Egypt Pyramid
"The dominant features of the Egypt Giza necropolis are,
of course, its three great Pyramids those conventionally
attributed to Khufu pyramid, Khafre pyramid and
Menkaure pyramid. In a sense they are what the entire, vast enterprise
proclaims itself to be all about what the causeways lead towards,
what the `solar boats' are buried beside.
Sprawling diagonally across the meridian axis of
the site, it is
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they, above all else, that the geometrical `Horizon
of Giza' appears to have been designed to circumscribe. Nothing
about them is accidental their original constructed heights, their
angles of slope, the measurement of their perimeters, even the pattern
in which they are carefully laid out on the ground all of these things
are purposive and laden with meaning. [1]. " "The Egypt Pyramid was originally 481.3949 feet in
height (now reduced to
just a little over 450 feet) and its four sides
each measure some 755 feet in length at the base. The second
Pyramid was originally slightly lower with a designed height
of 471 feet and has sides measuring just under 708 feet in length.
The Egyptian third Pyramid stands some 215 feet tall and has
a side length at the base of 356 feet. When they were built the Egypt second
Pyramid and the First Pyramid were both
entirely covered in limestone facing blocks, several courses of which
still adhere to the upper levels of the former. The First
Pyramid , by contrast, is today almost completely bereft of
its casing. We know from historical accounts, however, that it was
once clad from bottom to top with smoothly polished Tura limestone
which was shaken loose by a powerful earthquake that devastated the
Cairo area in An 1301. The newly exposed core masonry
was then used for some years as a crude local quarry to rebuild the
shattered mosques and palaces of Cairo.
All the Arab commentators prior to the fourteenth century tell us
that the Pyramid casing was a marvel of architecture
that caused the edifice to glow brilliantly under the Egyptian
Sun.
It consisted of an estimated 22 acres of 8 foot thick blocks, each
weighing in the region of 16 tons, `so subtilly jointed that one would
have said that it was a single slab from top to bottom'. A few surviving
sections can still be seen today at the base of the monument. When
they were studied in 1881 by Sir W. M. Flinders Petrie,
he noted with astonishment that `the mean thickness of the joints
is 0.020 of an inch; and, therefore, the mean variation of the cutting
of the stone from a straight line and from a true square is but 0.01
of an inch on a length of 75 inches up the face, an amount of accuracy
equal to the most modern opticians' straight edges of such a
length.'
Another detail that Petrie found very difficult to
explain was that the blocks had been carefully and precisely cemented
together: `To merely place such stones in exact contact at the sides
would be careful work, but to do so with cement in the joint seems
almost impossible . . ."
Also `almost impossible', since the mathematical value pi (3.14) is
not supposed to have been calculated by any civilization until the
Greeks stumbled upon it in the third century BC,"
is the fact the designed height of the Egypt First Pyramid 481.3949 feet bears the same relationship to its base perimeter (3023.16
feet) as does the circumference of any circle to its radius. This
relationship is 2 pi (i.e. 481.3949 feet x 2 x 3.14 = 3023.16 feet).
Equally `impossible' at any rate for a people like the ancient
Egyptians who are supposed to have known nothing about the
true shape and size of our planet is the relationship, in a scale
of 1:43,200, that exists between the dimensions of the Pyramid
and the dimensions of the earth. Setting aside for the moment the
question of whether we are dealing with coincidence here, it is a
simple fact, verifiable on any pocket calculator, that if you take
the monument's original height (481.3949 feet) and multiply it by
43,200 you get a quotient of 3938.685 miles. This is an underestimate
by just 11 miles of the true figure for the polar radius of the earth
(3949 miles) worked out by the best modern methods. Likewise, if you
take the monument's perimeter at the base (3023. 16 feet) and multiply
this figure by 43,200 then you get 24,734.94 miles a result that is
within 170 miles of the true equatorial circumference of the earth
(24,902 miles). Moreover, although 170 miles sounds quite a lot, it
amounts, in relation to the earth's total circumference, to a minus
error of only three quarters of a single per cent. [2]. "
"The Egypt First Pyramid has numerous features which leave
us without any doubt that its designers paid careful attention to
the stars and tracked their transit at the meridian. [3]. "
The Companions of Osiris
"The complication arises from the strong correlation, first demonstrated
in The Orion Mystery, between the three belt stars
of the
Orion Constellation and the ground plan of
the three Pyramids of Giza in Egypt. An overhead view shows
that the Egyptian First Pyramid and the second Pyramid
stretch out along a diagonal running 45 degrees to the south and west
of the former's eastern face. The Egypt third Pyramid,
however, is offset somewhat to the east of this line. The resulting
pattern mimics the sky where the three stars of Orion's belt
also stretch out along a `faulty' diagonal. The first two
stars (Al Nitak and Al Nilam) are
in direct alignment, like the first and second Pyramid,
and the third star (Mintaka) lies
offset somewhat to the east of the axis formed by the other two.'
The visual correlation, once observed, is obvious and striking on
its own. Additional confirmation of its symbolic significance, however,
is provided by the
Milky Way, which the ancient Egyptians
regarded as a kind of `Celestial Nile' and which
was spoken of in archaic funerary texts as the `Winding
Waterway'.' In the heavenly vault the belt stars
of Orion lie to the west of the Milky Way,
as though overlooking its banks; on the ground the Pyramid
stand perched above the west bank of the Nile.'
Faced by such symmetry, and by such a complex pattern of interlocking
architectural and religious ideas, it is hard to resist the conclusion
that the Pyramids of Giza represent a successful
attempt to build Orion's belt on the ground. This
makes all the more sense when we recall the firm identification of
the Orion Constellation with the high god Osiris. But bearing in mind
the changes induced by the phenomenon of precession we must also ask:
`Orion's belt when?' `Orion's belt in what epoch?' [4]. "
References:
[1] - [4] Robert Bauval, Graham Hancock, Keeper Of Genesis. London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1996.
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BUILDING AN EGYPTIAN PYRAMID
CURATOR EMERITUS OF EGYPTIAN ART, MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON
HE QUESTION of how the ancient Egyptians went
about the building of a pyramid has been the subject
of speculation and wonder as far back as the days
of Herodotus, whose account in his History (11, 124-
125) seems to have been based on tales told him by Egyptian
dragomans of the fifth century B.C. In recent times
such scholars as Petrie and Borchardt have written on the
subject, and as late as 1947 it was treated by I. E. S. Edwards
in his Pyramids of Egypt in the Pelican Series:
(Reference should also be made to Ancient Egyptian
Masonry, by Somers Clark and R. Engelbach [London
1930] Chapter X.) The fundamental difficulty in arriving
at a definitive solution of the problem, however, remains
that the Egyptians themselves left no clear account
of how it was done, and we therefore have to rely on our
very imperfect knowledge of what they actually knew of
engineering, and of the methods which we know they
used in handling heavy and bulky materials.
In the spring of 1950 the Museum of Science in Boston
undertook the construction of a model of one of the
Egyptian pyramids as the first in a series of representations
of great engineering achievements of the past. Mr.
Theodore B. Pitman, an experienced model-maker of
Cambridge, Massachusetts, was chosen to undertake the
work, and Mr. Bradford Washburn, Director of the Museum,
asked the writer to act as archaeological consultant.
T
1. General view of a diorama in the Museum of Science, Boston. In the foreground the Third Pyramid at Giza is shown in course
of construction. To the right the emplacement for the funerary temple (not yet built) is being used as an assembly and sorting area,
while farther to the right may be seen the upper end of the causeway leading to the valley and the site on which the Valley Temple
was later constructed. In the background rises the Second Pyramid of Chephren and behind it the Great Pyramid of Cheops, both recently
completed. The observer is looking north-northeast.
2. View looking down into a
quarry from which blocks of limestone
for the core of the Pyramid
of Mycerinus are being cut. In the
upper center a block, freed from
the quarry face, is being levered
onto a sledge. This quarry lies in
a depression southeast of the
Third Pyramid.
BUILDING AN EGYPTIAN PYRAMID continued
Professor Walter Vose of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology gave us the benefit of his practical engineering
knowledge in order that the model might represent
work which would have been mechanically feasible with
the means at the disposal of the ancient builders.
The pyramid selected for representation was the third
of the Giza group, that of King Mycerinus of the Fourth
Dynasty, who died about 2570 B.C. Several reasons determined
this choice. The Harvard University-Museum of
Fine Arts Egyptian Expedition under the late G. A. Reisner
ner had excavated the temples of this pyramid as well as
the quarry adjacent to it, and there was a large collection
of photographs and plans of the site available in the Mu-
Museum of Fine Arts. This was the smallest of the three
great pyramids at Giza and a scale model could therefore
be of reasonable size. Furthermore, being the last of the
group, the model could have as background the first and
second pyramids as they must have looked when newly
completed (Figure 1).
The work was finished in March, 1951, was installed
in the Museum of Science in time for the opening of its
new galleries shortly thereafter, and has been favorably
noticed by a number of scholars who have seen it. Photographs
of the model will, therefore, be of interest to a
wider public.
THE PROBLEM WE HAD TO FACE in constructing the Science
Museum model was to build on a tiny scale (actually
1 :120) a pyramid of known size and proportions, using
only the means with which we know the Egyptians were
familiar. In this way we could visualize the many practical
problems with which they must have been faced, and
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3. Building materials for the
pyramid arriving from the causeway
at the sorting and distribution
area-site of the pyramid
temple of Mycerinus. Here joints
of facing blocks are being
dressed and fitted.
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