Ancient Civilizations

Watched an interesting movie ("10,000 BC", from 2008) that tied in a lot of stuff we talk about around here. Apparently it didn't get very good reviews / got panned (it has 10% on RT lol), but whatever, I thought it was solid.

It starts out with a primitive hunter-gatherer civilization struggling to survive the Younger Dryas (they're north, up in the Caucasus region I think). One of their women is a genetic mutation with white skin and blue eyes, so everyone wants to be her mate. One day they get sacked by raiders with advanced weaponry (basically an Iron Age civilization attacking a stone age civilization), who take her away. The few remaining warriors from the tribe chase after the raiders, and end up going all the way into Africa. Turns out lots of tribes there have been getting sacked by the raiders as well, so the main character ends up leading all of them to band together and strike back against this more advanced group that's doing whatever it wants.

Eventually they follow the riverways around the expanding Sahara to reach the epicenter of the advanced group, the "Eye of the Snake", which turns out to be the Nile Delta, and it turns out that they're basically Atlanteans who fled to Egypt after their lands to the west were destroyed by ocean waves. They even had big islands out in the Atlantic Ocean that sunk completely under the waves. They had three God-Kings and two of them died in the cataclysm, leaving one left to rebuild their civilization in Egypt (he's never named, but I guess this was supposed to be Enki/Thoth). They've been enslaving people all over Africa/the Middle-East to use them as workers in rebuilding their fallen society, and the good guys have to find a way to defeat this advanced enemy and rescue their enslaved brethren.

Cool things in this movie: You see Atlantis literally drawn-out on a map, you see the three Great Pyramids under construction and almost finished, you see the completed original Sphinx (and it's a statue of a large-headed lion, which means the Egyptians just put their own spin on it 7500 years later after it eroded down). The advanced civ (which I don't think they ever actually refer to by name, only "the ones whose kingdoms were destroyed by waves") has some really high-tech stuff for 10,000 BC, basically Roman-era, with boats that look like massive red dragons. They've mastered usage of the oceans and seas, while everyone else is still using bone tools and trying to figure out how to tame horses.

I think it's awesome to see a mainstream movie going out on a limb like this with ideas that fly in the face of accepted historical doctrine (like the Pyramids being 12,000 years old and the Sphinx being even older than that, Atlantis being a real civilization, a dominant one, and the real builders of the Pyramid/Sphinx, etc). Far as I can tell, a lot of the negative reviews were due to the "historical inaccuracies" but I'm not sure that any of them were even inaccurate. The most inaccurate part to me was that the Sahara was way bigger than it should have been at that time (though that might have been the Saudi peninsula that they traveled through, difficult to say).

INTHEMIDSTOFLIONS said:

I remember seeing that movie in theatres. I enjoyed it at the time. Haven’t seen or thought about it since tbh. Except the lead actor became James Holden in the Expanse adaptation.

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It's definitely something I would have mostly forgotten about if I saw it back in 2008. It's got a fair amount of narrative issues and is mostly predictable (and the girl getting resurrected by the old woman's spirit was pretty out there).

However, seeing it for the first time now was pretty awesome, because I kept DiCaprio pointing at the screen over things that are now catching on as semi-mainstream ideas. My mind was blown when they showed the Sphinx, and not only was it already completed (as of 12,000 years ago), it had the lion head that so many of us believe it started out with. Then the map that showed Atlantis of the coast of Mauritania, and the few surviving Atlanteans (who were a bunch of creepy goblin-like people that enslaved everyone they could) saying that the recent super-flood had washed their home away. The whole fourth quarter of the movie takes place at Giza, where the Atlanteans have their legion of slaves working around the clock building a massive complex.

Yeah, I got a lot out of this. Jimmy Corsetti would probably really like the movie.

Most of the negative reviews of it (got a terrible RT score) have a lot to do with all the "historical inaccuracies" that, in the grand scheme of things, probably aren't that inaccurate...

Julian The Apostate said:

This is really plausible. Not sure why this idea isn’t more widely discussed

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Another thing about the 10,000 BC movie that I forgot to mention: When they're showing the three Great Pyramids being constructed by the slave legions and elephants while the Atlanteans oversee it, there is a giant gold point installed at the apex of one of them to turn it into a sharply-pointed structure. They have gold pyramids ready to be loaded onto the other two as well, but it never gets done because the Atlanteans are defeated by the good guy and his rebellion.

Even this figures into the idea that the pyramids were built to be some sort of power generators, and would have had gold caps on top of them (that are long-since gone, hence the pyramids now having weirdly flat tops).

For 2008, this movie was so far ahead of its time on alternate-history stuff and it didn't even take any liberties, all of it completely fit with what people like Jimmy Corsetti think today.

Again, the only thing I can say for sure that the movie got wrong is that the Sahara Desert is huge, which it wasn't back then (if it was even a thing at all). Though to their credit, Egypt itself seems pretty lush, and there's an actual forest all in and around the Giza area. The giant lion-headed Sphinx surrounded by lush greenery and trees was probably the most striking visual moment in the movie.