The experts come out on Carson. Now from TPM Reader EI …
As a medieval art historian, I get used to people using the term “medieval” in a negative way; anytime you want to criticize someone, you accuse them of being medieval, as if that is universally bad, and whether or not their policies or statements are genuinely medieval.
With Carson, though, is absolutely accurate to say that his pyramid thesis is medieval.
The Middle Ages did not practice archaeology, but they were very interested in ancient monuments, and attempted to explain them. And the dominant explanation of the pyramids was that they were built as Joseph’s granaries (Erhard Graefe, “À propos der Pyramidenbeschreibung des Wilhelm von Boldensele aus dem Jahre 1335 (II),” in Erik Hornung, ed., Zum Bild Ägyptens im Mittelalter und in der Renaissance(Göttingen 1990), pp. 9-28. ).
In a pre-archaeological age, the explanation made sense: they were old and impressive structures located where an impressive event was known to have taken place a long time ago. Nowadays, of course, we don’t have the excuse of the absence of archaeological information.
