Hi all,
I'm writing in the hopes that perhaps an egyptologist may stumble across this and help me with this question. It seems like in the last ten years or so, people have been going gaga about Ancient Egypt. All I hear is a about how Egyptians had discovered electricity and built the pyramids with their alien brethren and so on and so on. But aside from those clearly crockpot ideas, there's also a camp of people who make other kinds of wild claims: that ancient egypt is far older than we think, that the pyramids were likely never used as elaborate coffins, and instead had cosmic purposes and yadayada. And I'm trying to separate out the horseshit from what we know, and that's proving quite difficult. And I should say that I have some knowledge of earlier civilizations (Sumer, in particular), and I can say unequivocally that even many "agreed upon" ideas about the ancient Sumerians are not rooted in fact, but rather conjecture. It seems like the field of archaeology in particular is prone to just making things up with every new discovery they find and trying to get papers published.
Basically, I wanted to find a source that has verifiable, accurate information about what we know about Ancient Egypt. I want to figure out how a sizable portion of egyptologists (non-academic) can make claims such as that the pyramids are 30k years old, or that they were never used as mausoleums. Can we carbon-date the pyramids, or have we?
I've grown extremely frustrated in my own pursuits because I've run into bullshit from laymen and academics alike, and short of travelling the world's libraries and booking a flight to Egypt I don't know how to get to the bottom of this.
In Egypt of the Pharaohs, his history of Egypt, the Egyptologist Alan Gardiner once lamented the scantiness of textual sources for Egyptian history.
Even when full use has been made of the king-lists and of such subsidiary sources as have survived, the indispensable dynastic framework of Egyptian history shows lamentable gaps and many a doubtful attribution. If this be true of the skeleton, how much more is it of the flesh and blood with which we could wish it covered! Historical inscriptions of any considerable length are as rare as the isolated islets in an imperfectly charted ocean. The importance of many of the kings can be guessed at merely from the number of stelae or scarabs that bear their names. It must never be forgotten that we are dealing with a civilization thousands of years old and one of which only tiny remnants have survived. What is proudly advertised as Egyptian history is merely a collection of rags and tatters.
"Facts" are few and far between in ancient history and will remain so until someone invents a time machine. As historians, the best we can do is make well-reasoned conclusions based on as much evidence as we can muster. Sometimes those conclusions change with new evidence, which is certainly much better than clinging to a disproven hypothesis.
Since there are many (far too many, really) misconceptions about ancient Egypt, I recommend picking one at a time and posing those as separate questions, which makes them easier to answer. In the meantime, there is a very good AskHistorians reading list for ancient Egypt.