image: By 1200 BC, the end of the Bronze Age, the Egyptian map of the world (above) showed nine bows or latitudes, numbers 4 to 9 including the Nile Delta, Delphi, Southern Britain and Iceland, a map based on an ancient geodetic survey.
This post explores a pyramidion, now lost, which exceeded the apex height of the pyramid, so as to model the different reference latitudes established by geodetic surveys and encoded within their metrology and the Great Pyramid (by 2500 BC). This pyramidion would have sat on the flat top of the pyramid, 480 feet above the base of the pyramid.
In All Done With Mirrors, John Neal described how the full height of the pyramid, reaching to its natural apex, would have been just over 481 feet. Most pyramids probably had a pyramidion since a number have been found elsewhere that repeat aspects of or have a name carved on them, of a specific pyramid. Sitting on their apex, they often repeat the form of the larger pyramid, and are scale models of a specific pyramid. In the case of the Great Pyramid, exactly 441th of its natural apex is missing, and this is likely to be because a pyramidion once stood on the flat top the actual pyramid.
Continue reading “A Pyramidion for the Great Pyramid”