Ben Carson is either playing games or is - I can't think of a way to put this politely - incredibly stupid...
He claims that he came up with the idea for a musical based on the story of Joseph and his coat of many colors during a surgical consultation with a patient named Jacob Brandman … in 1998 (30 years after Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat premiered). When pushed for comment on this issue, Carson responded that he was in fact aware of the existing musical production in 1998, but that “
The Bible calls it a coat of many colors, but in those days the only colors were black and white, as you can see in old television footage. My belief is that the coat was black, white and brown – the first time anyone had ever seen brown. That story has yet to be told.”
In 2009 he wrote an essay ... claiming that the Great Sphinx of Giza was not a creature with the body of a lion and the head of a human, but instead “
an ugly cat with a hat on. The confusion stems from the fact that anything looks human with a hat on. Put a hat on a turtle, a monkey, a bat, tell me I’m wrong.”
(from Fact check: Ben Carson's claim that the pyramids were used to store grain).
Playing games, or unbelievably stupid? You be the judge.
The 'not of this world' problem I have with the idea of pyramids as grain silos, is structural.
It's conceivable that a mad god-pharoah could order that the existing convenient, local, well-protected, grain stores should be abandoned in favour of building the worlds biggest, most inconvenient, and most impratical grain store, at huge expense, outside the city, in a ceremonial area dedicated to the gods themselves, larger but with a similar shape to the tombs of previous pharoahs elsewhere, to house more grain than would ever be available to put in it, or would ever be needed... pretty mad, but it's conceivable... barely (it makes building a massive stone pyramid as your tomb and gateway to the afterlife seem refreshingly reasonable).
But this was an order of magnitude or more bigger than any storage structure of the time, and made of stone, a very poor choice for a large storage silo, given its structural properties. A non-starter. Earlier structures show that the Egyptians had been building up to large pyramids for some time, and learning from their mistakes. These structures were all built around a solid central core, and given past efforts, a solid structure the size of the Great Pyramid would have been a bleeding-edge structural engineering achievement at that time. They did figure out that, by corballing the stones, they could create voids for ceremonial galleries and burial chambers, but these internal spaces were tiny compared to the structure. Quite unsuitable for grain storage, too.
