Mark Heaton Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> In response to Byrd:
>
>
> Many Egyptologists start with the notion of
> Sirius, but Sirius was merely a marker of the
> solar year.

A marker of the flood season as well. The observatories were there to predict the floods.


> it was. Observations of the heliacal rise might
> well have an error of a day so it was useless in
> the short term, and even after say 200 years might
> still have an observational error of a day, but
> the calendar year was 365 days, so of no help at
> all in reconciling anything as the calendar year
> shifted in relation to the solar year completing a
> full cycle in about 1509 years.

Self-adjusting if you use the rising of Sirius.

> The calendar year of 365 days was a way of
> calculating special days based on knowledge of the
> cycle of 309 lunar months which only has an error
> of about a day every 500 years, but probably
> regarded as perfect.

Where do you see this number 309 represented -- in a text?

> The
> burial chamber and antechambers were intended to
> be hidden in perpetuity, so the wisdom of Egypt
> was locked away in the burial place of the king,
> but the king was expected to look down on his
> pyramid in his celestial after-life and see that
> what had been entombed in the pyramid mirrored his
> celestial destiny.

This doesn't make sense, frankly. A "hidden secret" like that would have had to be taught by people (since the secret would die with just one person and it had to come from somewhere) and it would have to be taught to crown princes and so forth -- so the 'secret knowledge" would be rather general knowledge in the palace.

And why a "secret knowledge" of how long a year was when anyone could measure it -- when temples throughout the land used it to determine the timing of festivals and ceremonies. Also, the king after death wasn't responsible for things in the sky; he was aligned with Osiris, who was not a celestial deity.




> I hoped this would enable Robin Cook to re-draw
> his model more precisely in palms and then
> highlight the scale relationship of 1 to 36.5 to
> the base square.

They didn't have decimal fractions, so ".5" could not have translated to anything involving the calendar. It would have been 36 1/2 (one over two).


> Have you studied maths or physics or geometry at
> university level like me and countless others?

Yes, in fact I have, and I have an on-site math consultant (my husband with not one but two Master's in Mathematical fields). And topology is a particular favorite of mine.

-- Byrd
Moderator, Hall of Ma'at