First, it should be noted that a good theory is not made historically accurate by being "fascinating" or "interesting". It is made good by proper evidence and logic. The fact of the matter is, although Dr. Edwards was an expert on pyramids and the physical archaeology surrounding them, it would have been much more appropriate for you to send your cultural/religious based ideas to an expert in those fields. James Allen has been publishing works in this area since before you brought your Correlation hypothesis to the public fore. The seminal work on Osiris was authored by J. Gwyn Griffiths in 1980. He was accessible during the time you were initially researching this topic, and published his last works in 1991. He passed away 3 years ago this past June.

Ed Krupp, Director of the Griffith Observatory in California, has repeatedly demonstrated the internal inconsistency in the logic of your theory. Your own work claims the shafts "lock" the plateau into a cardinality (a cardinality that Egyptologists almost universally agree is the same between the sky and the ground), and yet your pyramids are laid out in a fashion that immediately contradicts that "lock". An article by Professor Krupp explaining many of these internally inconsistent points can be found here: [www.hallofmaat.com]

Tony Fairall, Director of the Capetown Planetarium, has also pointed out quite clearly that your dating and alignments of the pyramids to Orion's beltstars is also significantly flawed. The summary of his analysis can be found here: [www.hallofmaat.com]

I have web-published my own work regarding the actual Egyptian view of stars in the Old Kingdom, and found that your idea is devoid of cultural context. This article can be found here: [www.gizabuildingproject.com] . It should be noted that in all my years of research, I have found many references in the mastabas in the Giza necropolis that contain titles of individuals. These titles frequently include things like "Priest of Khufu" or "Priest of Khafre". We find these same titles paralleled in the heavily evidenced site of Abusir, where the priests roles are clearly explained in their most perfunctory, logistical roles. What we do not see, at any point in the Old Kingdom, is a reference to the Giza necropolis as being a single conceptual construct. It is only your circular logic that permits Giza to be known as "Rostau", because you begin with the assumption that the Giza pyramids were representative of the beltstars, and then you superimpose those stellar relationships (including the land of Rostau) back onto the plateau, and thus arrive at a single name for the Giza site. If I may quote you from "Secret Chamber":

Quote

"Giza, the earthly Rostau, is located on the west bank of the River Nile. Thus by transposition, we can deduce that the celestial Rostau is a region of the starry sky on the west 'bank' of the Milky Way. p. 95

Your tenuous link that Giza is the "Highland of Aker" is also circular in its reasoning. You are the only one linking Giza to Osiris, then you use that preconceived conclusion as evidence that the Highland of Aker (the domain of Osiris) must refer to Giza.

Most respected references to the land of Rostau include all the pyramids from Saqqara to Abu Roash. Breaking out a piece of that geography is, to my knowledge, an unevidenced speculation. You are welcome to disagree, but if you do, please provide the factual references from Egyptian sources in the Old Kingdom as your support.

The angles and targeting of the shafts have been further analyzed in extreme detail, and what has been discovered is that they only target the stars that you have selected for analysis during a time in Egyptian history that is virtually impossible to be reconciled with the evidence we have for the reign of Khufu in the Fourth Dynasty. The article demonstrating this appears in a recent issue of the Journal for Historical Astronomy, as authored by John Wall.

In the end, your Orion Correlation hypothesis was exactly as Dr. I.E.S. Edwards described it: a very interesting observation. Upon close examination, however, the idea does not apply to the culture that actually built the pyramids at Giza.

Anthony

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him think.