Hi Hans,

Forgot to thank you for posting photograph of basalt ball. I think the intention was obviously to make a sphere, and it is quite regular compared to other examples of pounding balls that I have seen.

Count yourself lucky that you just found the six pounder - and nothing ever hit you,if that is the case. I have the same Christian name and surname as my grandfather who woke up to find a piece of shrapnel in his head from a German shell in World War I. For him the war was over, but he made a full recovery. Sometimes its obvious what something means, but not always.

I don't think Khufu thought about sending a message to posterity, but to the gods he believed encircled the celestial sphere.

The pounding ball was a crude tool, and perhaps not too much use for the construction of the granite sarcophagus. Petrie concluded that the pyramid builders had used a saw at least 9 feet long to saw through the block of granite.

It would cost hundreds of thousands of US dollars to make a re-production of Khufu's sarcophagus which was made out of a single block of granite. The technology was impressive, much more so than the simple geometry proposed in my post.

We know the ancient Egyptians were good at calculating volumes from the formula for the volume of a truncated pyramid in the Moscow Mathematical Papyrus and the volume of a cylindrical granary in the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus. If either of these papyri had not survived then we would know much less about Egyptian mathematics based on documentary evidence. It is very likely that much more was lost than has been found because the papyri are quite different.

I am not arguing that the granite ball was put there on the orders of Khufu, but may have been a tribute from a pyramid builder, rather like the graffiti in the so-called stress relieving chambers.

Don't you think the ancient mind was capable of making a connection between the granite ball as a sphere and the sun?

The sun was contemplated in three dimensions in my opinion, not just a disc.

Mark