Book I: The American Egypt · Chapter 1
Before any town on the Mississippi was called Memphis, Cairo or Thebes, the land already had pyramids.
The oldest mounds are older than Egypt’s pyramids
Watson Brake, in northeast Louisiana, is a ring of earthen mounds built around 3500 BC. Egypt’s first pyramid, Djoser’s step pyramid, dates to about 2650 BC, and the Great Pyramid of Giza to about 2560 BC. The mounds came first. (Record)
Monks Mound at Cahokia, across the river from St. Louis, is the largest earthen pyramid in North America. Its base covers about 14 acres. The Great Pyramid’s covers about 13. (Record)
They said it themselves
On July 25, 1813, H. M. Brackenridge wrote to Thomas Jefferson about a Cahokia mound. He said it “falls little short of the Egyptian pyramid Mycerius” and that “the mound of Cohokia is as ancient as those of Egypt.” (Record)
That letter was written five years before Cairo, Illinois was planned and six years before Memphis, Tennessee was named. The first Americans to measure these pyramids reached for Egypt on their own.
Kincaid Mounds, a mound city built between about 1050 and 1400, sits in Massac County in the heart of the region still called “Little Egypt.” (Record)
Then they gave the pyramids away
In the 1800s, writers claimed a “lost race” built the mounds: Israelites, Egyptians, even the Welsh. Anyone but the people living on the land. In 1894 the Smithsonian’s own surveyor, Cyrus Thomas, admitted the ancestors of the Native peoples built them. (Record)
The lens: the land had pyramids before it had Egyptian names. The builders were the aboriginals, and the “lost race” story was a way to take the pyramids from them. (Pattern)
Still open: whether any Egyptian names were used here before 1813. That needs French records from Kaskaskia and Cahokia and river maps from 1790 to 1813.
How to read the labels: Record = what the document literally says. Pattern = what we see across records. Open = the question not yet closed.
Sources: Brackenridge to Jefferson, July 25, 1813 (Founders Online) · Watson Brake · Kincaid Mounds