Hi Hermoine,

Thanks for linking my thread above, but it is really just talking about the Akhentaten boundary stelae, where the proposed length of the itr has been based on the distance between the farthest apart known boundary stelae, and even since my thread from 2003, additional boundary stelae have been discovered at Akhentaten that are farther away from each other.

More recently I spent a good bit of time on the length of the itr and wrote a long article about it here:

[home.hiwaay.net]

My article deals with other topics also, but the impetus for the article was the inscribed cubit rods discovered by Borchardt at Karnak. They say the length of Egypt is 106 itr from Elephantine to the northern limit of Egypt and that the length of upper Egypt is 86 itr and the length of lower Egypt is 20 itr. If this is a N-S meridian measure and the dividing point between upper and lower Egypt is the apex of the delta, then the itr works out to be precisely 15,000 royal cubits. There are no mathematical texts or other ancient Egyptian inscriptions that specify the number of cubits in the itr. However, even though Egyptologists generally decline to speculate on matters that are not supported by philology, they go out of their way in this case to give lengths for the itr, other than 15,000 cubits. There are a couple of photographs of the cubit rods that Borchardt published that I included in my article, but my source on Borchardt's take of the length of the itr is from Gardiner in Egyptian Grammar. I also quote Hans Goedecke who agrees with Borchardt, on what I think is the same basis. Namely, the ancient Egyptians were not capable of measuring N-S meridian distances, and therefore the cubit rods, and other similar inscriptions about the 106 itr length of Egypt, were based on itinerary distances along the river that they say gives a length of 20,000 cubits for the itr. In order for 20,000 cubits to work, the division between upper and lower Egypt has to be moved a good bit south of the apex of the delta, and I also discuss these efforts by Egyptologists in my article. The length of the dodecaschoinos is also offered as evidence of a 20,000 cubit itr, and I also discuss this in my article, since all of these arguments are used for, and I think were created for, the purpose of not allowing the itr to be a length that could support the idea the ancient Egyptians were capable of measuring by degrees.

Jim Alison