[notahacker]

Think this applies to a lot of searching for accuracy in mythology. It's a bit like the attempts to connect rather abstract and ahistorical flood myths with specific post Ice Age deluges. Maybe the Epic of Gilgamesh was a >10,000 year old oral tradition describing the end of the Ice Age... or maybe it was just that massive flood was about the most tangible way for humans building civilisations on flood plains to imagine the gods destroying everything.

[gota]

This is in line with my (admittedly not well researched) theory of why 'many primitive cultures built pyramids': a square-based pyramid is the most stable structure that you can build to be really high. Columns, arches and metalworking are the things that allowed us to come up with something else, right?