A couple of years ago I posted some drawings I'd done using the block measurements for the King's Chamber given by Piazzi Smyth in his "Life and Works at the Great Pyramid". I've been looking at the data again because of some new drawings I'm doing and I still find it a bit puzzling.

Here's a drawing based on Dormion's plan of the West Wall of the Chamber as reproduced in "La chambre de Chéops" which was published in 2004.



Unfortunately he doesn't give dimensions for all the blocks and his drawings are reproduced at too small a scale in the book to be able to read all the figures that are given. However I'm confident that my drawing is an accurate representation of his original.

If I then add the positions of the joints as taken from Smyth's data in red you can see the differences quite clearly with one joint on the left of the second row not even appearing on Dormion's drawing at all and others in different places. Dormion's drawings are reduced from large scale achitects plans so the positions of joints etc should be exact particularly as he uses the pattern of joints elsewhere to argue for unknown features within the pyramid.



I find this very odd as Dormion's drawings have the reputations of being the most accurate ever done. However if you compare with Maragioglio & Rinaldi's drawing you find it's the same as Dormion's so he seems to have based his on theirs. This certainly isn't the case with other of his drawings as there is far more detail in his plans of the Queen's Chamber for example.

I'd might suspect Smyth's data if it wasn't for the fact that I can compare all these drawings directly with my own photo of this wall which shows quite clearly that Smyth is correct and M&R and Dormion are wrong.

Lepre also has a drawing which matches Smyth and is clearly based on it. He specifically discusses the joints on this wall so I'd expect him to be reasonably accurate although he makes mistakes elsewhere.

I find the "missing joint" the oddest error unless there's another explantion. This joint is shown as damaged by Smyth:



It was rough and exposed when I first saw it in 1984 but it's been filled in now. Could it just be a damaged area that M&R recognised as such but which was mistaken for a joint by Smyth?

Here's a section of one of my more recent photographs (I haven't had the chance to photograph this area specially since I started all this drawing) The joint in question is the one next to the temperature guage.



I don't think it's very likely actually that this is just damage and I think it is the case that there is an error in the M&R drawings which Dormion has copied. Smyth is quite specific in stating his measurement to the joint in his chart and also quotes a measurement from "Alton and Inglis" which is 15 inches so very close to his which is 14.7 inches.

For all his daft ideas and prejudices Smyth did important work at Giza and he's still worth consulting today.

Jon

www.egyptarchive.co.uk



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/17/2007 02:22PM by Jon_B.