How much of this of this guys comment on Egyptology is falsified?

by DRHARNESS

On this /r/todayilearned post about the pyramids having 8 sides, some guy showed up and soapboxed about "politicized" archaeology and the pyramids being built by a different civilization (with no details on that.) Without further ado here's a link. How much of this is false and is there anything factual to his claim?

CptBuck

The supposed motive that he posits for there being "a concerted effort by Egyptologists" to hide these revelations is that "many modern civilizations are covering up the truth of a more ancient civilization in order to protect their "sovereign" claim to the land they occupy" and "archeology [sic] is extremely politicized".

That might (in some crazy bass-ackwards way) make sense if Egyptology were the monopoly of the Egyptian government, or of native Egyptians, or if there were significant restrictions, now or historically, on basic archaeology in Egypt.

None of those things are true. Egyptology, as a field, was not invented by Egyptians (the important observations of Medieval Islamic historians notwithstanding.) It was first practiced in Egypt by the archaeologists who came with Napoleon's expedition in 1798 and remained essentially a wholly European affair (with notable exceptions like Rifa'a al-Tahtawi) until Egyptians reached relatively senior positions in the archaeological institutes of Egypt in the early 20th century and "remained largely European-dominated until the 1950s." (Reid)

In other words, if you posit that:

There is a concerted effort by Egyptologists to obscure the history of the pyramids because it reveals a past civilization built the structures before the current Egyptians moved in.

One must ask who these Egyptologists are. Why would the French and the Germans and the English care who built the Pyramids, in a political sense? Why would they be committed to an "Egyptian" civilization doing so? Why would the modern "Egyptians" (who, by the way, are Arabs of only a tenuous genetic connection to the ancient civilization, as the people of Egypt were Helenized and then Arabized, edit: although that's not to say that Ancient Egypt isn't critical to modern Egyptian nationalist discourse and identity-- it is.) continue to maintain such a ruse and how would they be able to do so?

I'm not an Egyptologist, so I can't comment on the 8 sides, or the length of time it took to build the Pyramids or any of that, but I do know a thing or two about the historical development of Egyptology and this strikes me as blathering nonsense.

For a good history of Egyptian contributions to Egyptology, which doubles as a history of the institutions of Egyptology in Egypt, see Whose Pharaohs? By Donald Malcolm Reid.