Athansios Angelopoulos, author of Metron Ariston, has provided us with plans and data for (among other things) Hadrian’s Library. I have not looked at much the material carefully yet, but already there may be several things worth mention.
Says Wikipedia,
“Hadrian’s Library was created by Roman Emperor Hadrian in AD 132 on the north side of the Acropolis of Athens
The building followed a typical Roman Forum architectural style, having only one entrance with a propylon of Corinthian order a high surrounding wall with protruding niches (oikoi, exedrae) at its long sides, an inner courtyard surrounded by columns and a decorative oblong pool in the middle. The library was on the eastern side where rolls of papyrus “books” were kept. Adjoining halls were used as reading rooms, and the corners served as lecture halls.
The library was seriously damaged by the Herulian invasion of 267 and repaired by the prefect Herculius in AD 407-412.”
Thus we may ultimately have some questions about how the proportions described by Angelopoulos came to be, but for now let us take a closer look at a few of those proportions themselves.
To be honest, I am not quite certain what to make of the figure 82.75918635 ft. I think it may be noteworthy that some of the figures here are more that may be capable of tricking us if we are not aware of the possible imperative to reduce the pool of available whole numbers in order to ward off metrological chaos.
The truth may be that even a single metrological unit used with even such a restricted pool of whole numbers can be enough to create confusion that requires us to look for secondary means of confirmation.
At any rate, what I would most like to showcase here at the moment is the length and width of the complex made of the library and the two adjacent auditoriums. In Imperial Feet these are 266.8799213 and 58.80905512 respectively.
By now, these are hopefully very readily recognizable as
266.8799213 x 4 = 1067.519685 = ~1000 Hashimi Cubits 1067.438159, and
58.80905512 x 2 = 117.6181102 = ~50 Megalithic Feet = 50 x 1.177245771 = 58.86228855.
If these are the intended figures, the overall length / width ratio would be
(1067.438159 / 4 = 266.859398) / 58.86228855 = 4.533624946
That’s a bit unexpected – it might be more comfortable had it come out 4.523893421 for example, but technically the figure is ten times 1/6 of a Megalithic Yard of 2.720174976; thus it may be an acceptable figure whose “reason for being” remains for the moment better known to the architect than to ourselves.
We might assume that if 4.533624946 is the intended figure, that it was considered acceptable because it has some significance to astronomy, as do the elements it is constructed from here. It takes only a few simple calculations to see that this actually does appear to be the case; furthermore, the products of the library complex’s length and width also possess astronomical significance.
These do not give us the true area of the complex since the diagram shows the library extending out further than the auditoriums, but it does provide us with mathematically and astronomically significant figures.
Let’s look at the auditoriums for a moment. If they are designed symmetrically to be equal at both ends, they should have interior of length 16.1 m and width 14.26 m. Since we don’t need to convert units to check ratios since ratios will remain the same regardless of unit, we can use the metric figures to estimate the proportions of the rooms 16.1 / 14.26 = 1.129032258.
This figure, impossibly large to be 1/200 of any sensible approximation of the Venus Orbital Period, nonetheless equates to 400 / 354.2857143, a very good approximation of the ~354.36 day Lunar Year.
We note that some may wish to interpret the raw value of 52.82152231 as related to the 5280 foot mile or to the Indus Foot of about 5280 / 4800 = 1.1; to keep to our experimental assessment, the raw calculation for square footage of one or both the auditoriums given the data available is
52.82152231 x 46.78477690 = 2471.243137 = 4000 / 1.618618557.
This is presumably referring, if the data is accurate, to the form of Phi that was extracted from the Great Pyramid by means of close approximation and actual in situ use, namely our friend “Not-Phi” 1.618829140.
From here, given certainty about the identity of 46.78477690 ft, we might back calculate the true intended value of 52.82152231 ft. I am not quite certain what 46.78477690 is meant to be.
Those familiar with Munck’s materials know that 46756.36369 (1.718873385 x 2.720174976 x 10^n) was a number he associated “geomathematically” with the pyramid of Menkaure (Mycerinus); 48 Roman feet would be 48 x .9733868822 ft = 46.72257035 ft = 384 Egyptian Remens.
Once again, ancient metrology can become overpopulated with similar figures even with a drastically restricted pool of whole numbers such as I am using, and we are reminded of that again here already because in spite of those two glittering possibilities, we may also wish to to note that 5 / 1.067438159 = 46.84112103 / 10^n, 46.78477690 x 45 = 2105.314961. Thus we could also be seeing Hashimi Cubits again, or Palestinian Cubits respectively.
The latter may make a little more sense if what is emerging is a pattern of someone opting to use a palette of typical units.
If that is the case, we might expect to find next perhaps the Megalithic Yard or the Egyptian Mystery Unit, or perhaps Indus Units.
Indeed, 92.06036745 could be in Indus Units (92.06036745 x 12 = 1.104724409 ft x 10^n) and 82.75918635 could be in Megalithic Yards (225 / 82.75918635 = 2.71831417), which actually resembles the version of the Megalithic Yard that can be constructed from the Harris-Stockdale Megalithic Foot or something very much like it such as 1.177245771.
Its a bit unusual, but 52.82152231 x 2304 = 1.217007874 x 10^n, which could be in Remens. 82.75918635 could also be a display of the Egyptian Mystery Unit in Inverse form: (1 / 72) / 1.676727943 = 82.83328817.
This is not necessarily an easy puzzle even when we may be able to see the theme of the choices of measurement.
The ratio between the length of the Library and of the auditoriums is 28.06 m / 25.225 m = 1.112388503 = ~250 / 224.7416251, which looks very like the very typical backhanded tribute to the Venus Orbital Period that we see so much of. Hopefully then if we manage to identify either 28.06 or 25.225 in feet, knowing this ratio might be will allow us to know what both values really represent.
The ratio between outer length of auditorium and reading room combined (28.06 m) and inner length of auditorium (16.1) is 28.06 / 16.1 = 1.742857143. As a length measure, this would most likely be in Egyptian Sacred Cubits since we can perfect the estimate as sqrt 4860 / 40 = 1.742842505 and we have learned that valid square roots of whole numbers are in practice the essence of the Egyptian Sacred Cubit (see also Thom Mid-Clyth Quantum), while in origin the Egyptian Sacred Cubit seems as it may be be Remen x Royal Cubit, using their values in “modern” feet.
I think I will leave it at that for a first look. Once again, I hope we have made some important inroads with the particular subject even if it may be a particularly challenging design to interpret.
–Luke Piwalker
Luke Piwalker 