Nemtinakht Wrote:
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> There was no "Great Pyramid Building Age." A
> pyramid is a pyramid. The fact that some were
> larger and of better quality than others is
> sequential.
Yes! They were built in sequence. First the great pyramids that required stupendous work to lift the stone were built and then the tiny little imitation pyramids made of inferior materials were built. Indeed, the very first pyramid was a great pyramid. They didn't warm up with little 150' pyramids but rather started with a 200' one.
Comparing the effort to build a pyramid by volume or height is highly misleading because the work required is proportional to its volume times its height. Somehow or other this is being overlooked.
Worse is that there is never a distinction drawn between these real pyramids that came first and the later pyramids that are now tiny little piles of rubble. They are in no way equivalent. Maybe trying to maintain that a pyramid is a pyramid is part of the reason that there are so many alt theories. No primitive technology could be suddenly adapted to build a great pyramid unless it had the capacity to do so. They wouldn't adapt any existing technology to build a 200' pyramid unless they knew it had sufficient capacity.
> I you meant that the Pyramid Texts were written
> after the Giza pyramids were built, then you are
> correct. However, linguistic and contextual
> evidence has revealed that many of these spells
> were written centuries earlier, Some of these
> perhaps as early as the First Dynasty, or even the
> late Predynastic.
Calling them 'spells" is presumptuous since you can't say what a single one of them did or how they believed it accomplished it. without the book of the dead they can't even be translated.
But it is irrelevant whether they are "spells" or merely "rituals" as I maintain. What is relevant is the word "ramp" doesn't appear here or in any other writing from the great pyramid building age. What is relevant is even the vocabulary does not support modern beliefs about its meaning or the overall "cultural context". The word "belief" and all of its synonyms are absent just as are all the words to denote "thinking". Yet phrases such as "birth of (M)in" is still taken to represent a belief and a superstition. It is impossible to sit around and invent new "gods" without a vocabulary that can support it.
It is quite obvious that we are misinterpreting all of the evidence. There is no possible hypothesis or even guess that can explain the lack of vocabulary and the breaking of Zipf's Law that is consistent with our understanding. It follows one or more of our assumptions are incorrect.
It's the same thing with the data from the infrared scan; there is no hypothesis or guess to explain the data in terms of the paradigm. So it is being ignored.
> I haven't looked into this in
> much depth, but it is likely that the word for
> ramp predates the reign of Unas by a few
> centuries.
I have no doubt they had a word for "ramp". That it was "ta-rd" is as good a guess as any and better than most.
I point out that the word "ramp" is unattested not because I think they were too stupid to invent the technology or that they hadn't actually invented and used it. There was a word for "ramp" and indeed I'm confident that like all referents there were actually three words for it (two that aren't known at all and the other unattested).
I point out that the word "ramp" is unattested to highlight just how trivial these were to the people. They wrote several thousand different words but neglected to record the one for "ramp"!!!!!! There was no "god of ramps", no "builder of ramps", no "dragger of stones on ramps", no "ramp engineers", no mention of ramps anywhere at any time during the great pyramid building age! How does a man live and die on ramps yet no one ever thought to use the word?
It is an impossibility and this should never be ignored. This is the assumption upon which all the others rest and it is most likely the assumption undermined by the infrared scans that is being suppressed.
I've said for years that the infrared scan will show how the pyramid was built no matter what means was used. This is only slight hyperbole but no matter because the results clearly show there were no ramps just like the cultural context says. Stones were pulled straight up the sides of step pyramids.
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Man fears the pyramid, time fears man.