Author: Dylan Bickerstaffe
After meticulously measuring the Giza pyramids, over several months in 1880-1, the young William Mathews Flinders Petrie found that he had disproved Piazzi Smyth’s supposed relationship between the perimeter of the Great Pyramid and the precise number of days in the year (365.76). In his report, The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, he remarked that he had never suspected – when he first read Smyth’s theory fifteen years before – that he would be the one to:
‘reach the ugly fact which killed the beautiful theory.?
The research leading to this book is not on the scale of Petrie’s survey, and the facts that have been unearthed are inconvenient rather than ugly, but the objective has been the same – to try to establish the correct answer as far as possible. It must also be said that some of the theories addressed, which have been trumpeted in the press as cast iron certainties, are found, when scrutinised, to be far from “beautiful”.
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