reply to post by A boy in a dress
I'll get back to bulla's post momentarily, but feel a need to address this first. Bulla's ideas may really be more at home in a thread of their own,
to avoid "cross pollination" as it were.
The Sumerians originated the "sexagesimal" or base 6 system, upon which our compasses of 360 degrees are still based, to this day.
The Earth rotates 360 degrees, and it does so in roughly 24 hours (nominal - actually 23 hours, 56 minutes), so we can correlate angular measure in
degrees to time measure in hours and minutes. The Earth rotates through 15 degrees in one hour (360 deg/ 24 hr). One hour, divided by 15 degrees,
gives us 4 minutes of Earth rotation timewise per each degree,
All of that goes all the way back to Sumeria, where it met it's inception.
The point at which the pyramid peaks subtend (measure from peak to peak as an angle) one degree each is critical. A few feet closer, and the angle
changes. Same for a few feet further away, or to either side. ANY deviation from that point will change the angle between the peaks. Therefore, that
point must have some significance.
Further, bulla states that the sun's rise or set - I forget which just now - is measured against time across those angles. This tells us two
things:
1) the vantage point MUST be "away" from the sun at those times for it to appear at those points to even be measured in the first place. What he's
talking about is a more or less precise alignment with the pyramid peaks and the sun, and for that to occur the third point in the alignment is
critical - ANY two points will line up by coincidence. The third point in a line is what actually makes it a true alignment, and not just a random
straight line between two points.
2) The time is measured by the motion of the sun (actually the rotation of the Earth as shown by the sun's apparent motion) in a fairly precise way -
TWO equally spaced intervals of 1 degree/ 4 minutes each. For this to have a meaning beyond sheer randomness, it must have a significance. Further,
this alignment would be necessarily "four dimensional", since it would align not only three points in 3 dimensional space, but further, an additional
point in time. The alignment would only occur twice per year, on specific days.
edit on 2011/10/29 by nenothtu because: (no reason given)