Cladking,
Rather than address each of the points you raise (something I am now rather weary of doing), can I confine myself to observng that the whole "pyramids as granaries" tradition is examined and discussed in Colavito's "Legends of the Pyramids" - [
www.amazon.co.uk] I can assure that, if you could get hold of a copy, you would find it informative.
This, for instance, is Colavito's description of how the tradition developed in the early mediaeval era:
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Sometime before the year 500 CE, a student of Julius Honorius, a Roman teacher, took notes about his master’s geography lecture and recorded that Honorius had told his students that the pyramids were the “storehouses of Joseph.” The claim appears again in the commentaries of Pseudo-Nonnus in the first half of the 500s. Gregory of Tours wrote in 594 CE in the History of the Franks 1.10 that Joseph’s granaries were made of stone, wide at the base, and narrow at the top. Although he had never seen the pyramids, they are clearly his inspiration. In 825 CE, the monk Dicuil, writing in the Liber de Mensura Orbis Terrae 6.13, described the monk Fidelis’s visit to the pyramids and identified them as Joseph’s granaries. The claim appears as well in the commentaries of Nicetas of Heraclea in the eleventh century and the Byzantine Etymologicum magnum of the twelfth century (among other sources); in both, the word pyramid is falsely said to derive from the Greek word for grain because of Joseph.
The reason for this belief is a little unclear. Some of it is likely due to sheer ignorance at the end of antiquity, when Egypt was slowly falling out of the increasingly isolated West’s orbit. (pp. 61-62)
And, like so many other baseless traditions connected with the pyramids, the granaries tradition at times finds itself pressed into some very odd forms of service, as mentioned here:
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In 2015, Dr. Ben Carson, a physician who was then the frontrunner for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination and later served as a cabinet secretary under President Donald Trump, faced a controversy when a 1998 video emerged showing him embracing the idea that the pyramids were Joseph’s granaries. He called this his “belief” and supported the assertion with claims lifted directly from ancient astronaut books but revised for a religious worldview. Carson claimed that the pyramids had “hermetically sealed” chambers—a medieval Arab legend, but not a true one—and wrongly described popular ancient astronaut writers as “various scientists” who supported the idea that aliens built the pyramids (p. 195).
Briefly, the pyramids were not granaries, Joseph's or anyone else's.
Hermione
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