Great pyramid entrance tunnel not astronomically aligned

Science Frontiers ^ | Nov-Dec 1985 | William R. Corliss

[wyattearp]

btw, what cheaper sources of protein was there?

Haven't actually run a cost analysis (and I'm not really sure how), so I may have been a bit premature. I seem to remember that the cattle had to be brought from quite a distance, and were being butchered on-site. They did find a lot of fish remains as well, but the amount of cattle surprised the researchers. It's just not something that was generally fed to slaves, at least not on a regular basis.

I'll try to dig up a bit more later today. Gotta run.

[S0122017]

I wonder whether fish bones are preserved as well as cattle bones. Preservation of bodily remains seems to go well in those regions, but still, fish bones are small and can easily be displaced by storms. And shrimps and any other seafood would not even leave remains.

Im just saying, many food items would not leave remains or are less likely to leave remains then huge cattle bones.

[vannrox]

YES. Of course. The earlier alignment was based on an inncorrect date of construction, and did not take into account earth pole shifts and axis reorientations.

[SunkenCiv]

IOW, it's just some semantic rephrasing by Lehner, and in the case of Hawass -- "The pyramids were probably not built by slaves because slave labour was not widely used in Egypt at the time" -- just denial, followed by the use of the denial as evidence that the denial has a basis in evidence. :') It was slave labor. The Nile flood, coupled with agricultural techniques adapted to the conditions, made large agricultural surpluses available, leading to literacy, arts, and of course monumental works of construction for the aggrandizement of the god-king. A peasant in the society would have been much better pleased to keep the fruits of his labor, and enjoy the leisure time made possible by his industry. Not that I'm a Marxist of course. :')

[SunkenCiv]

Makes me wonder what they did at weddings in the old days. Scream "ALALALALALALALAH" and throw spears up into the air?

Heh... the non-Semitic ancient Egyptians (the aristocracy) had a pretty good time most of the time. They messed around a lot before marriage, and were expected to be faithful after marriage, so the weddings may have been a nice mixture of celebration and wake, kinda like now. ;')

[SunkenCiv]

vannrox: YES. Of course. The earlier alignment was based on an inncorrect date of construction, and did not take into account earth pole shifts and axis reorientations.

I'd agree that the Sphinx (and at least one of the Giza temples) isn't per se of 4th Dynasty date, but I don't accept the claims of Predynastic origin of the Giza pyramids. There used to be painted plastered coatings on the interior walls of the Khufu pyramid, with scenes and texts from his reign, the last surviving of which were recorded over a hundred years ago. They have since turned to dust, like so much of the ancient Egyptian art.

The inscription found by Vyse is not a fake (one of the many unfounded claims by Bauval and others; I think Hancock has repudiated that claim) and reads, "How mighty is the Great White Crown of Khufu gang?" ("the Great White Crown of Khufu Gang" was one of the construction crews' nickname).

There's no ancient inscription anywhere which says, hey, the pyramid has these cool alignments, so looking for alignments doesn't make a great deal of sense. That doesn't stop people from looking though, which another example of how so-called archaeoastronomy is mostly modern day phrenology. For example:

Dating of Black Sea Flood
Michael Manneville
September 21, 2000 19:04:47 EDT

My own hunch is that a very small dislocation of the axis occured duiring this time, contributing about half of the total error in the alignment of the Great Pyramid (two arcminutes out of 4 arcminutes, the remainder of the error can be attributed to annual creep in the average location of the pole). At the moment this is way beyond my hard correlations, so consider this highly speculative.

Some still accept that alignments exist; when shown that they don't, then they must have been ruined by some kind of physical change to the Earth.

Now, I'm probably lumped into the loony bin by some, because I'm a catastrophist (specifically, a secular catastrophist), and the Great Pyramid was shaken during or shortly after its construction. The corbels over the Grand Gallery are hanging on by a fraction of an inch on one end. Also at that time, the first of the tunnels was dug from the top of the Grand Gallery into the bottommost relieving chamber over the King's Chamber, in order (apparently) to inspect for damage without disturbing the burial chamber.

But even that bias mitigates against Giza pyramid star alignments' being anything but a modern invention.

RightWhale: Somewhere on the internet is a set of 3-D AutoCAD drawings of the Great Pyramid. You can change your perspective until you can sight right along the star shafts; it becomes clear that nothing can be sighted through the crooked star shafts, although when the pyramid was in construction and only half complete the shafts might have been straight enough to allow sighting through them.

One of the "Queen's Chamber" shafts is straight; one has an obtuse bend in it to (if memory serves) avoid hitting the Grand Gallery. However, neither of them opened into the "Queen's Chamber" when the pyramid was built -- those holes were dug in the past hundred years or so. And the top ends are capped not only by the upper layer of stones, but (in one case) by a stone door of sorts. It doesn't sound like they're star shafts in the first place. Perhaps they were vents to relieve the humidity (the pyramid absorbs water, even without tourists' exhale, which could be the reason the plaster decorations crumbled off), a phenomenon discovered during construction.

One recent thing from Schoch that I found interesting is the idea that the well chamber, which was dug into the bedrock, was constructed as a burial chamber at an earlier time, but sometime post-Sneferu the site was appropriated by Khufu.

Exploring the Great Pyramid
by Dr. Robert M. Schoch
2005

Carved in the bedrock underlying the Great Pyramid, this room looks truly chaotic. Huge chunks of rock emerge from the floor, and there is also a strange "well" or "pit" on one end. Many traditional Egyptologists consider the Subterranean Chamber unfinished or abandoned. But why an unfinished chamber in what is arguably the most precisely aligned and built structure in the entire world? ...a suggestion made by Robert Bauval, one I had independently been thinking about too. Perhaps the Subterranean Chamber, and the natural rock mound in which it is found - - a rock mound that is now covered over by and enclosed in the Great Pyramid - - is much older than the Great Pyramid itself? Was it considered sacred for thousands of years before the Great Pyramid was actually built?

[SunkenCiv]

The Histories: Euterpe
by Herodotus
tr by George Rawlinson

...and I observed that there were shells upon the hills, and that salt exuded from the soil to such an extent as even to injure the pyramids; and I noticed also that there is but a single hill in all Egypt where sand is found, namely, the hill above Memphis; and further, I found the country to bear no resemblance either to its borderland Arabia, or to Libya- nay, nor even to Syria, which forms the seaboard of Arabia; but whereas the soil of Libya is, we know, sandy and of a reddish hue, and that of Arabia and Syria inclines to stone and clay, Egypt has a soil that is black and crumbly, as being alluvial and formed of the deposits brought down by the river from Ethiopia.

Salt injured the pyramids...

[RightWhale]

I have seen one picture of the main entrance where it appears the interior slope is lined with gigantic stone cogs, as if there were a gigantic machine at one time that used to ride up and down the cogs like the Mount Washington railway.

[null and void]

There used to be painted plastered coatings on the interior walls of the Khufu pyramid, with scenes and texts from his reign, the last surviving of which were recorded over a hundred years ago. They have since turned to dust, like so much of the ancient Egyptian art.

Yet on an earlier thread someone pointed out that the Sphinx' head was too small for the body, and the general consensus was that a later Pharaoh had it re-carved with his own likeness.

It seems to me that chipping off old plaster and re-frescoing was a much easier job for Khufu's apple polishers...

[wyattearp]

...nd in the case of Hawass...

Doggone it, I was trying so hard not to quote Hawass. The "...slave labour was not widely used in Egypt at the time..." should have been a clue. I thought the phrasing sounded familiar. I should have checked it further.

I don't think that it was just semantic rephrasing by Lehner. The labor was compulsory, but it was paid. It's not a whole lot different from mandatory military service like modern-day Israel, except that it was a whole lot more than a two-year hitch. Kind of like permanent, part-time, mandatory physical labor.

Don't get me wrong: I don't approve of mandatory labor, paid or otherwise. Far from it. However, it doesn't really equate to slavery. I'm not aware of any records of peasant farmers being bought and sold like commodities, for example. Another example would be punishment. There was whipping as punishment in the early US Navy, and confinement with only bread and water up until just a few years ago. That doesn't mean that US sailors were slaves.

I don't think that it was merely semantics. He was making what I see as a valid distinction between slavery and mandatory service. What about the military draft? Is that slavery because the service is mandatory? I don't see that it is, and I believe that is the point that Lehner was trying to make.

[SunkenCiv]

Yet on an earlier thread someone pointed out that the Sphinx' head was too small for the body, and the general consensus was that a later Pharaoh had it re-carved with his own likeness.

The face is definitely not that of Khafre, but generally Egyptologists say that it was sculpted for him and in his "living image". And it is out of scale relative to other sphinxes, which suggests that either it is really old and has been refined and recarved, or that it was something else to start with (whatever its age) and not a lion/sphinx at all. I've seen it suggested that it was originally a sculpture of Anubis. In that case the nose and ears could easily have fallen off because the stone isn't all that great.

Miroslav Verner has said that the face is that of Khufu. Since there is just one known image of Khufu (and that is about the size of a fist, with a head perhaps 1 1/4 inches in size), that's an easier position to defend (vs the idea that it is Khafre) because of the lack of other images with which to compare it. In addition, there's a New Kingdom copy of an Old Kingdom record of Khufu's having repaired the Great Sphinx, which has been cited by Verner, and by those (such as J.A. West) who favor a much older Sphinx. There is a monumental head (fragment of a larger statue, never found) which in recent years has been identified as Khufu, but without further examples (especially those with a cartouche), there's no way to verify it.

There's also at least one advocate that the Sphinx bears the likeness of Djedjefre, elder son and successor of Khufu, and predecessor of Khafre. Since there there's only one (if memory serves) suspected image of Djedjefre, that's easier to defend than the idea that it's Khafre. :')

The Dobecki et al study of the subsurface weathering around the Sphinx suggests to Schoch that the rump of the Sphinx was carved out much later than the area in front of the Sphinx, perhaps thousands of years earlier. That's a bit of a problem for the argument that the Sphinx is out of scale, because if the rump was carved out later, then it wasn't a lion (or a dog) in the first place -- at best, we can only say we don't know what it was when first carved.

It seems to me that chipping off old plaster and re-frescoing was a much easier job for Khufu's apple polishers...

Since the pyramid was built for Khufu, they saved the first step of that. There's simply zero evidence (real evidence, such as inscriptions) that the pyramid was built by someone else, or dates from a much earlier time.

[null and void]

There's simply zero evidence (real evidence, such as inscriptions) that the pyramid was built by someone else, or dates from a much earlier time.

True, but it's fun to speculate. (And fairly harmless, as long as you remember you are speculating)...

[SunkenCiv]

:')

[SunkenCiv]

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[Robert A Cook PE]

26th BC?

No.... Only about 3000-3500 BC.

[SunkenCiv]

The Great Pyramid was built in the 2500s BC.

[SunkenCiv]

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[SunkenCiv]

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[mad_as_he$$]

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