CURIOSITY
Markers of Ancient Advanced Civilizations
Because chicks dig archaeology, right?
This article is a part of Introspection, Exposition’s new ‘Curiosity’ section, where our writers share stories of the subjects they obsess over.
My partner doesn’t believe that I’m very likely to pick up girls by enthusing over the accurate encoding of pi and other mathematical coolness in ancient megaliths.
Not so fast, I say…let me show you my ancient measurements.
I saw an article a few weeks ago that described how some partially burnt notes of Sir Isaac Newton were sold for $500,000 at auction. Maybe his first idea of calculus, or maybe a drawing of an apple falling on his head?
Nope. The topic of the notes was his research into dimensions of the Great Pyramid in Giza to calculate the Egyptian royal cubit, the ancient equivalent of the foot or meter in the Mideast.
This was fascinating to me (and surely to my posse) because I had also spent hours (and hours) looking at the dimensions of the pyramid to try to understand it. I had read contrarian views of the meaning and purpose of the Great Pyramid’s design and was interested to see for myself if there was anything particularly unusual in the dimensions, besides the fact that the perimeter of the base is about 2pi times the height. YouTube has countless hours on theories about why and when the pyramid was built and whether ancient aliens were involved.
Newton was ready for some end of the world drama and thought knowing the exact length of the cubit would allow him to unlock biblical codes, rebuild the Temple of Solomon and release all kinds of mayhem in the name of Armageddon.
Fair warning: I didn’t look for, nor find, such a code (or, as far as I know, start Armageddon), but I did find indications of a truly advanced civilization that remains unknown to us — so advanced that it seems they had even accurately measured the dimensions of the moon. Very sexy!
But isn’t it also relevant as a society to contemplate that our own civilization and everything we’ve learned could, in principle, be lost in another 20,000 years with no evidence of its existence? Imagine; the Kardashians lost to history forever.
Admittedly, my only advantage over Newton is that with the internet, I have access to the measurements of many careful scholars (after his time) to determine the exact dimensions. And I had to get the dimensions right if I was going to have clues about what the Great Pyramid might represent.
Maybe just to explain the method: imagine that you had a big well-made building in the US to measure, inside and out. You could quickly deduce that the underlying units used in the design were inches and feet. Of course, you might also conclude that 2x4’s were sacred and represented the pathway to eternal life.
But anyway, this is how I found the same information from the pyramid and discovered the cubit wasn’t just the length of some narcissistic Pharaoh’s arm from fingertip to elbow, but something much more profound.
Warning: there will be some math in the following, but no test, so don’t worry.
The first thing I noticed when looking at the measurements of the pyramid is just how amazingly big and precise it is. A stroll around the base is roughly one kilometer and yet the length of the four sides is identical to within a few centimeters. So, any conclusions I came to had to also be extremely accurate to be conclusive.
What I was looking for was round numbers for the base dimensions. I mean, if you were going to make one of the seven wonders of the world, you would say “this should be big, like 1000 feet long” or something like that. Or if you were making it scale to something you might say “the perimeter should be exactly one millionth of the circumference of Venus.” Those were the kind of things I was looking for.
It turns out the measured sides of the pyramid (the base foundation) are all about 9070 inches (~23040 cm) plus or minus an inch or two. Imagine pulling a tape measure that far and trying to be accurate! You’d have to pull it super tight or your actual distance would still be shorter than what you were trying to design. So what length were they shooting for?
To figure out the best estimate of the cubit, I looked at the dimensions of things inside the pyramid that would be several cubits long, like passageways, chambers, stone boxes and things like that. The measurement I came up with was on average about 20.57 inches. Using that gave the sides of the pyramids being 440.88 of these cubits.
One of the famous early researchers of the pyramid, Flinders Petrie, decided the cubit was a bit longer making the pyramid 440 cubits on a side. But it turns out, according to my analysis, that it is exactly 441 cubits (assuming a plan of 9072 inches). Who cares, you ask? This little difference turns out to be very significant.
Here’s why.
The cubit is well known to have been broken into seven palms per cubit, and a reed was seven cubits. And based on the bible and Temple Scrolls, forty-nine (seven times seven) cubits was also a thing but the name is lost, so I will call forty-nine royal Egyptian cubits one royal chain since the British chain is similar.
Using this definition, the pyramid’s perimeter is exactly thirty-six chains, nine on a side. Note that is three times twelve chains. Twelve and seven, the two most sacred numbers around the world showing up together — huh.
If that isn’t exciting, I don’t know what is.
The next interesting thing is that this definition for a cubit would also mean that seven cubits would be exactly the same length as twelve feet. This is not well known or accepted, but it is arguably true.
The strongest evidence I have is that there was a causeway leading to the great pyramid measured to be 432 inches wide by the early explorer Vyse. Using my definition, this is exactly three reeds. If one used the definition of the cubit giving 440 cubits on a side, then for the causeway to be even in cubits would mean that it should be 431 inches. See? One inch of length is important.
The implications so far are that the foot is actually ancient and uses increments of twelve (meaning twelve feet would also be called a reed) and the cubits used increments of seven, with the linking measure being the reed of twelve feet or seven cubits.
Here is the amazing bit. Using these definitions, it turns out the equatorial circumference of the moon is exactly 12x12x12x12x12x12 reeds to an error of 0.007%!
This really made me wonder, since I knew the definition of the meter, when originally defined, was one 10 millionth of the distance from the equator to the north pole of earth running through Paris. I am pointing out that this new and advanced unit (the meter) in our base-ten world used the planet we live on to define a standard of measurement, so what’s up with base twelve measurements defined from the moon?
One more crazy result. The mean radius of the earth is 12x12x12x12x12 chains to an error of 0.002%!
Coincidences do happen, but this seems a bit much to me. If our civilization were to be mostly destroyed, I am certain investigators would notice that the meter was an underlying unit (in much of the world) and relate it to the polar circumference of the earth. They could rightly deduce that we had the capacity to measure on global scales.
My conclusion is that there may have been an ancient, maybe pre-ice age, civilization that used base twelve numbering schemes and could measure the earth and even the moon; and somehow, our British foot and inch are its legacy. I also wonder if the echoes of this culture show up in the prevalence of the numbers twelve and seven in religions across the world.
If you aren’t intellectually aroused yet, just check out the following article on twelve and seven.
If for some strange reason, you’d like to read more about me as a person, feel free to check out my ‘about me’ here:
