Hopefully enough people will tell you about the merits of recycling refuse materials. I think I’d like to say a few things about recycling pyramids and other ancient architecture.
In the past few days, I’ve seen how the data for Germany’s Pommelte henge contains some of the key datapoints for the Stonehenge sarcen circle, and looked again a little more at the resemblance between the outer sarcen circle’s measurements and those of Rollright and Clava.
While each ancient monument may have clever ways of addressing more novel concerns, there’s still a bit of overlap that seems to be in evidence.
That territory is also shared by Egyptian pyramids (not to mention that there seem to be shared measures between Stonehenge, and the Great Pyramid and Mycerinus Pyramid at Giza, with the Great Pyramid’s slope length coming out at twice the inner perimeter length for the sarcen circle and the length down the descending passage before it branches into the ascending passage apparently being equal to the inner diameter of the sarcen circle, as well as the outer sarcen circle perimeter apparently being equal to the edge length of the Mycerinus Pyramid (120 Megalithic Yards of 2.720174976 ft).
I didn’t save them (I should have), but in passing during my last binge reading Egyptological articles, I found references to parts of earlier pyramids or temples being incorporated into later works. (Zahi Hawass also mentions recycling of pyramid material in the “updated” version of Petrie’s Pyramids and Temples of Giza).
The authors seemed to suggest something that may parallel some of what I see with the numbers, a possible sentiment on the part of ancient builders that they were continuing a tradition by literally incorporating parts of past pyramids into the present ones, although I’m a bit puzzled that some of it ended up as unseen filler material instead of being proudly displayed as fulfilling some type of mandate.
Although they are contingent on the accuracy of the respective source data, the following items appear in my notes
Here was an interesting thing, though – base values for the final Djoser pyramid of 121 by 109 meters give a perimeter of 3018.3728462 / 2, if I’m not mistaken; compare to the 3018.110298 base perimeter (paved) of the Great Pyramid I work with, and the possible 301.8110298 height of Sneferu’s pyramid I recently looked at.
(Petrie in Medum (pg 6) gives this figure for the step pyramid of Meidum: Height: 3619 inches – that’s 3619 / 12 = 301.5833333).
The best guess here is of course going to be a height of 301.8110298 ft as the original design specification.
These reinforce the validity of the Munck model (or “paved” model) for the Great Pyramid with perimeter length of 3018.110298 ft, different than the figure for the pyramid as it presently stands, about 3022 feet or so, also a meaningful figure (Megalithic Yard / 360) x 10^n.
Lehner and Verner give the base of the Red Pyramid as about 722 feet, but Josef Dorner (via John Romer) gives 219.08 m = 718.7664042 ft, which is quite similar to the 718.9741438 ft edge length calculated for the Great Pyramid as it presently stands.
There are more examples of this as well.
With no shortage of interesting numbers, why do we see repetition like this? Most of these figures don’t seem to be whole numbers of Royal Cubits or Remens; does the repetition or recycling of these numbers point to a special significance that we may have yet to understand?
–Luke Piwalker
Luke Piwalker 