Byrd Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> cladking Wrote:
> -------------------------------------------------------
>
> > Until we understand the PT we can not
> understand
> > the pyramid builders. Until we understand the
> > pyramid builders it might be impossible to
> > understand ourselves.
>
> You can't understand the PT until you understand
> each one in its place. You can't fully understand
> them if you look at the mish-mash collection where
> "N" represents "some pharaoh but not necessarily
> all of them."
>
> That's the beauty of the Allen translations. He
> shows what each individual pharaoh chose for their
> tomb instead of a wild conglomeration of texts
> written before and after a certain Pyramid Text.
> To be convincing, you have to show your versions
> with respect to where they're found in the tombs
> (because that is actually significant) and what it
> means for each individual pharaoh. Your version
> picks up on some items that appear in only ONE
> tomb and try to apply them to all tombs.
>
> And that didn't happen.

I understand what you are saying but I disagree.

I disagree because I believe all the meanings 'hidden' in the Pyramid Texts are hidden in plain sight, right in the literal meaning of the words. Where Egyptology began the task of understanding the Pyramid Texts with the assumption it was the oldest version of the book of the dead, I made no such assumption. I only assumed that the words made perfect sense in terms of the premises of the authors. It was these premises I was attempting to deduce. It never occurred to me when I started that there even were two types of languages! Rather this second type of language emerged as I solved words in context. It was likely a fool's errand because I probably could never have solved Ancient Language if it were like all of ours. But it wasn't and as word meaning emerged (like lotuses from the Nile) so too did some of the rules of grammar. The task was made simpler by the fact that the meaning was usually literal like "he is a star" and that potential solutions could be compared to the physical evidence and the laws of nature. Only those potential solutions that were internally consistent and consistent with the evidence and experiment were even considered. Most had to be rejected because they made no clean fit.

So what we have is a "solution" right or wrong that is internally consistent, is in agreement with known science, and that tends to be literal. If they said something the intent was literal and our job is to figure out what they were thinking by saying what they did. What were they thinking when they said hundreds of times in the PT that the king was the pyramid and dozens of times that the king was a star? Following this logic I believe that the great pyramids were mnemonics to remember the king as well as a boat that took the king to the imperishable stars at night which served the same function and served to represent all human history. As such they all corresponded. They were in probably, many types of alignment.

Yes, the Pyramid Texts is a mess that even Allen can't really fix if you want to parse them and are concerned about to which king they apply as well as their ages and religious or magical significance. But I believe ALL of these things are irrelevancies and the ONLY thing that matters is author intent. Once we understand author intent then their placement and all the nuances become relevant. In the meantime we are overlooking the very nature of the language which breaks Zipf's Law and has virtually no vocabulary at all except a few thousand nouns. Why have these characteristics not been seen? It is apparent that it is nearly invisible when you parse it to agree with the" book of the dead" which didn't exist for many centuries so can not possible have any effect on the older writing. If you parse the same word in many different ways then it "appears" like many different words to the reader. We simply can't even imagine a language where every word had a fixed concrete meaning correlated to mathematics and reality so can not be parsed. Parsing is what we learn. Parsing is for every practical purpose the acquisition of language. We must learn the difference between "to", "too", "two", "tu tu", etc etc etc. This is unique to modern human language. Words are metaphoric, symbolic, and have no meaning except in terms of other words. Each speaker has his own definitions and every individual takes a different meaning dependent on his vocabulary and beliefs.

AL was wholly different. When they said "he is a star" it was meant literally whether it appears in Unas' tomb or Pepi's. When they said the great pyramids were not tombs they meant that they were not and that the king's tomb was in the sky.

By interpreting and solving word meanings in terms of the far better understood "book of the dead" we were misled in the exact same way as the authors of the "book of the dead". They got it all wrong in the exact same way and for the same reasons we did. We are not familiar with the concept of metaphysical language rooted to the greats who were remembered as stars.

____________
Man fears the pyramid, time fears man.