The modern Egyptian populace are all descendants of the Muslim Conquest that happened in the 7th and 8th century. If you watch lots of AA videos his most interesting ones are when he digs up journals of British aristocrats and other Orientalists who went to Egypt in previous centuries.
The locals had no idea who built the Pyramids or any of the monuments then. Strabo visited the region in the 1st century BCE and even then nobody knew who made them. They were just ruins laying the sand. Memories of a bygone age.
The most compelling thing about all of this ancient architecture to me is the scale itself. If you look at anything humans build there is a constant theme. Most structures humans build are generally built with what? Objects that the average human can reasonably carry. See cobblestone, modern uniform bricks, and so on. Logically human beings will build with things they can move around. You see this in all of the megalithic sites. It's very glaring in Japan, Peru, and Egypt.
Yet, in the distant past, people instead took the time to move things far beyond reasonable human ability. Only to totally forget how to do this and go back to the logical way of building things with materials that can be reasonably carried or moved. They did this with copper and stone tools and not a single modern convenience.
Baffling.
