Warwick.
Thanks for the links which I hope to read in due course. Some years I read that 'the heiroglyph for Sirius is, oddly enough, the triangular face of a pyramid' (James Bonwick, Pyramid Facts and Fancies 1877). The heiroglyph for Sirius, as you may know, is now associated with a thorn. But this set me thinking that the design of pyramids may have been linked to the cycles of time. If the pyramid enshrined the celestial destiny of the king, then it would have been reasonable to link the design to the cycles of time. If the sun and moon and stars were seen as gods, then it would have been natural to want to encode cycles of time in the pyramids. Josephus tells us that Abraham refuted the wisdom of astrologers (who believed in the conscious divine power of the sun and the moon), and attributed the timely motions of the heavenly bodies to the one and only God of creation. It does not require a modern astronomical perspective to suppose that the ancient Egyptians may have detected precession. If it was observed, then the precession may have been encoded in the Bent Pyramid for the above reason. James Bonwick tells us that no star was so venerated in Egypt as Sirius. Its position must have been watched in relation to other stars. If Sirius does not provide us with a proper estimate of precession, then it must shift in relation to other fixed stars which can be used to estimate precession. I simply asked whether or not this may have alerted AE to precession. That was my question before this aside. I think AE watched the movements of the stars very closely, and recorded their positions, because to predict time from observation of time would have provided a basis for planning religious festivals - in accordance with the cycles of the sun, moon and stars. That is what I meant by observational astronomy. Nowadays Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox, and is based on the time of the Old Testament Passover. We know that the Israelites came out of Egypt with their own lunar calendar, and the importance of the cycles of time in the ancient world is a matter of historical record. The sun, the moon and the stars govern time and the seasons. Perhaps we have forgotten the importance of seed time and harvest when we buy food at the supermarket. AE thought the heavenly bodies were divine, and may have wanted to encode the secrets of time in the pyramids. AE may have thought that to have knowledge of the divine was a step towards the divine. Is it unreasonable to propose that the king-god may have wanted the design of his pyramid tomb to reflect the divine heavenly cycles?