engbren Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Manu Wrote:
> >
> > I think you did very well. The most important
> > thing to do now is to make a prediction,
> something
> > you can put to a test to confirm or falsify you
> > model of pWestcar. One way to do this is to use
> > those aspects of the Pyramid Texts which are
> > solidly astronomical as your yard stick and
> then
> > project forwars instead of clawing backwards to
> > see if you can detect how the deeper meaning
> > became flattened and why you think this
> happened.
> > For example, there were major changes after the
> > Old Kingdom both environmental, economic,
> > religious, and political. The Middle Kingdom
> was
> > the era of the rise of the Middle Class.
> Suddenly,
> > non-royal commoners with wealth were able to
> > become an akh in the sky. The Coffin Texts
> became
> > an off-shoot of the PTs custom-designed for
> > nomarchs, generals, doctors, and high priests
> to
> > be like gods to become immortal. The scribes in
> > the House of Life began to cut and paste texts
> and
> > so the content became more fluid less
> conserved.
> > This is the context in which you have to see
> > pWestcar, which shows a Heka magician as a
> > conjurer and entertainer, not as the king's
> right
> > hand man...(the thet of Narmer eg).
>
> Hi Manu,
>
> Thankyou for the context and your feedback. There
> is a prediction in my paper already - the
> prediction on the age of the Pyramid which is
> based on the decoding of the astronomical data
> contained within the stories. This yields a date
> for the Pyramid of circa 2800 BCE, with a very
> good correlation to the story events occurring on
> 2 December 2800 BCE. This date is of course a
> couple of hundred years earlier than the generally
> accepted chronology as well as the most recent
> radiocarbon dating study of the Old Kingdom, which
> (according to Lightbody’’s recent paper on the
> Trial Passages) sets a date of 2590 BCE for
> Khufu:
>
> Bronk Ramsey, C., Dee, M.W. Rowland, J.M., Higham,
> T.F.G., Harris, S.A., Brock F. and Quiles, A.
> (2010),
> ‘Radiocarbon-Based Chronology for Dynastic
> Egypt’, Science 328, pp. 1554-1557.
>
> Puchkov in a thread on HoM:
> [www.hallofmaat.com],
> 626586#msg-626586 challenges the chronology:
>

Quote
Puchkov
> There is an interesting situation with studies of
> short-lived materials from the period of the Old
> Kingdom.
> In 2010, Ramsey and the group of other researchers
> published the "Radiocarbon-Based Chronology for
> Dynastic Egypt", in which for the entire Old
> Kingdom they processed only 6 samples belonging
> presumably to the Djoser's reign. In my article, I
> show that the selection of samples for the Old
> Kingdom in this work is completely
> non-representative and therefore, based on the
> data obtained for this period, no acceptable model
> can be built for it.
> Surprisingly, this work was approved by the
> scientific community and no further studies of
> samples of short-lived materials for Old Kingdom
> have been carried out to date. Since then,
> Egyptologists have widely used the
> "Radiocarbon-Based Chronology for Dynastic Egypt"
> as a confirmation of correctness of the current
> chronology, and the carbonists, although they
> understand the flawness of Ramsey's model for the
> Old Kingdom, are still silent, as Egyptologists
> have long rejected the radiocarbon dating method
> as unacceptable for Egypt (which does not give the
> necessary results) and only in 2009-2010 did these
> two areas come to a consensus.
>

>
> Puchkov provides a recalibration of the
> radiocarbon dating in his paper in Table 9 on page
> 46 of his paper:
> [www.academia.edu]
> he_cord_ceremony_for_astronomical_orientation_of_t
> he_Old_Kingdom_pyramids
>
> In it, he determines a likely date of construction
> of Khufu starting with stretching of the chord on
> or around 2803 BCE. Thereby my theory provides a
> prediction of the age of Khufu’s pyramid which
> closely matches that of the re-calibrated data
> produced by Puchkov.


Excellent. That's how you do it. If you are right, you falsify both Belmonte and Lightbody and possibly confirm the Dash method. The next step is to scrutinize Puchkov and answer the critics with one or two examples of textual congruence between Middle and Old Kingdom astronomy. Just FYI, I think David did a great job breaking out of the Petrie-Lehner stronghold but my hunch only is the T.P.'s are not an astronomical device. I could obviously be wrong. The key to the puzzle is the vertical shaft.

Your main opposition comes from the, in my opinion, more compelling Belmonte method of Phecda and Megrez simultaneous transit which would date the foundation to the mid-26th century BC. There is a more well developed context for mskhtjw targeting than Thuban aiming with respect to orienting the G.P. (not the star shaft) which Belmonte explains discussing the small step pyramids.