A pharaoh-free zone (Image: Barry Iverson/Alamy)
Posted on 07/27/2012 7:37:52 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
The Dahshur royal necropolis in Egypt was once a dazzling sight. Some 30 kilometres south of Cairo, it provided King Sneferu with a playground to hone his pyramid-building skills - expertise that helped his son, Khufu, build the Great Pyramid of Giza. But most signs of what went on around Dahshur have been wiped away by 4500 years of neglect and decay. To help work out what has been lost, archaeologists have turned to fractals.
All around the world, river networks carve fractal patterns in the land that persist long after the rivers have moved on (see picture). "You can zoom in as much as you like, at each magnification the [natural fractals] would look the same," says Arne Ramisch at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany. This should be the case around Dahshur, because it sits on the fringes of the Western desert, where river channels drain into the floodplain of the Nile - but it isn't.
Ramisch and his team generated a digital model of the topography around Dahshur and assessed its fractal geometry as part of their archaeological investigations. They found a surprisingly large area around the pyramids - at least 6 square kilometres - where the natural fractal geometry was absent. The find suggests that the entire area was once modified, probably under the orders of Sneferu and other pharaohs of the Old Kingdom (Quaternary International, DOI: 10.1016/j.quaint.2012.02.045)...
The disturbance to the natural fractals can even give a sense of what occupied the site. In this case, says Ramisch, it was probably broad terraces several kilometres long, which would have "increased the sense of monumentality of the pyramids".
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
A pharaoh-free zone (Image: Barry Iverson/Alamy)
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| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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I've been on dialup too much this week, and otherwise engaged, or we'd have enjoyed even more excellent topics this week. MANY thanks to the MANY FReepers who posted topics. This week's Digest will contain an unusual number of modern topics, and a larger number than usual of underwater archaeology topics (some of which were pinged), with some overlap between those categories. |
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King Sneferu....old Sneffie.....lots of laughs.....always had a lampshade on his head at parties.....
Old Sneffie had a million of them....
“Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Cairo.”
“Cairo who?”
“Cai row row row your boat...”
Never, ever, disturb The Force.
I have been in the Meidum pyramid. And I just checked. The pyramid count in Egypt is up to 118, as of 2008.
***The pyramid count in Egypt is up to 118, as of 2008.***
Won’t be any left once the muzzlemen brotherhood gets through with them.
True. I count myself very lucky to have seen the wonders there.
LOL
Mandelbrot! Mandelbrot! Mandelbrot! Mandelbrot!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IE7hr8FhHI
If you’re hanging around the Meidum pyramid when the muzzies attack, run, or it will become the Yourdum pyramid. /rimshot
Anyway, thanks, the Egyptians loved them some pyramids, and forty or so have been discovered in the past, well 30 or so years.
That’s cool. Your third picture looks like it’s using the Golden Ratio.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio
Interesting!
This article got me wondering if this idea had occurred to anyone before this, e.g., those archaeologists involved with remote imagingy.
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