Ha...that, we are. Given the scale of the mystery, I think we're doing okay ;-)
Why no records of the methods? Well heres another educated guess. It was considered a sacred art, not to be divulged to commoners or foreigners.
Embalming was considered a sacred art, but they left records about that process.
If the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids with primitive methods, hundreds of thousands of laborers would have been involved. The pharaohs would have had to kill them all to preserve the secrets of how they did it. And what of the laborers' wives, their children, the master builders, the priesthood, neighboring kingdoms, and their spies? They would have had to kill them all, too.
Surely, some would have escaped to tell the tale.
What purpose would such secrecy serve, if it required killing a substantial number of their subjects to preserve it? Last of all, if they were such tyrannical megalomaniacs, why didn't they have their names inscribed on every one of these structures?
After all that, they took no credit? I don't think so.
All the evidence points to the ancient Egyptians having moved into the Nile River delta after the Sahara dried out. Upon arriving in Egypt, they merely discovered the ruins of a lost culture that preceded them by centuries - maybe even thousands of years.
They borrowed heavily from the cultural artifacts they unearthed, and inscribed many of the monuments and structures with their own hieroglyphic writing. In later ages, scholars ascribed everything in ancient Egypt to the dynastic Egyptians, chiefly due to that fact.
It's only in recent decades that researchers and scholars have begun to look much closer, and pick apart the true story of the history of that region. That's an ongoing process which will eventually uncover a much grander picture of ancient history than we ever suspected.
“That’s an ongoing process which will eventually uncover a much grander picture of ancient history than we ever suspected.”
As a believer in the Bible, I’ve wondered if some of this seemingly supernatural stuff (like the pyramids) IS supernatural. Some Bible verses seem to point to angels living on earth and having children with humans - the Nephalim were the offspring iirc. Perhaps some angel built a pyramid to woo some hot human chick?
And then of course another angel built another pyramid and said “mine’s bigger!”.
And of course there is the NT verse about having the faith of a mustard seed that one could move a mountain!
I knew a guy that built gravity meters. Years ago he consulted with the Air Force. Their missiles weren’t behaving how they thought they would behave. One possibility was anti-gravity forces, so this guy did some studies for it. He couldn’t measure anything - but he said the low levels that a possible anti-gravity force would have was probably beyond being able to measure it in the field.
I just thought it was interesting that both the Air Force and this gravity expert both thought that it was a possibility, and enough of one to actively pursue it. The guy I knew said something like “Every other natural force has a positive and a negative - why shouldn’t gravity?”