Talking Pyramids

Yesterday the Giza 3D Project was launched at a gala event at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA).

After the event I caught up virtually with Peter Der Manuelian, Giza Archives Director at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and Philip J. King Professor of Egyptology at Harvard University, and Mehdi Tayoubi, Vice-President Digital & Experiential Strategy at Dassault Systémes to find out a bit more about the project.
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World leading 3D software company Dassault Systémes and Harvard University last night officially unveiled Giza 3D to the world at a gala event at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA). It presents the results of over a 100 years of work by the MFA and Harvard University expedition led by George Reisner in the first half of the 20th century.

Almost forty years of archaeological data collected from those expeditions has, over the past ten years, been laboriously digitised to form the Giza Archives. Read the rest of this entry »

A workshop on pyramids is to be held at Geijersalen, Engelska Parken, Uppsala University over two days, May 31st and June 1st.

Speakers will include such notables as Denis Searby, Peter Jánosi, Miroslav Barta, Tarek el-Awady, Jaromir Krejci, Mark Lehner, Catherine Berger, Harold Hays, Roman Gundacker, Nils Billing and Erika Meyer-Dietrich.

There are some very interesting topics on the programme, such as Erika Meyer-Dietrich’s session: Sonic acting in the pyramid of queen Neith – statements about sound in ritual texts from the time of Pepi II and Catherine Berger’s talk about the Pyramid Texts in the recently discovered pyramid of Queen Behenu.

I look forward to reading reports of the event and perhaps even viewing some video footage. Hopefully audio from all sessions will be released afterwards.
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Polish researcher Teodozja Rzeuska says her research indicates that the Meidum necropolis was used as late as the New Kingdom period, extending its history by over 1500 years.

After early publications by pioneering archaeologist William Matthew Flinders Petrie and others, Rzeuska says that it became “dogma that in Meidum the dead had been buried only in the early reign of the fourth dynasty.” Her research re-analyzed the pottery, other artifacts and dated excavation reports to completely reshape the chronology of the site. This new study calls for a reexamination of the many reports based on the old chronology, which were uncritically dated to the early Old Kingdom.

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You may have noticed that the activity here on Talking Pyramids has died down a bit over the past few months. My ever faithful and trusty assistant Bennu has continued posting lots of news items every day on Twitter, which you can read in the side bar on Talking Pyramids.

GooglePlus
The reason for the slow down of posts here on Talking Pyramids is partly due to GooglePlus. Since June last year I’ve been spending a lot of time trying out the new service by Google called GooglePlus. In case you’re not familiar with it, GooglePlus, or G+ for short, is a little bit like a multi-faceted blog, allowing one to post to different ‘Circles’ or groups of people.
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There have been a few new additions to the Pyramid Texts Online website that I’d like to share with you all.

Hieroglyphic Flash Cards
A new online hieroglyphic flash card tool has been created by Plan Zero.

If you are interested in learning the basics of hieroglyphs these are definitely worth a look. It’s still fresh and new (mind the wet paint) so there may be some missing phonograms at the moment but it is expanding every day.

Before you can view the next card you must enter the corresponding transliteration of the hieroglyph, which can be entered via the on-screen letters or your computer’s keyboard. It has both the European and British styles of transliteration as well as MdC, which you can switch between. This is a nice touch as it enables the student to work just on MdC, or the transliteration of their choice. If you leave the page you can pick up where you left off when you return.

It is easily the best system of flash cards I have seen online yet…including those wonderful vocab videos from Bennu.

Visit the Pyramid Texts Online Tools page, and find the link under the section “Flash Cards”.

The Organisation of the Pyramid Texts
Dr Harold Hays recently contacted to let me know about the forthcoming publication he has written about the Pyramid Texts, The Organization of the Pyramid Texts (a 2 volume set). It should appear before the end of July, this year.

Dr Hays offered a tantalising overview:

“It’s the first comprehensive study of the Pyramid Texts since 1981, and one of the first studies in Egyptology to apply performance theory to the study of ancient Egyptian religion. The first volume makes a classification of Pyramid Texts and determines their original settings in life, as well as dealing in detail with the effects of the transposition of ritual scripts to the pyramid tombs. The second volume consists of reference material: a set of listings of typological information about individual texts, their situations of transmission, and the most important motifs found among texts, as well as a set of 32 plans and 15 charts.”

He also gave me a link to his latest paper, ‘The Death of the Democratization of the Afterlife’, which he asked if I would add it to the Pyramid Texts Online Library. You can find this paper along with other papers by Dr Harold Hays in the Pyramid Texts Online Library.

If we built the Great Pyramid today, how much would it cost?

It’s a question that pops up from time to time and it’s one that’s not easy to answer. Even taking the shortcut of utelising today’s technology the cost would still be sky-high.

Architect Jean-Pierre reckons it could probably be built for about 5 billion dollars…from the inside out using the Internal Spiral Ramp theory.

“I am quite sure we could do the same today, and it would be the most economical method,” Houdin told Life’s Little Mysteries.

There would be two main differences between pyramid-building now and then. First, “Instead of people pulling the sleds that carry the stones up the ramps, you would use something with an engine,” he said. Secondly, “for the (topmost) 10 or 15 meters, you would use a small crane.”

Just as cranes are lifted onto the tops of skyscrapers today, a helicopter would apposition a crane onto a flat top of the pyramid. Stones and other construction materials dragged up to that level via the internal ramp would then be set in place by the crane. (It wouldn’t be feasible to build the entire structure with cranes, Houdin said, because they wouldn’t be able to reach far enough to lift materials from the base to the center of the top of the pyramid.)

It just so happens that there are plans to build another pyramid.

The Earth Pyramid project is not quite as large as Khufu’s pyramid but it will still be quite expensive to build.

The outer facing blocks will be made from a range of different types of stone, giving it a patchwork-like appearance. The first course of casing stones that will form the base of the pyramid will consist of 276 blocks with the aim of receiving one stone from each of the world’s nations. The expense of quarrying these stones would be exorbitant and so to keep costs low different methods to create the stones is being considered.

One of these is the Geopolymer method, currently being explored by the team at Louisiana Tech, that will enable the blocks to be poured like cement into molds onsite. It is hoped that the Earth Pyramid’s construction will provide an ideal opportunity to demonstrate the potential of environmentally-friendly technologies for use in future construction projects.

As well as having Jean-Pierre and myself on the team to offer guidance on ancient and modern building methods, world leading architectural design and engineering firm Arup has also recently become involved in the project. Arup is best known for it’s structural design of the Sydney Opera House and also it’s work for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing and the team will be bringing their expertise in structural engineering, selection of construction materials, environmental & sustainability aspects to the project.

Read more about the Earth Pyramid at the project’s website: http://earthpyramid.org

Sources:
MSNBC
The Earth Pyramid
Arup