Hi Pistol,

I consulted the older publications of Petrie on pyramids and temples at the British Museum many years ago including his Inductive Metrology in 1877. I think that this publication would raise a few eyebrows on the French forum mentioned earlier in this thread, as would your insistence on a cubit accurate to a tenth of a millimetre for your theoretical models.

As far as I know, Petrie did not visit Egypt until 1881. 'Inductive Metrology' includes Smyth's estimate of the cubit as 20.6275 inches from memory, though not actually Smyth's estimate. It is Petrie's estimate based on Smyth's measurements of 412,5 inches and 412.6 inches as the length of the long walls of the King Chamber, taken as 20 cubits.

Newton estimated the length of the the cubit at 1719 thousands of an English foot (20.628 inches), so the precision of Newton's estimate was 0.012 inches or just less than an eightieth of an inch and perceptible to the naked eye. A British engineering ruler used to have 100 divisions per inch, and cabinet makers were able to work to 1/64 inch, but a tenth of a millimetre is 1/254 of a British inch. That's why so many scoff at those who require the cubit to have a length accurate to a tenth of a millimetre

I asked for a list of Petrie's publications in the reading room of the British Museum, which was brought up on computer in a few seconds. There is a large Egyptological library in the British Museum, and I was given access to read selected publications by prior appointment as not open to the public without good reason.

The notion that all the monuments of Egypt were built with a cubit of exactly the same length so that statistics can give us the exact length of an exact standard accurate to a tenth of millimetre, even for two pyramids belonging to father and son, is not tenable, in my opinion.

In 2006, I rationalised the external dimensions of Khafra's pyramid as corresponding to a cubit of 20.62 inches which is not the same as supposing that the cubit was gauged from a master standard exact by definition, and also 20.62 inches. The master standard may have been 20.61 inches or 20.63 inches with build errors resulting in an apparent cubit of 20.62 inches.

By the way, Petrie was confident that the best estimate of the length of the cubit from the Great Pyramid, that could ever be hoped for, was his determination of 20.632 inches plus or minus 0.004 inches, so he was happy, like you, to claim a precision of about 1/250 inch, as you can read in his second edition of the Pyramids & Temples of Gizeh, which was published after proposing different views on the length of the cubit in his first edition, so you can pick what you like from Petrie's analyses, which are regarded lightly, or quite simply as incorrect by many, including me. He was a brilliant young man, but with little formal education in 1877, so not worth studying his methods and opinions for long, except as a historical exercise unrelated to Egypt.

The fact that Petrie thought that the digit was not a sub-division of the Egyptian cubit is bizarre, but he proved this to his own satisfaction, and you may well prove things to your satisfaction, but do not be surprised if others do not judge you as warmly as Petrie whose errors are overlooked because of his great achievements as a pioneering archaeologist.

Mark



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 07/31/2023 04:02AM by Mark Heaton.