engbren at GHMB has been working on what I think is most likely a very worthwhile academic paper regarding the possibility of Saturn exerting an influence on the design of Egyptian pyramids though various possible mathematical fingerprints.
It reminds me that mathematical fingerprints for the planets seem somewhat difficult to come by. While I wouldn’t put anything past the ancients personally, the ancients knowing the distance of the planets from the earth or the sun or the diameter of Mars may be rather far-fetched to academicians and I don’t exactly blame them.
Even the question of whether the ancients were able to calculate the sizes of the planets has proven difficult. Our Founder Carl Munck had determined an interesting figure for the size of Mars at the equator. It escapes me now because there seems little point in remembering it, because only a few years after I’d been working with it, NASA completely revised their figure courtesy of improvements in areography (Mars geography) which was brought about by new data from further successive Mars missions. In a very real way, asking the ancients to know this data is asking them to know what even NASA may not know.
Angular values can also be difficult; I think in one place an angular value for some of Saturn’s retrograde functions was posited, a value of about 3.5 degrees with a stipulation of +/- 1 degree from an academicians. In our terms, roughly 1/4 of all possible valid numbers occur between 2.5 and 4.5, probably making it absolutely impossible to get a mathematical lock on Saturn using this parameter.
Still, retrograde values may be a great place to look because it’s a rather dramatic phenomenon from “the view on the ground”, and one that is accessible to even the “primitive” astronomer.
I’ve been hesitant to move forward with working retrograde (and prograde) values because astonishingly, the only data I have on the subject is still what we get from Wikipedia, which looks very much rounded to the nearest whole number.
However, even if we can’t rationalize the ancients sticking to whole numbers, one premise of my work is that they did use use some rather sophisticated decimal numbers to emulate simple whole numbers from calendars – 353.9334578 for the 354 day Lunar Year of technically about 354.36 days, and so forth.
For that we can hope that even rounded numbers for figures related to planetary retrograde cycles can at least tell us part of the story.
In a way it’s not really fair for me to just plop this data down on the table; there are some important comments that could be made and there are a number of interesting observations that could be made. On the other hand it’s not probably not fair for me to just sit on the data sets until I can figure out what to do with them, if they might be of assistance to others in the meantime.
One important thing that I think may be apparent in general is a number of additional “serendipitous coincidences” of the sort that likely lent themselves to the original development of such a calendar system that could meet such a grueling demand as being all-encompassing. One of them is that Mars Orbital Period / Mars Days in Retrograde looks very much like yet another instance of the Royal Cubit about literally falling from the sky.
Out of curiosity, while I was at it I included Uranus and even Neptune to see if we can learn more about whether the ancients devised a calendar system that could incorporate them too if they had somehow known about them. Some of what I’ve read about the possibility of the ancients having observed Uranus doesn’t it make it sound all that unlikely that they may have managed to spot it.
I don’t think these numbers can really tell us whether they knew Uranus or Neptune were there or not, but I am interested to know if ancient calendars or calendar-related metrology could have accommodated them or not, and little devoted study has been given to the subject so far on my part. I’m intrigued that Neptune may be capable of generating the same Mayan Wonder Number that seems to be something we may be able to generate with the formula of Venus Synodic Period / Venus Days in Retrograde.
I think that even for being offered with so little in the way of commentary, there may be some very rewarding things in store for anyone who wishes to linger over it for just a little bit. Anyone who’s been able to follow this blog very closely for very long may see a surprising number of familiar-looking figures, but perhaps even more importantly, there are some hints that we may still not quite a complete vocabulary of ancient astronomical constants.
There probably even some important clues here to the absolute identities of a few planetary cycle values that may remain somewhat uncertain such as Mercury’s Synodic Period. It’s always almost too easy to take that one as being equal to 80 Indus Feet in Imperial, but somewhere in previous posts I’ve been able to make some alternative suggestions that may have considerable merit themselves.
We may even see some equations here that ancient people tried to communicate thought mythology; there may be more than once instance of that related to Saturn visible in the tables.
Without further ado then, I will hope that I was successful in weeding out the last of the errors, and put this at this disposal of anyone who might be interested or assisted by it. I should have done this much sooner since of course that really is by far the best way to gain an overview of extensive data sets is to try to lay them out in some kind of orderly fashion.
–Luke Piwalker
Luke Piwalker 