but you can still see it in place in earlier photographs and diagrams.

[00:56:58]The form of the box itself is also pretty mysterious. I've never seen anything quite like it. It has these strange symmetric notches, almost cogs of a sort, that are carved into the front edge of the enclosure. It also has something like a shelf or a thicker part of the back wall shaped into it. And the top of the inside of the cavity has both a leading edge and an obvious curvature to it. It also looks to me like there are small square shaped holes on the top inside edge of the box.

[00:57:32]Perhaps it was meant purely just to house a statue of the deity on this site, but some of these aspects seem, at least to me, a bit more functional. Why go to the incredible effort of carving these notches or these other features into a single piece box, no less?

[00:57:50]Interestingly, and this is absolutely the mainstream academic perspective because it's been documented by several accounts throughout history, there were originally four of these same boxes of the same size here once on this same platform.

[00:58:05]>> These are big slabs of granite, too.

[00:58:08]>> It was four here from the same thing.

[00:58:10]Actually, >> this when it fell, >> the rest the rest of the four all of them.

[00:58:13]>> There was four >> four similar >> four of the N.

[00:58:17]>> Yeah.

[00:58:18]So there were four of these here.

[00:58:21]Wow.

[00:58:23]>> You hear that?

[00:58:27]>> How do they bring it up?

[00:58:28]>> We're saying that there were four of these here.

[00:58:30]>> Four.

[00:58:31]>> Four of these. Nouses were here.

[00:58:35]>> Platforms like this.

[00:58:37]>> Maybe. I mean, >> these are big chunks of granite. There are certainly some mighty big chunks of granite lying around here as well as some faceted pieces with astonishingly well polished and smooth surfaces that remind me of the great stone boxes with their lids at the cerapium.

[00:58:53]>> Yeah. I mean, look at the polish on this too. The polish here. Look at this.

[00:58:57]Feel the polish on this thing here >> with the angle. Like look at there's like complex angles. There's like one here, one there three. It's faceted.

[00:59:06]It's like faceting >> with the faces.

[00:59:11]probably came out of the box or something radius on the inside of the box.

[00:59:14]>> Yeah. Holy [ __ ] This here like this granite, these slabs that came off here.

[00:59:20]>> This is the top right there.

[00:59:21]>> It is. Yeah. So, this is a piece off it.

[00:59:23]Like the polish on this is spectacular. You can see almost discoloring from weathering.

[00:59:30]>> Like look at the color difference here.

[00:59:31]Like where it's chipped away. Like the amount of weather it's seen >> stained and all.

[00:59:36]>> Yeah.

[00:59:39]You see, do you see like the like the finish on this piece came off the top of it. If you look at the finish on this and then this piece over here has like all the faceting. See this there's like the three faces on that and it's super well polished and finished. I think what we're looking at here are the broken pieces for the boxes that used to be here. The whole stone platform in its own right is also something of a mystery. The Nouse itself is housed on top of a further four layers of limestone blocks and then a large granite base. Was the entire platform built up that high originally when there were four of these big boxes here? Why are there so many layers of limestone that then seems to be capped by a layer of granite?

[01:00:24]If they were up there, how did these big chunks of granite, presumably from these boxes, or perhaps that top layer of this platform, some of these pieces today, I think they weigh probably at least 40 or 50 tons, how did they end up on this platform? And when did that happen?

[01:00:40]Could there be anything beneath this platform? I don't know if anybody's ever dug down below this. There are so many unknowns here, even when you consider all of the historical accounts.

[01:00:52]Speaking of these historical accounts, it's to them that we must turn to understand the attribution of the Nouse.

[01:00:58]According to academia, the Nouse is dedicated to the ram god, the deity of Mendes, and it was put there by King Ammesus of the 26th dynasty in the mid 5th century BC.

[01:01:10]This attribution is courtesy yet again of some chiseled glyphs on the Nouse itself. Glyphs that are all but invisible today. Perhaps they were barely scratched into the surface. This kind of reminds me of some other poorly made glyphs that have been scratched into mirror finished granite. As I mentioned earlier in the video, Edward Neville when he was doing his explorations and excavations here in the late 1800s had some interesting things to say about the origins of the Nouse and indeed of this entire structure.

[01:01:40]Quoting Neville, the shrine is an enormous monolith of red granite. Its height is more than 20 ft and its width 12. There is a low roof in the form of a pyramidion with a very obtuse angle. Its granite base rests upon a high limestone basement which extended not only under the monument itself but also underneath the hall which contained the shrine. The shrine was evidently destined to contain the sacred emblems for it had a door probably made of precious wood. The limestone basement was quarried out not long ago and a quantity of lime has been made out of it for a pashes farm so that at present the solidity of the monolith is endangered by the deep holes around it into which blocks of the pavement have fallen. This quarrying seems to have been stopped lately owing to the energy of the museum authorities otherwise the shrine would certainly have fallen to pieces and that the more easily since deep cracks on the sides show that the stone is broken. One of the French explorers, Gerard, says that in his time there were traces of erased hieroglyphs on the sides of the shrine.

[01:02:46]They are no longer discernable. Burton, who visited the place around the year 1825, and who made a drawing of the shrine, could decipher a few signs which were probably on the corners of the monument. They formed the coronation cart of King Ames of the 26th dynasty, who is said in the same inscription to be the worshipper of the living soul of Shu.

[01:03:08]In the course of the excavations which I made near the monolith, I found the same cartou with the words the living soul of Seb on a granite block. Whether the shrine was reconstructed by the Seites or whether those kings merely engraved an inscription upon it, one thing is certain. The temple itself is older than the 26th dynasty. For among the stones which belong to the basement, there are several bearing the name of Ramsy's II and of his son Marin Petar. Two of them have been cut into water basins. Both have the name of Ramsy's II. End quote.

[01:03:44]So once again, we find that academia's a confident attribution of a large and complex ancient artifact isn't exactly a sure bet. As with so many other artifacts, dating based on what seems to be, in this case, fairly shoddy inscriptions cannot be considered reliable, particularly when evidence exists for other rulers writing their own names on the same structure. nearly a thousand years prior.

[01:04:10]It also doesn't help that those chaps in particular, Ramsay's and his son Marinetar of the 19th dynasty were the most notorious of all pharaohs, known for usurping and essentially rebadging older artifacts and architecture by erasing older inscriptions and deeply inscribing their own names. Petri even called Ramsy's II, the great usurper.

[01:04:34]Who knows how truly ancient this artifact really is. We certainly have proof that the site itself was here and flourishing in pre-dynastic times.

[01:04:44]There is one more thing that we found at Mendy's that I want to share in this video. Once again, this was most unexpected, but to be honest, after the discoveries that we had already made throughout the day here, it probably shouldn't have surprised me as much as it did. We found definitive proof for advanced ancient machining of the type that I've documented extensively and that we typically see on Old Kingdom megalithic sites.

[01:05:11]>> Found.

[01:05:14]>> Look at that. Oh my god. That's amazing.

[01:05:16]It's a circular too. That would be Look at this. This is a circular. So that's amazing.

[01:05:26]Nobody else used the bazel except the pyramid builders. And with the tool marks, we have confirmation. This was a It was a floor. It was a ground >> tiles.

[01:05:40]>> Yeah.

[01:05:41]>> Yeah. Right here.

[01:05:42]>> Yeah. Look at this one. Just like the top of the foundation on the eastern side of the of the pyramid.

[01:05:48]>> Yeah.

[01:05:50]>> Can already see them.

[01:05:53]Yeah.

[01:05:57]Oh yeah.

[01:05:59]Hell yeah.

[01:06:03]Hell yeah.

[01:06:04]>> This one looks circular.

[01:06:05]>> It does. Yes. Well, it looks circular here. It looks almost straight at the other end. This part here looks the bottom part looks circular like this bit here.

[01:06:15]>> Yeah.

[01:06:15]>> You can see the fine striations too.

[01:06:18]>> And and here.

[01:06:20]>> Yeah. But then it straightens out >> could be being dragged. This this part got broken.

[01:06:24]>> Yeah.

[01:06:25]>> But this is the blade here on the board.

[01:06:28]>> Yeah.

[01:06:28]>> Very fine striations.

[01:06:29]>> Yeah. You can see it. It's amazing.

[01:06:31]>> Yeah. Here.

[01:06:33]>> Yeah.

[01:06:33]>> Oh yeah.

[01:06:35]This is >> no tool in the ancient Egyptian toolbox for this. Like that's the thing.

[01:06:41]>> You see the hammering?

[01:06:42]>> Exactly. To to lock the pieces together.

[01:06:44]Exactly. So >> like same as the abigra, >> same as an inside of a great pyramid when they pound these to lock them together.

[01:06:54]>> Yeah. Yeah.

[01:06:56]>> Yeah. And there's a look, there's a a lip here, too. The same thing.

[01:07:01]>> Yeah.

[01:07:01]>> You get the undercut. So you can actually see the width of the blade.

[01:07:03]>> Yeah. Here it is, too.

[01:07:04]>> Really?

[01:07:08]>> Is that Thanks, >> have a radius on it, though. It seems >> does down there.

[01:07:12]>> It's kind of curvy. That one looks like a flat.

[01:07:14]>> They have You see evidence for both?

[01:07:15]Petri document.

[01:07:17]>> Yeah.

[01:07:17]>> Petri documented evidence for both.

[01:07:19]>> You see that cuz this is the higher level. So this is a primary cut to shape the stone.

[01:07:25]>> And then well and they cut it and then they then they hammer this down to to deliberately leave this rough surface to lock to lock pieces together.

[01:07:35]>> And then you can see see there's a lip here. So you the blade >> the blade's really thick.

[01:07:42]for how large it must >> the diameter like and wait till you see the one at a like definitely curved and it's like 11 like 30 plus feet if you spread the radius out >> like you look at the curvature the diameter is 30 ft >> finding sa blocks of bassalt like this just barely sticking out of the sand at Mendy's was quite a revelation something similar to finding the vase fragments as we did earlier as you can probably tell we got pretty excited here Because we know what this is. It's a clear sign for ancient machining, something that's well beyond anything the donastic ancient Egyptians were capable of. As I said to Joe in this clip, no tool in the ancient Egyptians toolbox can explain these witness marks. I've documented these extensively, primarily in this video on ancient Egyptian stone cutting. Once again, it's linked below in the description. One of these days, I'll make a new fundamentals video that goes over these topics that are covered on my channel and the context of how they all fit together, as I'm sure it could seem a bit bewildering to anyone who's new to it. A super short version though, if you're wondering what I'm talking about with ancient machining or how these things all fit together. If you watch my videos on machining, precision, and logistics, and then the tale of two industries, then maybe dive into the tube drills and the affforementioned saw cutting video, you'll start to have a grip on the context that's behind a lot of what I say in my content that deals with more specific sites or artifacts.

[01:09:04]In the case of these bassalt floors that show sophisticated and powerful saw cuts, we only really ever see these on other Old Kingdom sites. Famously, the best examples are at the closed site of Abuir. And you can also find these witness marks. Petri documented them on the bassalt pavement that sits to the east of the Great Pyramid at Giza. I'm sure that in the past they also existed elsewhere. There were rumors and reports of a bassalt floor that is now gone at Sakara.

[01:09:35]During our trip to Mendy's, all that we saw were the things that were just poking up out of the ground. And I can only imagine what might actually be uncovered here if a genuine and open-minded archaeological excavation took place. There certainly seems to be evidence here for many layers of civilization and possibly some strong connections to some of the most significant mysteries of our past. I was certainly very grateful for the opportunity to get out to Mendy's and see this rarely visited site for myself and I hope that you all enjoyed sharing a part of the journey with me. A big thanks to my colleagues in Egypt as well as the Ministry of Antiquities who all made it happen. I can only hope that at some point in the future, more of Mendy's will be uncovered and shared with the world. But until then, as they have for likely thousands of years at this point, the secrets of this place will no doubt remained patiently buried just under the surface, waiting to one day be revealed.

[01:10:31]Thanks for watching.

[01:10:35]All right, there it is. I hope everybody enjoyed that look at ancient Mendy's or Tel Robber or any of the other names that it's been known by over the years.

[01:10:55]As I mentioned in the intro, we are going back to Egypt for another special permissionoriented trip in December of 2026. The whole crew is coming back with me. It's going to be an awesome time. I think we've got seven or eight special permissions on the itinerary. I'm very much looking forward to getting back there. If you want to check out all the details, you can find it in the link below or it's uncharted.com/primordial 2026. Also, as always, just wanted to say a massive thank you to everybody who does choose to support this channel via the value for value model. I don't do sponsorships or anything like that. I get those offers all the time. I'd much prefer to keep this kind of sponsorship and and you know, native ad free if you like. I do try to provide a set of exclusive resources as well as content to people who sign up to support the channel whether it's through Patreon, Subscribe Star Locals or YouTube channel memberships. For example, with this video, I'll be sharing all of my script notes, my resource notes, as well as all of the images and resources that I have, including the photographs from these old books about Mendy's. So, if you are interested in that or interested in just supporting my work through that value for value model, I've got lots of ways you can do so. It's over at unchartedex.com/support.

[01:12:01]Speaking of that support, one of those methods that I've had available for a long time because people ask me is crypto. I have a few wallet addresses up there for various types of crypto. I'll be honest, I don't know much about crypto. I don't check it very often. And in fact, I hadn't checked one of my wallets for several months. In fact, uh not since last year. And when I did finally open up one of those wallets, I was a little bit surprised. I did look for emails. I couldn't find a record of anyone who sent me notes saying they'd sent me some crypto. Somebody certainly did. So, to that person who did happen to send me some crypto, I just wanted to say a very sincere thank you. It's very much appreciated. I don't take it for granted. In fact, it's the same for anyone who supports me at any level really, which let me tell you, between making this really long video as well as writing that vase article has got me a little burned out for a minute. So, I'm going to leave it there. I hope you enjoyed the video. I've got lots more to come and I'll see you in the next one.

[01:12:52]Cheers.