How Europe discovered the Egyptian pyramids

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How Europe discovered the Egyptian pyramids
How Europe discovered the Egyptian pyramids
Anonim

The horrors of the Middle Ages

Actually, the denseness of medieval Europeans regarding the pyramids should not be surprising. What could they have learned about the Egyptian colossus from books and travel stories? Rabbi Benjamin Ben-Iona of Navarra, adventurer and traveler of the 12th century who reached the Giza plateau, noted: "The pyramids that can be observed here were built with the help of witchcraft and black magic." The Arabs quite seriously reported that at noon and at sunset the Great Pyramid was visited by a naked woman with huge teeth, who cast evil spells on people and then deprived them of their minds. Abdel Latif, who taught history and medicine in Baghdad, gathered all his will and nevertheless dared to enter the Great Pyramid, but fainted in the stuffy stench of its inner space and got out of there rather dead than alive.

The true meaning and origin of the pyramids was completely forgotten. Most of the pilgrims who dared to walk to these monuments of ancient architecture and inspect them, took on faith the legend attributing the construction of the pyramids to Joseph, the son of Jacob. According to this legend, Joseph intended to store bread in them during the harvest years, anticipating the coming famine, which he predicted, interpreting the dream of Pharaoh. The pilgrims called them "Joseph's granaries" or "Pharaoh's granaries." In fact, there were few alternatives to this point of view - all the same tales of black magic and similar nightmares.

The notoriety of the pyramids has reached the farthest countries. English explorer Sir John Mandeville is believed to have traveled to Egypt in the 14th century. He was very sad that he did not dare to enter the Great Pyramid, since it was literally teeming with snakes. However, the snakes were the same invention as his "Travels" themselves, certified by a certain hardworking notary from French Liège, who never left the borders of his country.

Sound judgments about the true purpose of the pyramids began to appear at the end of the 15th century. When in 1486 a native of Mainz (Germany) Bridenbach examined the pyramids of Giza, he said that, in his opinion, these were not granaries built by Joseph, but the tombs of ancient kings. At the same time, the ancient testimonies of Herodotus and Diodorus became known, which not only confirmed the opinion of Bridenbach and others like him, but also named the names of these ancient kings: Cheops, Chefren and Mikerin.

John Greaves: the pioneer of scientific Egyptology

And so in 1638, 36-year-old English mathematician and astronomer John Greaves, who was educated at Oxford and taught geometry in London, decided to go to Egypt. He dreamed of finding in the Great Pyramid basic data that would allow us to establish the true size of our planet. It is difficult to say where such an idea originated in the Renaissance, but perhaps it should be attributed to the subject of the activities of secret societies that kept some knowledge from ancient times, which during the Middle Ages were forced to remain silent and not show signs of life.

The very same task of determining the size of our planet was very urgent. Indeed, in the 16th century, many great geographical discoveries were made, and such sciences as geography and astronomy were still at the initial stage of development. By that time, no one had improved the data obtained by Ptolemy and al-Mamun to determine the magnitude of the geographical degree, and, therefore, no one knew the true value of the circumference of the Earth.

In order to cover his expenses, Greaves turned to the magistrates of the City of London for help and patronage, but they refused to support him. Fortunately, the Archbishop of Canterbury had a good opinion of Greaves and was extremely interested in obtaining the rare Arab and Persian manuscripts that could be found in the East, and therefore provided patronage to the scholar. Thanks to this, Greaves had enough money to equip himself with the necessary tools for measuring the internal and external structure of the Great Pyramid, astronomical observations, and also in order to spend several weeks in distant and mysterious Cairo.

Reaching Giza in 1639, he climbed a ten-meter hill of stony waste that had formed over the centuries in front of the Cheops pyramid, crept up to the Descending Corridor and got there, "crawling like a snake." Then horror seized him: he was caught in the epicenter of a storm of bats, which were "so hideous and so huge that they were clearly more than a foot in length." Greaves pulled out a pistol to scare off the bats. In the narrow passage of the pyramid, the shots echoed as if he had fired a cannon salvo. Following the path taken by the people of al-Mamun, Greaves reached the Queen's Chamber. There he found a mass of fetid insects, which were so aggressive that the Englishman left this room without stopping for a second.

Greaves reported that the pyramid was constructed of polished limestone that "was cut into equal blocks on spacious squares or other flat surfaces." The scientist was personally convinced that the "grip or tying" of the joints was so accurate that they were difficult to distinguish with the naked eye. In the Chamber of King Greaves, with the help of a measuring rod, 10 feet long, divided into 10,000 equal divisions, prepared in London by a reference foot from Guildhall, he took up measurements. So, having measured the empty sarcophagus, he found out with an accuracy of "thousandths of a foot" that its length is 6, 488 English feet. Once outside, Greaves climbed to the top of the Great Pyramid.

From there he admired the minarets of Cairo, Mount Mukattam on the opposite bank of the Nile, the silhouettes of the pyramids of Abusir, Sakkara and Dashur in the south. As he descended, the Englishman counted the rows of stone blocks visible to the eye. There were 207 of them. The most remarkable thing was that Greaves was the first to make such a calculation. He calculated the height of the pyramid and measured the length of its base. In the second case, he was mistaken by as much as 70 feet, which is not surprising - there was so much debris around it that it was far from always possible to determine where the first row of masonry actually was. All the facts and figures collected during the expedition were meticulously described by him and summarized in scientific notes called "Pyramidography".

The Adventures of Burattini and the Reasoning of Newton

Before returning to Britain, Greaves left his instruments, including the aforementioned 10-foot rod, to a young Venetian named Tito Livio Burattini (1617-1681) whom he met in Egypt. Burattini was an extremely gifted person. During his life, he has established himself from a variety of sides: as an inventor, engineer, architect, physicist, mechanic, instrument maker and metrologist, traveler, geographer, astronomer, Egyptologist and diplomat.

He made his four-year trip to Egypt thanks to a subsidy from Father Athanasius Kircher, who served the Jesuit Order in Krakow, Poland. The entire time he was engaged in meticulous measurements with the instruments received from Greaves. Burattini regularly sent written reports with the results of his research to Father Kircher, which was a great success for world science. When he returned to his adopted Poland through the Balkans, he was attacked by bandits. The scoundrels took away from him not only money, but also all the most detailed records about the pyramid, which he planned to publish in Italy in the future as a separate book. Only the information that Burattini sent to Kircher has survived.

Based on measurements by Greaves and to a lesser extent Burattini, Sir Isaac Newton concluded that the Great Pyramid was constructed using two different units of measurement. He called one of them "secular cubit", and the other - "sacred cubit". Taking into account the data obtained by Greaves and Burattini as a result of measurements of the Tsar's Chamber, Newton made the following calculations: with an elbow length of 20.63 English inches, this room represented an even laying of elbows in a ratio of 20 × 10. Newton called this type of elbow secular, or Memphis. Another, more mysterious elbow, which kept some secret meaning, was longer and was equal to 25 English inches.

So the study of the secrets of Ancient Egypt turned from a collection of idle speculation into a serious science.

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