OFF: Re: Pyramids

[J Strobridge]

WARNING ** this has no HW or BOC refernce at all - unless you count NT
playing flute in the Great Pyramid as something remotely relevant to
this.   I really wish I'd heard that for real **


Gordon Hundley writes:

> Yes, the basic insight that Bauval made while looking at Orion's belt was
> that it was the same as the ground plan of the three pyramids at Giza.
> Since then, he's done a lot of research and involved people from several
> disciplines in order to show that not only is this the case, but that the
> other major pyramids (4th through 6th dynasties) are also laid out as
> other stars in the sky, and that the Nile valley fits as the Milky Way.

Yep - while I agree absolutely with everything GinGoblin wrote on this -
the TV prog I saw had enough visual overlay evidence to make the
suggestion of at least the three pyramids a fairly compelling one.

However I remember being less convinced by the other pyramids (there were
significant gaps as I recall and, as always in these cases, sufficient
stars in the sky to assign any pyramid to something, whether obvious or
not).



> That's strange enough, but the degree of accuracy, and the knowledge of
> advanced astronomy, physics and mathematics that it suggests completely
> goes against all previously accepted views of ancient civilisations.

However I must protest this!    I don't think anyone, particularly
not any scholars of 'ancient civilisations' ever, ever, underestimates
the intellectual capability of the scholars of that civilisation or
culture.

There is absolutely no question that folk of 7,000 years ago were
perfectly capable of the sort of empirical observation that leads to
theories about the physical world, the space around it and the capacity
to engineer constructions that might reflect it.  It is fully accepted
that the only things 'ancient civilisations' may have lacked are 20thC
resources but they had plenty of their own and so ancient civilisations
are only that - ancient.   Not dumb.

>
> That's before we even go into stuff like the Chinese pyramids in Xian
> province,

no problem here - if you are creating a tall stone structure that is to
hold a building on its top and you don't want it to fall down then a
pyramid is the inevitable shape it'll take!

> If you're facinated by this sort of thing, then Amateur Astronomy and
> Earth Sciences (AA&ES) is well worth subscribing to. The sci.archeology
> newsgroup has occasional gems and breaking news, but, as ever with
> UseNet, the signal:noise ratio is bad.
>

The trouble is that a lot of wild speculation gets put forward as
absolute statements of truth without the theories ever being tested or
satisfactorily proved. Sadly this happens a lot in archaeology and any
scholar in this discipline who puts forward a theory must expect it to
be argued against and doubted for a very, very long time until
sufficient proofs are amassed for general acceptance.   And sometimes
this never happens.   But there are still an awful lot of folk who
publish their speculation as the *only* correct theory despite
argument to the contrary which makes fringe or speculative archaeology
very deep water to trawl around in.

jill   (still waiting to hear the definitive explanation about crop
circles)

 ==========================================================================
J.D.Strobridge at ed.ac.uk                         eset08 at tattoo.ed.ac.uk
                                                ELIJSA at srv0.arts.ed.ac.uk

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