Mike PSS

Doesn't Smyth reveal this? Isn't there any OTHER reference (old Egyptian writings or otherwise) that even HINT at this knowledge? Anything? Or is Smyth the FIRST person to realize that there are hidden meanings in the GP since it was built?
Then, Mr. "In your own words"....
"WHY DID THEY DO IT IN THE FIRST PLACE?"
It would be one thing to find a boat (or a temple, or a statue) that had hidden significance. But to put this into a f***ing massive tomb is quite another. Why hide all this "knowledge"?

If the whole Egyptian kingdom had vanished over the next fifty years then I can see the point. But it didn't. There is NOTHING in the post-history of the Egyptians to indicate that the supposed knowledge "hidden" in the GP made one bit of difference to the lives or operation of the kingdom. Not ONE single hiccup. And NO other kingdom, satrapy, republic, monastic order, church sect, barbarian horde, or otherwise thought to even mention anything about the GP in these terms.... until some 19th century Englishman named Smyth. THAT raises great big neon flashing warnings in my mind about these findings. You would have a much better time arguing about Cold Fusion (because, you know, there exists actual evidence beyond the original authors paper) than about the GP findings of Smyth.

That's rich Dave coming from you.
I'll get around to some choice quotes soon. But first, to resurrect an old question that applies directly to the papers I presented....
"How did Smyth determine his measurements to the precision of five significant figures?"
In other words, what survey tools did he use? What reference points were used?
And to really get you thinking....
"What level of accuracy could the GP builders expect to get out of their tools and measuring instruments? Does this level of accuracy match the reported level of measurement accuracy that Smyth reports?"

See Dave,
These questions don't pooh-pooh Smyth, or Petrie, or anyone else. They set up a clear and concise referential framework for everyone to compare. I'm not saying Smyth or the original GP builders didn't have accurate equipment, I'm just saying that the reported accuracy is very suspect given the nature of the evidence (missing capstones, non-square base, 4500 years of weatherring, etc.).

Pappy Jack

Long post follows, I’m afraid. I hope it’s worth it.....

afdave wrote:
Dave, you are the one making the claim that the appearance of pi in the deconstructed measurements of the Great Pyramid is in some way evidence for ‘advanced scientific knowledge’ that the Dynastic Egyptians could not themselves have been privy too. The links Mike provided lead to an explanation of how pi appears as a consequence of the design and construction techniques used by the Dynastic Egyptians. Your claim is the extraordinary one, you need to provide evidence in support of it whilst also refuting the non-anachronistic argument.

afdave also wrote:
‘I think’ is not the same as ‘it has been proved that’ and proof that your ‘5 points’ constitute evidence of ‘advanced scientific knowledge’ is what is lacking. Again, you need to provide evidence in support of your contentions that does not depend solely on the manipulation of disputed measurement data from the Great Pyramid. I keep referring you to (and I will continue referring you to) Gardner’s argument that, given a sufficient mass of numerical data and no limits on how it can be manipulated, it is possible to find any relationships that are wanted.

Smyth’s date for the Great Pyramid is also unproven. Why does the overwhelming weight of opinion amongst Egyptologists place the construction of the Great Pyramid in the 26th Century BC? Quite simply, because the overwhelming weight of evidence supports this. Smyth’s date was proposed at a time when Egyptology as a serious science was still very much in its infancy. Champollion had only published his studies on hieroglyphs in the 1820s and the principal fragment of the so-called Palermo Stone, one of the sources for information on regnal dates, was only known from 1866, for example. Nevertheless, even as early as 1853 J. Gardner Wilkinson attributes the pyramids to the 3rd and 4th Dynasties and dates the start of the reign of the 12th Dynasty pharaoh Sesostris (more widely known now as Senusret) to 2080 BC (current dating 1965-1920 BC). Whether Smyth was aware of such early studies in the sequencing and dating of Dynastic Egypt, I have no idea, but I would be interested in his reasons for discarding them.

Decades of careful scholarship and research using a wide array of textual sources has gone into compiling the currently-accepted chronology for Dynastic Egypt and overturning it will need compelling evidence. Even if some uncertainty is admitted about this chronology, this uncertainty is of the order of tens of years and not the hundreds required to make Smyth’s figure anything like feasible. The fact that more recent astronomically-based calculations suggest a date for the Great Pyramid that matches well with dates from textual sources (cf. Dr Kate Spence’s work I have referred you to before) reinforces the observation that Smyth’s date is quite simply wrong.

Furthermore, Smyth’s contention that the Great Pyramid was the most ancient of the pyramids and the others imitations of lesser value is denied by both textual evidence and the obvious evolution of the construction techniques used in pyramid construction.

The Step Pyramids at Saqqara were the first attempts to essay this type of construction and are dated to the reigns of Djoser (2667-2648 BC) and Sekhemkhet (2648-2640 BC), again stressing that the dates indicated are approximate.

The Step Pyramid (aka the Layer Pyramid) at Zawiyet el-Aryan is attributed to Khaba (2637-2613 BC).

The ‘fallen’ pyramid at Meidum is generally thought to have been the work of Huni (2637-2613 BC), although it may have been completed (or even built) by his son, Sneferu (2613-2589 BC). The Bent Pyramid and the Red Pyramid at Dahshur are both attributed to Sneferu. Interestingly, theses three pyramids contain more quarried stone than Smyth’s archetype.

All of which leads to the Great Pyramid of Khufu (2589-2566 BC) at Giza.

The design continuity from the Step pyramids, through Meidum, the Bent Pyramid and the Red Pyramid, leading to the Great Pyramid are evident and supported by the textual sources associated with each structure.

As Smyth’s Great Pyramid date and his idea that it was the ‘original’ pyramid sits so uncomfortably with this analysis, immediate doubt is cast on his Flood and Dispersion dates, leaving to one side the mythic qualities of these two events as against the substantial reality of the Great Pyramid.

So how do these dates fit with the chronology discussed above? The Flood date of 2743 BC comes towards the end of the 2nd Dynasty (2890-2686 BC), while the Dispersion date of 2528 BC takes place well after Khufu has finished the Great Pyramid. Indeed, Smyth’s Dispersion date comes some 150 years after work on the first pyramid was begun.

Finally, this analysis makes no mention of the clear evidence that exists for Predynastic (5500-3100 BC) and Early Dynastic (3100-2686 BC) settlement in Egypt. Even if David Rohl’s controversial and disputed revision of regnal dates was to be accepted in its entirety, it does nothing to establish an argument in support of a Flood dating to the 3rd Millenium BC, and certainly not one in 2743 BC, a Flood which should have wiped out all traces of this settlement.

Partial List of Sources
Davies, W.V., Reading the Past: Egyptian Hieroglyphs (or via: amazon.co.uk), London 1987
Emery, W.B., Archaic Egypt (or via: amazon.co.uk), Harmondsworth, 1961
Murray, Margaret A., The Splendour That Was Egypt (or via: amazon.co.uk), London 1963
Renfrew, Colin, Before Civilization: The Radiocarbon Revolution and Prehistoric Europe (or via: amazon.co.uk), London 1973
Shaw, Ian and Nicholson, Paul, British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt (or via: amazon.co.uk), London 1997
Tyldesley, Joyce, The Private Lives of the Pharaohs (or via: amazon.co.uk), London 2000
Uphill, Eric P., Egyptian Towns and Cities (or via: amazon.co.uk), Aylesbury, 1988
Wilkinson, J. Gardner, The Ancient Egyptians: Their Life and Customs (or via: amazon.co.uk), London 1853

Steviepinhead

Now that you're back "on topic," dave, when are you planning to get around to my questions about your claims about the shepherd Philiton?

Just, y'know, wondering...

You could, of course, always renounce or retract those claims, and just stick with "unknown builders plugged 'secret' cosmic numbers into the structure of the GP for unknown reasons for an unknown audience..." Except that that one seems to be growing just a tiny bit threadbare, as it's subjected to more and more intense scrutiny.

SpaghettiSawUs

June 23, 2007, 01:06 PM AFDave wrote:This coming from the man who rejects whole swathes of biological science while simultaneously admitting that he has never read a book on evolution by a non-creationist author.

The irony is truly sigworthy.

Spags

mung bean

Ah yes, these old questions. This was raised over at RD and never answered by you, Dave. I'm not sure whether or not it ever made it onto Occam's Famous Fleeing Chook List, but it would certainly be a worthy opening for such a list on this board.
Now Dave, here's teh Wiki link I quoted regarding the accuracy of the GP.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza
Note this section: "For four millennia it was the world's tallest building, unsurpassed until the 160 metre tall spire of Lincoln Cathedral was completed c. 1300. The accuracy of the pyramid's workmanship is such that the four sides of the base have a mean error of only 58 mm in length, and 1 minute in angle from a perfect square. The base is horizontal and flat to within 15 mm."
Now, even leaving aside the question of Smyth's instruments and granting him the (highly implausible) accuracy he claimed, how do you account for the inaccuracy of the pyramid's construction? If it was intended to encode esoteric knowledge with great accuracy why is it all a bit wonky? Remember you are claiming the builders had advanced technology so presumably they would have known about these errors.

Calilasseia

Incidentally, this business of π being encoded in the Great Pyramid ...

While it's perfectly possible for π to end up embedded in the ratios of measurements if one uses circular measuring tools for part of the job, this does not necessarily mean that the Ancient Egyptians knew its value to any great accuracy.

Indeed, the Rhind Papyrus contains as one of its set problems, the determination of the area of a circle. The problem is, that the method used is crude by modern standards, and involves approximating the circle with an octagon - a shape which the Egyptians could determine the area of more easily, since it was simply a matter of adding the areas of squares and triangles (again easily determined). The trouble is, that this determination of the area of the circle, if one uses it to obtain an approximation for π, yields a result that is not only crude compared to the basic 22/7 approximation (as Ericmurphy demonstrated by simple comparison earlier in this thread), but which could have been bettered by the Egyptians if they had devoted the requisite labour to the task because the Rhind Papyrus contains a long treatise on the derivation of fractions. More on this shortly.

Problem 48 in the Rhind Papyrus covers the matter of π, by virtue of finding a circle whose diameter equals 9 units, by overlaying a square upon it, trisecting it, removing the triangular corners (to form the octagon) and finding the area of that figure. The resulting approximation for π obtained from this problem is 256/81, which is approximately 3.1604 - as Ericmurphy demonstrated earlier, 22/7 (a simpler fraction) is a better approximation.

However, the labour required to compute a good rational approximation to π would have been, for the Egyptians, probably not worth the effort for simple practical purposes, because their method of representing rational numbers was a bureaucratic nightmare. Indeed I commented on this very fact at RDF, namely the unwieldy nature of simple arithmetic when conducted by the Ancient Egyptians, and I shall reprise the essential content of the requisite post (which was used originally to cast significant doubt upon the idea that the Ancient Egyptians knew about generalised exponentiation of the form y^x, which cropped up in the marathon Flood Debate Comment Thread at RDF - a whopping 411 pages of it!). I posted thus:

--------------------------------------------------------------

If the ancient Egyptians did know about exponentiation, it would be remarkable, given that they had problems with simple rational numbers.

I have before me a copy of the book Mathematics: An Introduction To Its Spirit And Use published by Scientific American (ISBN 0-7167-0369-9) which is part of my personal library. Pages 10 to 13 of that book cover a document called the Rhind Papyrus, which was obtained by A. Henry Rhind in 1858. This has since been determined to be, in the words of the author of this piece, "a practical handbook of Egyptian mathematics, written about 1700 BC". The document itself contains writing that states the author himself copied an earlier document, of which no trace was extant at the time the Rhind Papyrus was examined, and speculation exists that this earlier document may itself be a copy of an even earlier one.

The Rhind Papyrus is a useful insight into the Egyptian mind. To quote the book:

The document is written in hieratic, a cursive form of hieroglyphic, and is interesting because it demonstrates that the Egyptians, having alighted upon a particularly cumbersome notation for writing numbers, had trouble with the rational numbers. They could only handle fractions with 1 as the numerator, with the exception of 2/3, for which the Egyptians had a special symbol, and so all fractions of the form 2/5, /27 etc., had to be converted to sums of series of fractions of the form 1/n. The first section of the Rhind Papyrus contains a table of the division of 2 by odd numbers from 3 to 101. The book cites as examples of their working, that 3/4 was written as "1/2 1/4" (they did not have a plus sign) and 2/61 was written as "1/40 1/244 1/488 1/610". This cumbersome notation even found use among later Greek mathematicians, despite their having devised a better notation (Archimedes and Hero are cited as using the Egyptian method of writing out fractions) and the book even contains the interesting snippet that the method was still in use in some Russian documents as late as the 17th century AD!

The Rhind Papyrus contains 85 problems, centred upon fractions, solution of certain simple equations, and the measurement of areas and volumes - all standard practical fare for compulsive builders. Their arithmetic was essentially additive, and they reduced multiplication to repeated addition, and reduced division to repeated subtraction, operating directly in this mode. In this, they behaved in a manner similar to the first digital arithmetic processors that arose in the 20th century, but obviously a lot more slowly.

The description of the calculations presented would make most modern schoolchildren barf at having to use such tedious methods, though they alighted upon a variant of regula falsi as a means of dealing with problems involving arithmetic progressions. However, some ingenuity was evident, probably as a result of being forced upon them by the cumbersome notation and tedious basic methodology, but it can hardly be said that the document inspires confidence in any notion that the ancient Egyptians were aware of exponentiation as a general concept, because they confined themselves in the main to problems involving construction and the sharing of rations. Apparently another papyrus, the Reisner Papyrus, continues in the same vein.

--------------------------------------------------------------

As a consequence, ratios that bear some correlation with π in pyramid construction are more likely to be coincidental and an artefact of measurement techniques using circular measuring tools, than based upon any deep mystical significance.

mung bean

Callilactoseintolerantbutterflythingy, when we did Teh Rolly Ruler Theory over at RD it ended up getting sunk methinks. Mike and someone else posted up other derivations of the pyramid's ratios. The relevant area of the thread is the couple of pages each side of this link
( http://www.richarddawkins.net/forum/...=226808#226808 ), which I pulled up coz it's relevant to the current bunfight about accuracy.

Note that although the mean difference between sides is 58mm the largest difference is 300mm.
Dave, what is Smyth's ( and, incidentally, your ) explanation for this? If you are going to quote measurements to an accuracy of 0.01 inches you certainly have to deal with an discrepancy of a foot!

mung bean

Also, regarding Smyth's date for the GP I couldn't resist quoting myself from a few posts above that link.

Mike PSS

Thanks for the back-up mung old bean.

I NEVER subscribed to that Roller Ruler nonsense. I think in those pages I quoted some web page that showed the Egyptians used lard saturated twine (to prevent water intrusion) and trench water levels (which apparently can still be found around the GP base today) along with basic surveying instruments.

Roller Rulers. Ppschaaawwww!!!! :down: :angry: :Cheeky: :grin: :wave:

mung bean

From memory it said beeswax. Would've been less messy than lard too.