Talking Pyramids

Giulio Magli was in the news a couple of years ago with his grand plan for Giza, the idea that the three Giza pyramids were arranged to form a line that points to Heliopolis, an important religious center sacred to the sun god.

Last March he was back with an extension of that idea, creating a grid that may indicate the location of the lost pyramid of Userkare at South Saqqara, directly south of Djoser’s Step pyramid.

Now he’s back with “The Cosmic Landscape in the Age of the Pyramids”, which appears in the current issue of the Journal of Cosmology. Here is the abstract:

The pyramids of Egypt are to be counted among the most outstanding works of architecture in the whole of human history. The sites for their construction were chosen in accordance with topographical criteria which, while taking practical needs into account, were also profoundly and intimately connected with Maat, the cosmic order. As a consequence, the pyramid’s fields are criss-crossed by geometrical axes which were – and partially still are – easily perceptible on the ground. In the 4th and the 5th dynasty, such axes ideally connected the monuments with the temple of Heliopolis on the opposite bank of the Nile, while during the 6th dynasty new pyramids were ideally connected with older ones by means of meridian – south to north – alignments. In recent years, the present author attempted to provide a comprehensive analysis of this sacred landscape, and of its astronomical and symbolical interpretation in terms of the “cosmovision” of the ancient Egyptians. The present paper offers a brief but complete overview of the results of this analysis.

Read the full article in the Journal of Cosmology: The Cosmic Landscape in the Age of the Pyramids, by Giulio Magli

Photo from the New York Public Library.

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Tags: Saqqara, South Saqqara

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 27th, 2010 at 7:47 pm and is filed under News, Theory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.