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Thanks for link.
Who knows the detail of what's written in some of Newton's papers that were auctioned off other than those who purchased them, but if there is something interesting then those papers might become more valuable, and those trained in the history of science might want to review, if this is not the case already. I am not inclined to add to my collection of books.
Mark
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Mark Heaton
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Ancient Egypt
Hi Hermione
Thanks for the links
Many have supposed that Isaac Newton (1647 – 1731) became interested in the Great Pyramid hoping to find a connection to the size of Earth. This may be so but Newton was much more interested in the French survey of the globe because the instruments available in the Scientific Revolution meant that a modern survey would be far more reliable than any ancient d
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Mark Heaton
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Ancient Egypt
The more you look for coincidences the more you will find, and the presentation of the coincidences without the thousands of possibilities that are not strange coincidences can attract the mind into a pet theory by which one can hope to be remembered.
The greatest astronomical 'coincidence' is a total eclipse of the sun. Is there any need to look for any other coincidence?
The fa
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Mark Heaton
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Ancient Egypt
The first mathematician known to have calculated the volume of a sphere in antiquity is Archimedes.
The volume of a sphere encapsulated in the smallest possible cylinder is exactly 2/3 because pi cancels itself out.
In my latest post on Egyptian stadia, I should have mentioned the square of pi cancels itself out precisely, but not exactly, by expressing the radius in relation to the inverse
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Mark Heaton
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Ancient Egypt
Eratosthenes Circumference of Earth:
252,000 stadia of 300 Egyptian cubits, so 700 stadia per degree, and one ten millionth of radius is 630.5 millimetres for a cubit of 524 millimetres.
Newton knew Egyptian cubit was 1.719 Egyptian feet from King's Chamber of Great Pyramid, which converts to 524 millimetres.
Conjectural model of globe, potentially considered by Newton
Let perime
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Mark Heaton
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Ancient Egypt
Thanks,
I had read an article by Jim Alison before my post.
It makes it sound as if the12,000 cubits is a certainty rather than a hypothesis.
I do have something interesting on 12,000 royal cubits, not yet ready to share, but not sure if anybody else has spotted it.
Mark
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Mark Heaton
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Ancient Egypt
Thanks Hermione
I had read the article you linked just before my post.
Mark
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Mark Heaton
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Ancient Egypt
The paper by M.H. Stone listed a unit of length of an Ater equal to 12,000 Egyptian cubits of 524 mm so I tried to see what came up on the internet.
It seems Pliny regarded the Stadia as 1/40 x Ater which others have suggested is 300 Egyptian cubits in relation to the estimate of Eratosthenes on the circumference of Earth in Stadia (252,000) but I don't suppose there is any reason why a S
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Mark Heaton
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Ancient Egypt
Thanks Hermione for the link to the paper on cubits.
The paper states the cubit was 523 mm, whereas other modern estimates that I have seen are usually in the range 523.5 to 525 mm, and some estimates from the nineteenth century are even longer.
'When accurately made, they employ a sleek section in the form of a long parallelepiped rectangle and are 0.523 m long.'
Mark
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Mark Heaton
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Ancient Egypt
I decided to start converting the dimensions of the Great Pyramid to digits after viewing Maya's ruler at the Louvre twenty years ago.
A digit means the width of a finger. It is obvious that ancient Egyptians knew that 1/16 digit plus say 1/4 digit is 5/16 digit, but do not appear to have had symbols for complex fractions.
The lack of symbols would not stopped the architect of the Gre
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Mark Heaton
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Ancient Egypt
Agreed, although any such find might be a secondary standard, not the primary standard.
It seems likely that there was a metrological standard exact by definition, and potentially a longer length such as a double cubit to facilitate precision.
The top course of the King’s Chamber has two huge granite stones which are 10 cubits long as the full width of the chamber, so there may have been a
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Mark Heaton
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Ancient Egypt
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, Pet
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Mark Heaton
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Ancient Egypt
Thanks for posting a link to the paper I read some years ago.
Mark
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Mark Heaton
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Ancient Egypt
Thanks for your response and the translation.
I suppose Lauer may have decided on a cubit of 524 millimetres elsewhere because that appeared to be the case.
By the way, with regard to the comment on precision, it may be that the architect of the Great Pyramid used just two master stones to mark out the base square of the Great Pyramid, then placed those stones on the top course of the King&
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Mark Heaton
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Ancient Egypt
Can anyone confirm that Lauer used a conversion of 524 millimetres per Egyptian royal cubit?
Jean Philippe Lauer (1902 – 2001), a French architect, was the foremost authority on construction methods in the Pyramid Age. He worked as an archaeologist in Egypt for many decades from the 1920s, almost entirely on the pyramid complexes at Saqqara, primarily aiming to figure out the design of Djoser’
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Mark Heaton
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Ancient Egypt
I agree with you that I have to be able to point to a reliable historical source.
Jim Alison has set out the facts on page 80 and 81 of his link, and I had no idea that a length of 12,000 Egyptian cubits had been regarded by Jim and others as significant based on historical and archaeological evidence.
I approached the problem based on another source of historical evidence which hasn't
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Mark Heaton
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Ancient Egypt
Hello Jim,
The question of latitude has occupied my attention for many hours.
Some years ago, I arrived at the conclusion that a length of 12,000 cubits can be regarded as a significant arc of the meridian.
I had no idea, until now, that this length has a historical aspect.
My determination was, however, based on a modern determination of the size of the planet.
This puzzled me, be
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Mark Heaton
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Ancient Egypt
Petrie did not report his actual measurements, but what he thought the measurements would have been at the time the chamber was built.
Petrie assumed that the length of the chamber had increased because he could see cracks in the walls, so subtracted the width of those cracks from his measurements.
The east and west walls appear to have been built in between the long north and south walls o
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Mark Heaton
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Ancient Egypt
The top of the north wall is 412.14 inches to which we should add back 0.19 inches to get 412.33 inches .
The top of the south wall is 411.88 inches to which we should add back 0.41 inches to get 412,29 inches
The bottom of the north wall is 412.78 inches to which we should add back 0.19 inches to get 412.97 inches .
The bottom of the south wall is 412,53 inches to which we should add
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Mark Heaton
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Ancient Egypt
Wasn't there some graffiti in Menkaure's pyramid about the drunkards of Menkaure, or was that a later edition along with the sarcophagus?
Mark
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Mark Heaton
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Ancient Egypt
Menkaure was identified with Osiris on his coffin lid, so Fourth Dynasty, according to Budge (page 78 of Egyptian Religion)
A drawing of Menkaure's sarcophagus is shown on page 246 of The Pyramids by Miroslav Verner
Lost at sea on way to British Museum?
Mark
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Mark Heaton
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Ancient Egypt
Sadly, Egyptologists have a long history of describing rock incorrectly including the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum not that long ago.
Piazzi Smyth was critical in his day, but he had several advantages over most:
Firstly, he was able arrange chemical analyses in view of his prestige as Astronomer Royal for Scotland.
Secondly, his brother was a professor of geology.
Thirdly, he
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Mark Heaton
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Ancient Egypt
Hi Pistol,
Interestingly, a stone ball was discovered in one of the QC shafts which inevitably has a mass equal to the volume of a sphere of radius 'r' (with 'r' calculated for a sphere with the same density as the ball so as to have the same volume).
The mass of the ball was published in Nature shortly after discovery (and the approximate diameter), and it seemed to me
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Mark Heaton
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Ancient Egypt
You raise an interesting point that the area of a circle was of interest which appears to be so from the diameter of the holes in the top ledge of the sarcophagus which are precisely 9/8 digits in diameter so an area of one square digit (by applying the AE formula of 8/9 x diameter and viewing the product as square units).
This is, of course, not the place to debate the matter, but it seems in
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Mark Heaton
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Ancient Egypt
Thanks for your response.
Just to clarify, the sphere with a diameter of 2.5 cubits (not my idea) can be regarded as a 1/112 scale model of a sphere with a diameter of 280 cubits (my idea) because the triangular cross-sections of the pyramid on the north-south and east-west axes of the pyramid are each equal to a circle with a diameter of 280 cubits for the pi approximation 22/7 based on Petri
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Mark Heaton
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Ancient Egypt
We have come to expect a professional standard from the layman's guides.
Interestingly, few have understood that Petrie was simply evaluating Smyth's theory in his survey of the sarcophagus in the Great Pyramid.
Smyth claimed that the external volume was precisely double the internal volume after taking into account the irregular depressions in surfaces, and that the design was a
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Mark Heaton
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Ancient Egypt
The shafts appear to be chimneys, so not horizontal, and rise to the surface of the pyramid approximately perpendicular to the surface, so close to a minimum length.
Chimneys create a draught that would have pulled air from outside the pyramid through the chamber from the passage system.
The King's Chamber is unique in being so high up in the pyramid structure.
Other pyramids have
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Mark Heaton
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Ancient Egypt
In Genesis, the first book of Moses, the sons of Jacob did not recognise Joseph as their brother when they stood before him as vizier of Egypt.
The writer, Moses, obviously knew what the Israelites and Egyptians looked like, as did the contemporaries of Moses, so the Israelites, must have been similar in appearance to the Egyptians.
The statue of the seated scribe in the Louvre is, I think,
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Mark Heaton
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Ancient Egypt
I think Petrie started with Stonehenge.
I haven't seen his survey data but it may be useful to you if only half as good as his surveys of Egyptian monuments.
Mark
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Mark Heaton
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Ancient Egypt
There would be no justification for proposing anything other than round numbers of whole cubits for the antechamber of the Red Pyramid except for at least five facts:
Firstly, it is an astonishing geometric model for a precise conversion.
Secondly, the ancient Egyptians were good at building precisely.
Thirdly, the relationship between palms and cubits is the simplest way to conceive a s
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Mark Heaton
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Ancient Egypt
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