Page 419 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

miles away to east and west. This was Egypt, the real organic Egypt of
today and yesterday, which overlapped (but spread out far beyond) the
strange ‘official’ Egypt of the map described, a rectangular fiction exactly
seven terrestrial degrees in length.
In the nineteenth century the renowned Egyptologist Ludwig Borchardt
expressed what is still the conventional wisdom of his colleagues when
he remarked, ‘One must absolutely exclude the possibility that the
ancients may have measured by degrees.’ This was a judgement that
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seemed increasingly unlikely to be tenable. Whoever they may have been,
it was obvious that the original planners and architects of the Giza
necropolis had belonged to a civilization which knew the earth to be a
sphere, knew its dimensions almost as well as we do ourselves, and had
divided it into 360 degrees, just as we do today.
The proof of this lay in the creation of a symbolic official ‘country’
exactly seven terrestrial degrees in length, and in the admirably geodetic
location and orientation to the cardinal points of the Great Pyramid.
Equally persuasive was the fact, already touched on in Chapter Twenty-
three, that the perimeter of the pyramid’s base stood in the relationship
2pi to its height and that the entire monument seemed to have been
designed to serve as a map-projection—on a scale of 1:43,200—of the
northern hemisphere of our planet:

The Great Pyramid was a projection on four triangular surfaces. The apex
represented the pole and the perimeter represented the equator. This is the
reason why the perimeter is in relation 2pi to the height.
8

The Pyramid/Earth ratio

We have demonstrated the use of pi in the Pyramid and need not go into
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this matter again; besides, the existence of the pi relationship, though
interpreted as accidental by orthodox scholars, is not contested by
them. But are we seriously supposed to accept that the monument could
10
also be a representation of the northern hemisphere of the earth
projected on flat surfaces at a scale of 1:43,200? Let us remind ourselves
of the figures.
According to the best modern estimates, based on satellite
observations, the equatorial circumference of the earth is 24,902.45
miles and its polar radius is 3949.921 miles. The perimeter of the Great
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Pyramid’s base is 3023.16 feet and its height is 481.3949 feet. The
12

7 Cited in Ibid., p. 333.
8 See Chapter Twenty-three, and Stecchini in Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 378.
9 See Chapter Twenty-three.
Accepted, for example, by Edwards, Petrie, Baines and Malek, and so on.
10
11 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 27:530.
12 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 87.

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