About Me
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I excavate the sand when I'm not busy with that odd activity which forces a group of people, quite young people, to listen to an older individual with some "titles" given by other individuals, even older than the older one.
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Interests
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Egyptology, first dinasties. Lost languages and systems of writing.
Travelling around the world.
Getting bored in accademic meetings!
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Favorite Movies
2001, Blade Runner, Spartacus, Benhur.
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Journal
Like all astonishing monuments with particular architecture or which has challenged the centuries, the pyramids have generates a long chain of fantasies and hypothesis regarding their nature and their ** functioning **.
Already Proclo from Costantinaeples, V century a.c., in Observations about Timeo, suggested that the pyramids were tombs with also the function of astronomic observatories.
This hypothesis, with a clear connection with the Babylonian tales of their “pyramids”, the Ziggurats, is the most innocent and probably the most “normal”.
But in our modern time, from the middle of 19th century, the pyramids became object of the most absurd and incredible conceptions and ideas. The most amazing aspect of this phenomenon is that some scientists of other fields entered the debate bringing their science to meet the odd ideas of esoteric experts and mystics. Unfortunately without the right knowledge in the proper fields of Egyptology, archeology, philology, ancient history
In this mathematicians and astronomers gave their contribution generating, probably without will, confusion, when not disinformation.
The Egyptologist Jean Capart – Memphis, à l’ombre des Pyramides, Bruxelles 1930, p 291 – wrote:
with the help of mathematicians, and often confounding themselves with them, the mystics have invented something we can call “the religion of the pyramids”.
Adolf Erman – Die Welt am Nil, Bilder aus dem alten Ägypten, Leipzig 1936, p 123 – complained that
still nowadays we have to see this silly things proposed again, even if a century of researches should have made them disappear from a while.
Jean Philip Laurer in the 70’s tried to follow the methodology of the “alternative Egyptologists”. This great archeologist underlined that also those Egyptologists who accepted to develop as hypothesis of work similar theories actually gave them academic authorities. This is why I prefer to see hypothesis only in academic environment, at least until they are not supported by enough evidences.
For example we can name William Kingsland who in 1932-1935, in The Great Pyramid in Fact and in Theory, expressed strong doubts regarding the utilization of the Pyramid only as a tomb.
The main “prophet” of this particular approach to the monuments of ancient Egypt and overall to the pyramids was a Royal Scottish Astronomer – this gave a great authority to the new “matter” – Charles Piazzi-Smyth. This known and appreciated scholar was interested by the theories of the friend John Taylor who expressed them in the work “The Great Pyramid: Why was it built and Who built it?<br><br>In that work Taylor dated the Pyramid at 2404 b.c. – wrong – on the base of a calculation: 1600 years after the birth of Adam. This according to the calculation of the Archbishop of Armagh, James Usher, who – in 1658 – said to have calculated that God created the world on 22nd October 4004 b.c.
Taylor didn’t deny that the pyramids are tombs, but he said that so perfect monuments were beyond human capability and he suggested a supernatural origin. Taylor considered Egyptians pagan and so he thought that they hadn’t the divine grace to build perfect structures. Starting from the historian Joseph Flavius who quoted Maneton about the Hyksos he arrived to identify the Hyksos as builders of the pyramids. This is totally anti historical since the Hyksos reached Egypt well after the construction of the pyramids of the first dynasties. He said that the Hyksos entered Egypt leaded by Sam, Noah’s son …. Or by Melchisedec . Piazzi-Smyth made the disaster between 1865 and 1867 when in “Life and Work at the Great Pyramid” he accused the Egyptologists to take their knowledge from a race of idolatries and pagans. He was even so sure of the theory of his friend Taylor that he introduces a new unit of measure: he pyramidal inch equal to 1/25 of the sacred cubit. In this he used the work of Isaac Newton, “A Dissertation on Cubits”, in which the great scientists reasoned that Jews used a different cubit with reference to the one used by the pagan. Newton said that this cubit was variable. Piazzi-Smyth, using his own calculations, fixed this cubit at 63.56 cm. It’s out of doubt that the academic authority of the Scottish scholar and his position in the religious environment of that time gave a great resonance and importance to this new doctrine and his words put in a bad light the field of the scientific Egyptology just when it was developing – in late 19th century there were still Egyptologists who used dynamite to open tombs! Piazzi-Smyth knew that the ancient Egyptians used a unit of measure, the Royal Cubit – 52.35 – in some periods 52.40 cm – but he called it a pagan unit of measure, a symbol of idolatry and he said that Caine invented it. So, using the “perfect cubic” Piazzi-Smyth and the followers of this new doctrine used the Great Pyramid as a Bible in stone and they took prophecies out of it. Of course it seems that in the Great Pyramids there is all, from the crisis of the ’29 to the return of Israel in the Holy Land. Note: according to pyramidiologists the Exodus was dated at 1846 b.c. – under the reign of Amenemhat III, XII dynasty. After Sesostris III
An other common mistake – or strategy? – is to mix the pyramids with the later religion of the Egyptians. In VII – VI century b.c. the foreign influences were already present and the development of he philosophy and the religion of that culture was changing the perspective about the very ancient past of Kemet. To use texts from that period to interpret the pyramids is like to use a text of nowadays to interpret the great Roman monuments of the 2nd century a.c.
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