Anthony Wrote:
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> For the casing stones and royal cubit, we should
> actually see the structures. Petrie just gives
> his conclusions based on those observations.

What you are seeing is a far cry from professional observation. I always like to mention the floor of the King's chamber as an example. You walk over it, it appears flat. Then you are confronted by the survey.. It's not flat, in fact it's so rough in comparison to the rest of the chamber that the conclusion must be ..... an unfinished floor.

> Frankly I did disagree with the idea that having
> the angle off by a smidge at the bottom would blow
> out the point at the top. The pyramid was not
> "finished" to the angles we see on the bottom
> casing stones as if it were some massively exact
> endeavor from start to finish.


It's the only remaining evidence we have for slope although admittedly that evidence is slowly fading. Name me something more compelling than a casing block in place.

> Instead, the stones were all put up with rough
> facings. The facings were then smoothed, one
> block at a time, all the way from top to bottom.
> The angle of each block didn't actually match the
> angle of the pyramid... it just matched the angle
> of the blocks that SURROUNDED it, and the overall
> average angle of ALL the blocks was probably a
> seqed 5 1/2.

You appear to be saying that it is just a pile of stones in the shape of a pyramid. No wait, you've said that before.

> It's the same kind of "precision" that is
> misconstrued in the tunneled Descending Passage.
> It's easy to make it arrow straight. You start
> with a much smaller opening down the middle, and
> then carve out the sides until they are all arrow
> straight. The original passage may have been off
> by as much as six inches or more, but when they
> carved back the surfaces to smooth them, they made
> sure they were all dead on the money.

Which ever method they adopted the results are impressive. One of the great problems is to decide whether the inconsistencies of both height and width evident in the existing passageways are the result of inaccuracy or of unfinished work. Judging by what they could do, what they were capable of, the latter looms large.

> The "optical precision" of the casing stone joints
> is ANOTHER claim based on the misunderstanding of
> the technology that was used to put the stones in
> place. Since the stones were slab cut from long
> rows of blocks, they MUST fit back together with
> near-perfect precision. The saw that cut them
> apart took out a static amount between two stones
> that were then put back together when they were
> assembled on the pyramid construction site.
> Nothing fancy or mysterious about it... just a
> byproduct of the technology used to create the
> pyramid, and not the actual goal of said effort.

The precision of the joints is real and required additional honing and smoothing. Cutting the blocks out of the quarry to a grid system and reassembling them in order at the pyramid site is sensible logistics. It made the final fitting all that much easier.

On a lighter note I like your use of the words "slab cut". It sounds so much more convincing than "chiselled out"