"Prodigy of Atlantis" a paper on: the alignments of pyramids with Orion's belt

[Jonathan Barlow Gee]

"Prodigy of Atlantis"

a paper on: the alignments of pyramids with Orion's belt

contents:

introduction - "knowns and unknowns"

1. Orion's belt.

A. the constellation in the N. hemisphere

A1. upright orientation toward Polaris

A2. foot of constellation near Aries, hand near Taurus

B. the myths associated with the constellation

B1. Osiris

B2. Orion

B3. Hercules

2. pyramids.

2A. main sites.

2A1. Egypt (12,000 to 2,500 years ago)

2A1A. culture = religious / political / economic beliefs

2A2. Yucatan (2,000 to 500 years ago)

2A2A. culture = religious / political / economic beliefs

2A3. Elsewhere (above ground)

2A3A. Cambodia (Angkor Wat), Peru (S.America), Iran (Babylon), etc.

2A3B. cultures = religious / political / economic beliefs

2A4. Elswhere (under water)

2A1A. Yonaguni (Japan), Cuba, Spain, Bemuda Triangle, etc.

2A4A. cultures = religious / political / economic beliefs

3. alignments.

3A. of the pyramids to constellations

3A1. Giza alignment is "upside down" (N/S) to Orion

3B1. Yucatan alignment is west to east along the "way of the dead"

3B. of the pyramids to one another

3B1. Giza pyramids are aligned along a "phi" spiral (Sphynx facing east)

3B2. Yucatan pyramids are aligned west-east along the "way of the dead"

3B3. global alignments of all sites relative to the "Giza Equator"

4. modern theories

4A. theories for their design

4A1. preserving sacred ratios

4A2. use in death-based rituals

4A3. "higher" purposes than commonly known

4A3A. balancing the earth's crust on pivot points

4A3B. harnessing earth's EM-field like antennae

4A3C. synching of "alignment windows" for optimum warping

4B. most likely theories for their construction

4B1. concentrated steam used to hew stone

4B2. pivot blocks and wedges / pulleys to transport

4B3. exact placement by smelting metallic joiners

5. questions remaining

5A. size of work-force necessary

5B. original intentions vs. ultimate uses

5C. are reasons given in mythology trustworthy?

5C1. the accounts in modern popular myths

5C1A. the account of predeluvial giants in Theosophy

5C1B. the account of Marduk's imprisonment by Sitchin

5C1C. modern UFO / "Ascended Masters" beliefs

5C2. the accounts in ancient myths

5C2A. "ImHotep" - the Architect's Inscription and the Papyrus of Ani

5C2B. the Mixtec (Mayan / Aztec / Cherokee) calendar and Pacal Votan

5C2C. the global preservation of independent regional flood myths

5D. deep underground / underwater caverns and catacombs

5D1. crystal caves and geo-magnetics

5D2. underground rivers and "ley-lines"

5D3. fault-lines and fissures, dormant and active

5D4. the "death" cult of the "underworld"

5D4A. the ancient cults today (pre-Catholic)

5D4B. the more modern cults (post-Masonry)

5D4C. the mythologies maintained in these cults

conclusion - "what remains unknown"

[Jonathan Barlow Gee]

introduction - "knowns and unknowns"

"There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know."

- United States Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld

When looking back at the past, we must remember our place here in this present makes our knowledge of the past subjective to the here and now. We are standing in the ever-shifting sands of time, and all that we can do is hope they will shift and reveal some ancient secret, some long buried treasure. Such was the mission of Horace Francois Bastien Sebastiani de La Porta and the French Consulate for the Levant under French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. Some say Nostradamus predicted the first Anti-Christ of his three famous predictions for comings of the devil incarnate as being none other than Napoleon himself. Nostradamus' later picks, according to subsequent scholars, include Hitler as the second anti-Christ and a third anti-Christ, still, they say, yet to come, named by Nostradamus "Mabus" and described as wearing a blue turban and seeking to conquer Europe.

De La Porta, around the turn of the 19th century, sojourned to Cairo, Egypt and commissioned a book of illustrations be made of their journey along the way. During this period, in 1798, Napoleon himself was waging war there following the Mediterranean naval campaigns of 1798 and the capture of Malta, which Napoleon had then used as a staging ground to conquer Alexandria, sending troops through this sea-port to Cairo in Egypt and to Ottoman Syria. At the Battle of the Pyramids, so-called then, now recalled as the Battle of Chobrakit, Napoleon won a French victory and dispersed the opposing forces, under Murad Bey and Ibrahim Bey of the Mamluks from Cairo, ending their 700 year rule there. However, ten days later, Napoleon's fleet suffered a defeat by the British navy under Admiral Horatio Nelson at the Battle of the Nile. During the French Egyptian campaign, 151 (21 math, 3 astro, 17 engineers, 13 miners, 3 gunpowder, 4 architects, 8 artists, 10 draftsmen, 1 sculptor, 15 interpreters, 10 scribes and 22 printers in Latin, Greek and Arabic) "savants" of Napoleon's "Commission des Sciences et des Arts" accompanied the French military through Cairo and catalogued their observations in the "Description de l'Egypt," released from 1809 to 1829 as initially a 9 volume text, with 1 volume listing illustrations, with 10 volumes of illustrations, and subsequently as 37 volumes, with the first edition's volume 18 being split into 3, and a volume of maps being added. The 10 volumes of art consist of 894 plates from over 3000 drawings, some containing over 100 individual engravings of flora and fauna. 38 of the plates are hand-colored, the rest of the second edition is in black and white.

From the introduction to the 2001 Taschen, German publishing house, edition, by Gilles Neret, I quote:

"Soldiers, from the height of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on you..."; thus Napoleon is said to have addressed his troops shortly before the Battle of the Pyramids (21 July, 1798). His words aptly summarize the result of the "Egyptian Campaign," a military disaster which had extraordinary consequences for archaeology. Soldiers come and go... the pyramids remain."

And therein lies the quandary. In this modern, technology-driven era, can we harness our "people power" to bridge the gap between our vapid attention spans as individuals and our herd-mentality whenever in a crowd long enough to ponder an architectural archaeological mystery of the ancients first uncovered by the armies of Napoleon Bonaparte?

Because if your answer is "no, it cannot be so now," then I have nothing more to reveal to you at this time. And if your answer is "yes, but I already know it all" then perhaps, allow me to contradict you in that, but only to add to your knowledge base.

So, what dust has covered them having been swept to the side some time ago, what facts do we know now about the "mystery" of the Pyramids and their builders; what awaits beneath the shifting sands of time?

[Jonathan Barlow Gee]

1. Orion's belt.

Living as they did, some 4,500 years before us now, the Egyptians based their "Sothic" calendar on the "heliacal rising" of the "dog star" - the binary star system of Canis Major and Canis Minor they called "Sirius," such that, when the "dog star" first rose in the east just before dawn, it marked the time of their year to begin planting crops to harvest by autumn and to store to survive winter.

Times, of course, are different now, and so we see "Sirius" the "dog star" rising now just before sunrise in the east in early winter. "Sirius" the "dog star" trapes ever at the heal of his master, the constellation just north-east of him, alike the white dog at the heal of the traveller at the cliff in the Tarot trump card "the Fool." The "master" constellation of Sirius was called by the Egyptians Osiris, by the Romans as Orion, and by the Greeks as Hercules.

Just as the binary star system of "Sirius" was constellated as canine in the zoomorphism of early astrology, so was "Orion," his "master," depicted as anthropomorphic, as an upright person with their arm outstretched toward the north-east constellation, which is the "bull" constellation on the ecliptic zodiac, the sign called "Taurus," that rises nowadays in mid-summer.

A different constellation occupies the place of sunrise along the ecliptic zodiac every 2,000 years of so, and each constellation takes up about 30° of the 360° ecliptic cycle. Thus there are 12 ages we call "Solar Aeons," and during each a different constellation of the zodiac occupies the "rising sign" position on the eastern horizon just before sunrise on any given date from any other aeon. This process is called "precession" and it occurs due to the earth's angle of inclination between our geographic pole and its "ideal" perfect position at 90° from the solar equator's zodiac ecliptic being about 23.5°.

A. the constellation in the N. hemisphere

Thus, the constellation of "Orion," although not on the ecliptic zodiac and thus not part of its system of 12 "Solar Aeons," nevertheless pivots its position in the sky along with the rest of the celestial dome that surrounds us with the firmaments of the heavens by night. It seems to perpetually follow the "bull of heaven" in the form of the constellation "Taurus," and in turn to be perpetually pursued by the "dog star," the binary system of Sirius A and B.

According to Creedo Muttwa, an aboriginal tribesman of the Dogon people of central sub-Saharan African continental primitivists, the celebration of the "may pole" derives from an originally very ancient Dogon ritual to celebrate their communication with "beings" or "angels" from the twin "dog star" constellation. This attestation may account for the earliest form of worship of this constellation pair in the region where, much later, the pyramids of Giza would be built.

Geographically between the Dogon tribe's location in the middle of the African continent and the location of Giza, near Cairo, in Egypt to the north-east, where the pyramid complex has stood for around 4,500 years, are the Nubian Kushites of Sudan pyramids at Meroe, built from around 300 to around 1700 years ago at Meroe. The first Kushite kingdom's capitol city was Kerma, and was absorbed into the Egyptian Empire by 3500 years ago after some 220 years of struggle. While the Egyptian Empire of the era used hieroglyphics, the Nubians wrote in Coptic, and the combination of these forms of alphabet would eventually yield the Phoenician basis for our own written letters today.

A1. upright orientation toward Polaris

The constellation Orion is oriented with his figurative feet facing toward the "south" pole (the location of the continent Antarctica now) and with his head toward the direction of the "north" pole (the location of the Arctic ocean now), with his arm(s) outstretched toward the "west" in the direction of the constellation "Taurus," conceived as the "bull of summer" nowadays. In the middle of the year 2000, on May 5th, the sun, moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter all aligned briefly in the constellation "Taurus" between the bull's figurative horns. Some speculate this alignment has occurred before, and occurs in conjunction with the recent alignment on Dec. 21st, 2012, of the earth, the sun and galactic core that occurred in the "winter solstice" or "mid-winter" constellation "Sagittarius," the figurative centaur archer, who, like Orion, also stretches out the reach of his arm(s), but toward the point along the "Milky Way's" river-like stellar hub of galactic core.

If Orion, now a mid-autumn constellation, and Sagittarius, now a mid-winter constellation, are both holding their arm(s) outward toward these fixed points in the celestial sphere, then we can posit they do so for a reason that was known also to the ancients who designed these constellations' configurations as a star-chart of the night sky. Those who invented the astrolabe for navigation of the seas may predate even our own species earliest ancestors, the Keberan cave-dwellers of the Natufian-era Levant.

A2. foot of constellation near Lepus (rabbit), hand near Taurus (bull)

Between the Canis Major and Canis Minor constellations, along the line of the "3 kings" or close clustering of the stars (from left / northeast to right / southwest) Alnitak A (Zeta Orionis), Alnilam (Episilon Orionis) and Mintaka (Delta Orionis, the "belt" star in Arabic) comprising "Orion's Belt," is the constellation Manoceros (the unicorn), and between Orion and Taurus is the constellation Eridanus (the Po River).

By far the most important, being the brightest and most easily visible, trait of the Orion constellation is the "belt" of the "3 king" stars. If you draw a line between the middle star, Alnilam and the star to it's immediate right, Mintaka, and extend this line to the south-east from Alnilam in the direction of Alnitak A, you will find that Alnitak A is off-set from this straight-line by an angle of only about 10 to 12°. As we shall soon see, this angle was built into the pyramid complex at Giza in Egypt, as well as, much later (only around some 900 years ago), into that of the Meso-American capitol, Teotihuacan.

[Jonathan Barlow Gee]

B. the myths associated with the constellation

There are varied myths recounting attributes to this anthropomorphic constellation from every populated region around the world, even Australia and New Zealand in the farthest southern hemisphere latitudes able to see him, where the "belt" constellation is (oriented upside down) associated with a "saucepan" or "pot" (not unlike a south-hemisphere equivalent of the "Dipper" version of the north polar "Bear" constellation). In the Nazca Lines, enormous geoglyphs in the desert Ica region of Peru, the constellation Orion is depicted as a spider, where the head (facing west) would be equivalent to Mintaka, the abdomen to Alnilam and the thorax (to the east) to Alnitak A. To firmly associate the mythology of this constellation to their reason for erecting the world's earliest pyramids, let us examine the myths of Egypt most closely, as well as those of Greece and Rome from whence the modern name of the constellation derives.

B1. Osiris

The Egyptian God Asar (Coptic Osiris) became the ruler of the dead because the Old Kingdom fifth-dynasty Pharaoh who began his cult was the blood-thirsty mad man, Unas (reigning from 4375 to 4345 years ago) whose "sister-wife" mythology recalls as Isis was, in reality, Djedkare Isesi, and as they had no son, but a daughter, Iput, their son, figuratively recalled as "Horus," was their son-in-law and legal successor to the Egyptian Empire, Teti. The myth of Osiris proceeds that Set (Greek Typhon, Coptic Apophis), the "serpent God of the Nile River," conspired with 72 henchmen to betray and murder Osiris, but that Isis, his sister-wife, using the alchemical magic of Thoth, the Egyptian God of the moon and over time, was able to resurrect him and bear with him their child, Horus, who eventually avenged his father and slew Set, although losing one eye in the combat while doing so. In reality, the Pharaoh Unas erected a pyramid at Saqqara near the step pyramid of Djoser, northwest of the Old Kingdom capitol city of Memphis, which was founded by Pharaoh Menes some 5000 years ago.

B2. Orion

According to Horace (Ode 3.27.18), to Homer (Odyssey Book 5, line 283) and Virgil (Aeneid Book 1, line 535) Orion as a constellation was named after a mythical hero, what was called in Aram, a "Nephilim." Although little mention of him is made outside these sources, where he is described as having been born in Boeotia, blinded by Oenopion, the father of Merope, only to recover his sight at Lemnos, and finally to have been slain by the arrow of Artemis on Crete n the form of a scorpion sting (the scorpion being "translated" with him to the sky as the zodiac mid-summer sign Scorpio), there is little direct account of the hero by this name. Prior records to these, however, reveal much more, and relate the character of Orion to both Hercules and Gilgamesh. In Hebrew the constellation's name was "Kesil," literally meaning, "the fool."

B3. Gilgamesh or Hercules

Hercules (or Heracles) was the Roman name for the Greek God Orion. In their myths, he was the son of Zeus-Jupiter and the mortal woman Alcmene (though also technically Zeus-Jupiter's great-granddaughter) while she was exiled to Thebes, by disguising himself as Amphitryton, the Theban general from Tiryns in the eastern Peloponnese, whom had accidentally killed his father-in-law - his wife, Alcmene's father - Elcetryon, king of Mycenae, while Amphitryton was being redeemed by Creon, his maternal uncle and king of Thebes.

Gilgamesh, subject of the Mesopotamian Epic, was based on King Bilgames of Uruk, Iraq (4,500 years ago) in the first dynasty of the Sumerian King's List, according to which whom ruled for 126 years. In the Tunnal Inscription, Gilgamesh and his son Urlugal rebuilt the sanctuary of the goddess Ninlil in Tunnal, a sacred section of the city of Nippur that, according to the Epic of Gilgamesh (written later, 3800 years ago) it had been Gilgamesh himself whom had destroyed while in his youth. The Epic recounts, in detail, Gilgamesh's fateful meeting with Enkidu, a "wild man" born in the forests and raised by animals, and their adventures killing Humbaba, a forest-spirit guardian, the Bull of Heaven, sent to kill them by the Goddess Ishtar, daughter of Ninlil, and finally Enkidu's death and Gilgamesh's period in exile "roaming the wilderness in a lion's skin," until being shown the way between the "twin peaks" into the "tunnel where the sun sets and travels through to rise again in the morning" by a "scorpion man" and his "scorpion woman" wife. Gilgamesh travels this tunnel and meets Utnapishtim, his "ancient ancestor" whom had survived a "great flood," then returns to Uruk after losing the plant of immortality that had been Utnapishtim's parting gift to him when it was stolen at an oasis by a serpent.

[Jonathan Barlow Gee]

2. pyramids.

The original pyramids were called "mastabas" (Arabic for "benches" meaning "house of eternity") and were little more than an above-ground burial mound encased in mud-brick or stones from the nearby Nile river. On the roof of the Mastaba was a trap-door leading into the tomb itself, and a second such accessed the "serdab" (Persian for "cellar") where a statue of the deceased was walled in to the masonry, connected by narrow "air-shafts" or altogether unconnected to the underground catacomb containing the cadaver.

The earliest dates to the city of Abydos, meaning in Egyptian hieroglyphics, "the hill of the reliquary" that, according to myths, contained the head of Osiris. The Abydos necropolis of Umm el-Qa'ab and the Saqqara (alt. Sakkara) necropolis, containing the pyramid of Pharaoh Unas, overlooking the Old Kingdom capitol city, Memphis, contain the earliest architectural developments of the "mastaba" into the "pyramid" design. The Mastabas of the first dynasty simulated above-ground houses to contain the sarcophagus and various forms of funerary offerings in different rooms. The "Step" or "Bent" Mastaba was typical by the second and third dynasties, where the tomb was subterranean and connected to the roof by trap-doors leading to stairwells and air-shafts. In the Fourth Dynasty (4613 to 4494 years ago), tombs were hewn like caves into cliff-faces of shear rock. In the Fifth Dynasty mastabas were built with the "chapel" at the southern end of a rectangular base consisting of several rooms, a columned hallway and "sedab," along a slightly inclined passageway from a main entrance, and the tomb itself being accessible below this from a stairway concealed below the center of the grand hallway. In the Fifth Dynasty, Unas reigned, and built his pyramid at Saqqara near the "Step Pyramid" of Djoser, which had been designed by ImHotep, supposedly the "Great Architect" of this first pyramid shaped structure, prototype of the Egyptian deity "Thoth" or "Tehuti."

2A. main sites.

Although we now know of the pyramids originating in Egyptian Africa, we have not yet explored the pyramids built in other regions of the world, although it should suffice to say their architecture began independently in much the same way, until it reached a culmination point where cross-cultural saturation with previous pyramid-building cultures may have seeped in, at which point it began the construction of elaborate temples aligned with stellar constellations culminating in the building of megalithic pyramids. We see this trend repeated throughout the world, in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Sudan, Nigeria, Greece, Spain, China, MesoAmerica, North America, as well as during the Roman Empire, in Medieval Europe, India, Indonesia and Peru (South America), to mention only a few. Their low-point architecturally speaking came during the Medieval European "dark ages," when they were reduced to being merely underground catacombs connected by hidden passageways near the sites of stone-age menhirs (monoliths) and herms (mile markers).

[Jonathan Barlow Gee]

2A1. Egypt (12,000 to 2,500 years ago)

As stated, the practice of pyramid building began in ancient Egypt, north-eastern continent of Africa, along the Nile river, which flows from south to north (the only river to do so, being the only river besides the Amazon river in S. American Brazil, which flows north to south, to run opposite the direction of all rivers flowing toward the equator). The earliest "mastabas" in the southern, original sources of the Nile river evolved into the later "step pyramids" of the northern cities along the river. The peak of pyramid building is, beyond par, the Giza Necropolis near Cairo, Egypt. These three pyramids were built to honor the Pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty, Khufu (Greek Cheops), his son Khafre (Greek Khephren) and grand-son Menkere. The pyramid of Khufu was said by Herodotus  (the Histories Second Book, Numbers 124 to 128) to have taken 10 years to plan and 20 years to construct and was concluded 4560 years before now.

2A1A. culture = religious / political / economic beliefs

The period of the Fourth Dynasty in the Old Kingdom of the Egyptian Empire was the first civilization of sufficient size and technical ability in the area capable of constructing these massive Nummulite limestone megaliths. Originally, their exterior faces were surfaced with a coating of light white limestone, so called "Tura limestone" quarried from the eastern shores of the Nile and from no more than 200-400 meters to the south, where the quarries for the core stones were located. 

To construct the "great pyramid" for the tomb of Pharaoh Khufu, 6,500,000 tons of 2,500,000 limestone cubes weighing 2 and 1/2 ton each were hewn (into 127 X 127 X 71 cm units) and moved into 210 layers 146 meters tall in a pile surrounding the central burial chambers and the passageway to access them. The percentage of building materials is such that 97% of the blocks are below the 100 meter height level (around layer 150, counting from the ground level upward), while only 3% remain in the upper 46 meters of building area above this height. The shape of the pyramid was as a square (440 cubits per side) piled up toward the center (to a height of 280 cubits) with 356 exposed blocks per each of its 4 faces, at an interior angle of no greater than 60° (in the interior base) and no more less than 43.9° (in the upper interior), with the average slant being between 54.46° and 51.8° for the outer casing stones. The same ratio of base-unit side length to height yields a lowest common denominator of 11 "seked" per side, by a height of 14 and 17.8 layered steps. The ratio of the perimeter to the height (1760 / 280 cubits) is equal to 2 pi, to an accuracy of better than 0.05% (corresponding to the circumference over radius measurement for pi as 22 / 7 when calculated as a circle).

During these 20 years, building this pyramid required a work-force of untold sum. For those 20 years, 13,200 people at least (on average 20,000 and 40,000 at most) are said to have moved 3 stones every minute, 180 blocks per hour (12 per hour minimum working day and night) at 800 cubic tons a day with ten hour work days. Quarrying the stones took even longer, on average some 27 years would be necessary to quarry and transport the required 500,000 tons of mortar, and the 2.8 to 5.9 million tons (137.38 meters cubic) of limestone, 8,000 tons from Aswan over 500 miles south along the Nile, the rest from Tura and Maasara across and south a short ways up the Nile River. Pharaoh Khufu's vizier, Hemon, is credited as its architect. It is written, "he would but lift his hand, and the strength of 20,000 men would hoist up their ropes and lift the stones, and he would but let his hand drop, and they would let slacken their hold." This was not even the only massive megalithic building project undertaken during this time either. The Wadi Al Garawi flood-wall called the "Dam of the Pagans" of 100,000 cubic meters of rock and rubble was built between 4686 and 4498 years ago about 25 kilometers due south of Cairo. This project is likely to have been overseen by Vizier Hemon under Pharaoh Khufu as well.

During this time, Egyptian mythology, largely gleaned from the Egyptian Book of the Dead called or "Coming Forth From Darkness Into the Clear Light of Day," or simply, the "Papyrus of Ani," describe Egyptian funerary rights in great detail, and deal largely with their religious ritual beliefs in "metempsychosis" - the belief in an afterlife of the soul beyond the death of its incarnation into flesh. So, these pyramids were created as large ceremonial working spaces to practice their religious rituals of mummification and metempsychosis. The body of the royal Pharaoh would first be dressed accordingly in the "King's Chamber," at the central core of the above-ground structure of the "great pyramid," then placed in his royal sarcophagus in the "Queen's Chamber" below this and separated from it by the "grand gallery" sloping hallway. Following these treatments the body was then interred a while in the lowest, subterranean chamber of roughly hewn cavernous rock before being removed for its official burial in a separate "mastaba."

[Jonathan Barlow Gee]

2A2. Yucatan (2,000 to 500 years ago)

The most recent builders of megalithic pyramids were in the Yucatan peninsula far across the Atlantic ocean from the origins of the craft in Egypt, closer to the Amazon River of Brazil in S. America than to the Nile River of Egypt in Africa. Just as throughout Egypt there are known to be more than 80 varied pyramid sites, there are countless buildings scattered across northern S. America and the Yucatan Peninsula connecting it to N. America via Mexico and their culture seems to mimic, in many ways, the culture of pyramid construction at its height in the times of the Fourth and Fifth Dynasties of the Old Kingdom Egyptian Empire. The primary pyramid complex we will examine in this region is Teotihuacan in the Mexico Basin some 49 kilometers northeast of Mexico City. This name in Aztec Nahuatl means "Where Man Met The Gods" and the city served as the capitol of the Mixtec, multi-cultural empire with a population of perhaps 125,000 or more people at its peak around 900 to 750 years ago.

2A2A. culture = religious / political / economic beliefs

Teotihuacan's main-complex is comprised of three megalithic pyramid monuments, arranged along a straight, wide road called the "avenue of the dead" (or "miccoatli" in Nahautl) with the (from nearly exact magnetic north, 15.5° from geographic, north to south) "Pyramid of the Moon," the "Pyramid of the Sun" and the "Citadel" or "Temple" of "Quetzalcoatl" or "Kukulkan along it on the eastern side. Teotihuacan's "Pyramid of the Sun" is the third largest pyramid now known, following the Pyramid of Khufu in Giza, Egypt, and the Pyramid of Cholula to Quetzalcoatl in Puebla, Mexico, from around the same era (about 2300 to 1100 years ago). However, unlike the Puebla Pyramid, and alike the Giza Necropolis, Teotihuacan is comprised of three pyramids arranged along an exact line. The Pyramid of the Sun, at its completed parameters, was 225 meters across and 75 meters tall, with a slope per side of 223.5 meters at 32.494° angle of inclination. Its volume is, at present, 1,184,828.3 cubic meters, and it is located above a man-made tomb hewn from a lava tube cave considered to be associated with "Chicomzotc" the place of human origin according to Nahua legends due to the "Pyramid of the Sun's"  exact alignment with sunrise on Aug 12 and April 29 (August 12 being the traditional Mixtec "New Year's Day," celebrating the origin of the "Long Count" calendar). There appears to have been ritual human sacrifice in the form of burial alive practiced at the nearby "Pyramid of the Moon," and there remain unexplored hidden chambers beneath both these pyramids and the temple of the "Feathered Serpent," called "Quetzalcoatl" or "Kukulkan." Surrounding the Temple of the Feathered Serpent is the Ciudedela, an enclosed compound capable of holding 100,000 people in about 700,000 cubic meters of area.

Little is known about the culture of this city's original inhabitants, and it laid abandoned from the drought and famine period of 1474-1475 years ago and was used as a place of pilgrimage for Aztecs by the Columbian-era 608 years ago, who identified it with the myth of "Tollan" the "place where the sun was created."

[Jonathan Barlow Gee]

2A3. Elsewhere (above ground)

However, as mentioned, there are pyramids built, literally, all over the world. There is no single list of them all. There are 135 known of in Egypt, the Napata and Meroe pyramids in the Sudan (as recently as 1,700 years ago), Nigerian mud-pyramids, Greek pyramids in Pausanias (800 years ago), Hellenikon and Ligruio near Epidaurus, the pyramids of Guimar on the island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands near Spain, the First Emperor (Qin Shi Huang) of China's pyramid and those of the subsequent Han Dynasty Emperors, the Mexican and Meso-American pyramids, Monks Mound at Cahokia (with a larger base than the Khufu Pyramid) and various "burial mounds" throughout N. America, the Roman Pyramid of Cestius (2100 years ago) near Porta San Paolo and another in Falicon, France which is not alone there from this era, the Chola Empire Temples of South India, the Austronesian megalithic culture's step pyramids called "Punden Bernudak" as found in Central and West Java, as well as in Peru, S. America in Caral and Tucume, to name only a few. Modern architects continue to exploit the pyramid motif in building designs, now mainly using glass walls and sometimes, as in many cases nowadays, having hundreds of rooms and serving as a privately operative building in themselves. Currently the Khufu Pyramid of Giza is only the 4th tallest pyramid shaped structure in the world, behind the over 300 meter tall Ryugyong Hotel under construction in N. Korea, the 300 meter "Shard" in London UK, completed 2012 and the 250 meter "Transamerica Pyramid" in San Francisco, USA, completed 1972.

Let's examine only a few of these such megalithic structures briefly to better understand their pyramid building cultures' commonalities and differences.

2A3A. Cambodia (Angkor Wat), Peru (S.America), Iran (Babylon), etc.

Angkor Wat in Cambodia is the largest religious monument in the world, and was commissioned as a capitol of the Khmer Empire by King Suryavarman 2nd, around 1600 years ago. Angkor Wat is designed to symbolize Mount Meru, home of the Hindu Devas (good angels) and combines early Dravidian Architecture in a galleried temple with basic Khmer temple architecture in the temple mountain. In Sanskrit and Pali the name "Angkor Wat" means "Capitol Temple." It was unknown of to modern western sentiment until a Portuguese monk named Antonio da Madalena visited it around 524 years ago. The central quincunx of 5 towers is surrounded by a vast, square courtyard, enclosed by an outer wall 3.6 kilometers long per side, surrounded again, in turn, by a wide moat of shallow water 190 meters wide. The main entrance of the Temple faces due west, and the central shrine's spire rises 65 meters above ground level. Every wall (almost 1,000 square meters) is richly carved with bas-relief friezes depicting scenes from the Hindu epics the Ramayana and the Mahabarata. The most notable occurs on the eastern gallery walls as the scene of 92 asuras (evil angels) and 88 devas using the serpent Vasuki to "churn the sea of milk" under Vishnu's direction. Angkor Wat was constructed of over 5 million tons of sandstone, quarried from Mount Kulen, 40 kilometers to the northeast. If it was begun and completed under the reign of its commissioner, it would have taken only 40 years to complete.

The sacred city of Caral-Supe in Supe, Barranca province, Peru some 200 kilometers north of Lima is the oldest known city in the Americas and home of the Norte Chico civilization. It's over 60 hectacres housed over 3,000 inhabitants between 4,600 and 4,000 years ago. Here an urban complex spread over 150 acres containing plazas and residences around one "main pyramid" (Spanish, "Piramide Mayor") standing 18 meters tall and covering around 1000 meters of area. There are at least 19 other pyramid complexes in the Caral valley allowing for a possible population there of over 20,000 residents. Considering carbon-dating of reed woven "shicra" carrying bags found onsite as around 4627 years ago, the Norte Chico culture was pre-Incan and had a strong influence on later Incan culture, but the settlement by the Norte Chico at Caral in Supe Valley dates back much earlier, to around 11,210 to 10,000 years ago. The Norte Chico's culture is mostly now unknown, however there have been woven textile ropes, so-called "Quipu" or "talking knots" (used for mathematical record-keeping) suggesting their contemporary development of proto-writing systems.

The Mesopotamians contemporary to the Early Dynastic Period in Egypt were constructing pyramids of their own as well. Their model of architecture was called the "Ziggurat" or "plateau building" and these were erected throughout the ancient Levant, most notably in the earliest development of Iraq and Iran. The Sialk ziggurat in Kashan, Iran is the oldest known ziggurat, dating from 5,000 years ago, however the White Temple in Uruk, ancient Sumer is a standard example of their architecture, while the best preserved ziggurat remains in Chogha Zanbil in western Iran. The most well known ziggurat is undoubtedly the Marduk ziggurat, or Etemenanki, of ancient Babylon, the so-called "Tower of Babel." According to Herodotus, atop each ziggurat was a Shrine, and surrounding each ziggurat's base was a temple complex with courtyard, storage rooms, bathrooms, residences, etc. behind a city-wall. This format formed the basis for most architectural city-planning ever since, and was mimicked most often by the castle-builders of feudal Europe. It is currently thought this style of architecture originated to escape the seasonal flooding of the region from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

2A3B. cultures = religious / political / economic beliefs

So, what do these cultures have in common and what distinguishes them apart? They have in common, obviously, that they all built vast, megalithic temple complexes to house the royal living and to enshrine the royal dead, and they shared in common the architectural method of raising the roofs of these structures as high as possible above the surrounding environmental terrain. While in the west, many of these later cultures turned to blood-letting and human-sacrificial ritual centers, in the orient they were associated with libraries of scholastic monks. In all of them the role of life and death was meditated upon heavily by their residents, many of who went on to shape the worldly political events of their eras.

[Jonathan Barlow Gee]

2A4. Elsewhere (under water)

When we add the number sum of ancient megalithic city sites currently beneath the tide marks of modern shore-lines, we can begin to understand where the implied need for building their architectural projects upward as "stairways" to the sky originates. The very real threat, at any time, in the 6 sites where civilization is said to have formed independently, of flooding from their local river system(s) proved too daunting for some of the earliest civilizations, who would eventually move more in-land and away from the coasts, taking their knowledge of a pyramid-building culture with them and improving on their designs along the way. Let us examine, again, only a few of these such sites that we know of now, although we should realize that, underwater even more so than above-ground, there will be many sites that will remain undiscovered even long after our time here is up.

2A1A. Yonaguni (Japan), Cuba, Crete, Bimini, etc.

Off the coast of Yonaguni, the westernmost of the Yaeyama Islands of Japan, there lies a sunken city of monumental proportions, consisting of a monument of very fine sandstones and mudstones of the Lower Miocene Yaevama Group, believed to have been deposited there 20 million years ago. The main "monument" itself is a rectangular formation measuring about 150 by 40 meters and being about 27 meters tall, the top being only about 5 meters below surface of the East China Sea and Pacific Ocean waters. There is a similar formation of contested date of origin in the Gulf of Khambhat (called also "Cambay Gulf") the Arabian Sea inlet along the west coast of the Indian sub-continent in the Oriental state of Gujarat.

Off the westernmost Guanahacabibes peninsula in the PInar del Rio Province of Cuba Island is a sunken city between the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. For over 2 square kilometers, a massive urban complex ruins remain at between depths of 600 and 750 meters under water. For the land it appears to have been built upon to have been uncovered by water, the date proposed by archaeologists and geologists is in excess of 50,000 years before now, putting it well before the end of the last north-hemisphere ice-age, when there were still glaciers covering much of N. America.

Olous (or Olus) in Elounda, Crete in the southernmost Greek islands of the Mediterranean Sea is an authentically recognized historic sunken city, with underwater ruins such as scattered wall bases in Elounda Bay, however the date of its sinking and cause are now unknown. It is said to have been the home-town of Daedalus, the father of Icarus and Iapyx and uncle of Perdix. Daedalus features prominently in the stories, from Ovid's Metamorphoses (VIII:183-235), of Ariadne's Labyrinth on Minoan Crete and of Icarus' wax-winged flight toward the sun, and appears on an Etruscan jug from around 1,470 years ago. The primary temple of Olus erected by Daedalus was to the Goddess Britomartis (meaning "virgin"), the Minoan Goddess equivalent to Artemis. She was depicted in a wooden statue there holding the double-axes of authority and grasping divine snakes. Her effigy adorned the coins of this now long lost culture that also bore forth scrolls claiming to have done trade between the cities of Knossos and the island of Rhodes.

Off the northwest coast of north Bimini Island, 5.5 meters below modern sea-level, is a formation of three linear features, the longest of which, called the "Bimini Road" or "wall" is 0.8 kilometers long extending along northeast / southwest from the beach, but the other two features also extend above the water, and reveal hundreds if not thousands of limestone "beach rock" (carbonate-cemented shell hash) blocks between 1 to 4 meters of horizontal breadth. Radiocarbon dating infers that the bricks were comprised 2,800 years ago from sediment that had previously formed about 1,300 years before then. According to ancient records from China, the fleet of Admiral Zheng attempted to circumnavigate the globe and was caught in a hurricane that sank half of them (under admiral Zhou Wen) at Bimini. They had built the wall as a slipway to haul damaged junks ashore for refitting some 579 years ago. 

2A4A. cultures = religious / political / economic beliefs

All we can say definitively about the cultures of Yonaguni, Japan, of Guanahacabibes, Cuba, of Olous, Crete, and of Bimini Island near the Bermuda Triangle is that, if these submerged ruins are from ancient civilizations, all records of their existence and they themselves have been lost. In order to properly connect the sunken city of Olus, Crete to the erection of the Khufu Pyramid in the Giza Necropolis we would have to connect the Pharaoh Unas with Greek demi-deity Daedalus, and then find causes to justify our making this connection evidenced in some ancient artifact. Daedalus is more easily connected to ImHotep, or Hemon, the Pharaoh's vizier, as a "psycho-pomp" or escort of the dead across the "River Styx" symbolic of the transmigration of the soul after death along the hub's rim of the "Milky Way" galaxy. Like the Orisha Elegua, Greek Hermes or Egyptian Thoth / Tehuti, Daedalus was a "messenger" and a "father of Cretan arts and sciences." Thus, we can speculate the original designer of pyramids in Egypt could have come from (or at the least have known of) the sunken city of Olus, off Crete. However, for now, it remains just that: speculation and hypothesis, and we have nothing concrete to back up any such assertion yet.

[Jonathan Barlow Gee]

3. alignments.

The simple and straight-forward fact is that, not only are all the "pyramids" aligned to all the others on the continent around them, but they are also aligned to one another across the vast expanses of oceans as well. Most of the pyramid building cultures we have examined inhabited a thin latitude and established coastal or river-centric cultures in the 6 places civilization independently formed during the Bronze Age: in India, the Near East, Europe, China, Africa and the Americas during the so-called "Old World" or "Axial Age" from 2800 to 2200 years ago. These gave way to the Classical Period of Hellenism in Greece and Rome, the Persian Empire and Second Temple Judaism in the Middle-East, the Empire of India and China, under the Qin and Han Dynasties, in conflict with various tribal nomads such as the Huns, the Xiongnu and the Kok Turk Empire). During the Maudner Minimum of the sunspot cycle, Europe experienced a "mini-Ice Age" and its economic living conditions plummeted to form what has since been called the feudal "Dark Ages," however this was contemporary to the Islamic Golden Age of Caliphates prior to the Ottoman Empire, as well as a time of many new feudal city-state based "empires" across Asia, southeast Asia, MesoAmerica, the Andes Mountains (S. America) and Africa. Now we live in the "modern era" identified by the "western world" of Europe, the Americas, Eastern Orthodox Church countries (Greece, Russia, Southeast Europe, Ukraine, Belarus, etc.), Australia and Israel versus the "Islamic world" of the Arab Middle East, Turkey, South Africa and Somalia, the "Eastern World" or "Far East" comprised of South and East Asia (the "Sinosphere" of Chinese influence) and sub-Saharan Africa / South Africa still populated by indigenous tribes.

During these last 6,000 years or so, we have gone through no fewer than 3 "Solar Aeons" of around 2,000 years apiece. This means the entire sky-line has been changed, and concordantly all the religious iconography of our species associated to it has had to be changed along with it. 100 years ago, the magician and self-proclaimed "Ipsissimus" (head chief) of all then existent "secret societies," Aliester Crowley, working from a deciphering of an ancient Egyptian stele of the demi-deity Hoor-Pah-Kraat, whom he believed cognate to Greek Harpocrates, established the continuity thus far of three aeons: the first of the Mother, the second of God the Father, and the third of the "Crowned and Conquering Child" whom he identified with Isis, Osiris and with Horus-Ra respectively.

Prior to this beginning of our now known civilization, from before 6,000 years ago, to at least around 50,000 years ago, when we originated Africa and reached "behavioral modernity" as a species (having achieved anatomical modernity some 150,000 years prior to even then), there is a blank space in our historical records as a species. Supposedly, our genetic ancestors were the protohominid species "homo ergaster erectus," (from the early Plesistocene, between 1.8 million and 1.3 million years ago) oldest of the African hominid species, and "homo heidelbergensis" (from 600,000 to 400,000 years ago) are considered to be the "Adam" and "Eve" to both our species (Asian homo sapiens) and our European genetic cousin branch from 33,000 years ago, that subsequently went extinct around 24,000 years ago, "homo neanderthalensis." Interbreeding between modern humans and neanderthals took place from 80,000 to 50,000 years ago, and neanderthals contribute as much as 4% of our total DNA genome to the entire population of our species today.

Many ancient scholars postulated on the problem of human civilization seeming to have developed spontaneously (during the Bronze Age), independently (across 6 of the 7 total global continents, all except glaciated, south-polar Antarctica) and yet all had the same basic working knowledge of craft and tools to design and build with. They coined the phrase our modern civilization "arose suddenly, as if fully formed." Why, otherwise, would a species, dormant for 200,000 years, suddenly begin to spontaneously develop similar cultures at various independent geographic locations? And how can we account for the seemingly missing aeons between the date of our species origins, some 200,000 years ago, and when the first civilizations began in Jericho and Gobleki Tepe, some 8,000 - 10,000 years ago at the most? How did the various cultures of the "Axial Age" world know how to build pyramids, and why did they all align them (north-south-east-west) according to this "Giza Equator" of alignments that connected them all along a single line? And what does it mean that they all align, even Angkor Wat built much later, to the last position of the north geographic pole's location (from 80 to 48,000 years ago), and not to its present site?

3A. of the pyramids to constellations

Over the last 200 million years, the axial tilt of earth's geographic poles has travelled some 30°. This means the north pole and the south pole have occupied multiple locations. Between 810 and 790 million years ago, during the epoch of the super-continent called Rodinia, true "polar wander" events might have occurred twice, shifting the earth's magnetic poles by ~55°. The Cyrillic etymology of this super-continent's name means "the Motherland," and it formed from 1.1 billion years ago from the previous super-continent Columbia, formed from global-scale collision events 2.1 to 1.8 billion years ago, to 750 million years ago, when it broke apart during the Neopoterozoic and re-assembled to form Pangea some 300 to 250 million years ago, that once covered the entire land-mass of planet earth. The "true polar wander" the broke up "Rodinia" and formed "Pangea" should not be confused with geomagnetic polarity reversal events, that have happened 5 times over 1 million years, around 72 million years ago, 10 times over 4 million years, some 54 million years ago, 13 times over 3 million years,  24 million years ago, 51 times in a 12 million year period centering on 15 million years ago, and twice over the last 50,000 years. During a "geomagnetic pole reversal" there are multiple locations of various, equally strong "north" and "south" magnetic poles. Unlike solar plasma-magnetic polar reversal events, which occur as sunspot cycle peaks every 9-12 years, the geo-magnetic polar reversals known to have occurred on earth have happened during periods of low intensity for Earth's EM-field strength.

What does all this have to do with pyramid mapping? The ancients reckoned the size of the earth in cubits, a measure devised from measuring the length of an average person's fore-arm from the elbow to the tip of the middle-finger, as such being about 7 "palms" 4 "finger"-widths each and using "cubit rods" of about 52.5 centimeters. However even prior to this there was a method for measuring that was far more exact, called the "megalithic yard," which was given as about 0.83 meters, and a "megalithic rod" of about 2 and 1/2 "megalithic yards." Each "megalithic rod" could be divided by 100 and "megalithic yard" divided by 40, called a "megalithic inch" (of 2.073 centimeters). The Megalithic Yard, once called the "Greek Fathom" (of 2.072 meters) was equal to the diagonal of a rectangle measuring 2 by 1 Egyptian "remens" (of 5 "palms" or 20 "finger"-widths).

The size of the earth, calculated by these measures, will yield various different number sums. But the ratios for angles between these various different number sums will always stay the same, even when translating between the various number-based systems. For example, 1/2 of 180 is 90, of 90 is 45, etc. and 1/2 of 72 is 36, etc. while 3/5ths of 360 is 216,1/3rd of 216 is 72 and 1/3rd of 36 is 12, etc. Although the sums may differ the ratios themselves are the same between them. The mean radius of earth is 6,371 kilometers (it's exactly 6,378.1 km from the core to the current equator and exactly 6,356.8 km from core to pole), it's circumference is 40,075.017 km (equatorial), 40,007.86 km (meidional) with an axial tilt of 23°26'21.4119", orbiting the sun at an average velocity of 29.78 kilometers per second, or about 107,200 km / hour. In cubits, these measures differ, and in the "megalithic yard" or "Greek Fathom," they differ yet a third time. But the ratios remain the same, and therein lies the lesson.

3A1. Giza alignment is "upside down" (N/S) to Orion

It can be found that, along the latitudinal "Giza Equator," a great arc may be drawn from Angkor Wat to Teotihuacan with Giza at its center. The ratio of this great arc's completion around the rest of the globe between Teotihuacan in Mexico and Angkor Wat in Cambodia is this the same distance as between the Teotihuacan and Giza or between Giza and Angkor Wat. Along the "Giza Equator," these three monuments are about equidistant from one another, forming a "triangle" of ruins along a forgotten equator from when earth's geographic polar location was off-set from its present location from 17,000 to some 12,000 years ago or so. However, this is only the figurative "tip of the ice berg" in these matters, as the Temple of Angkor Wat is (alike Incan Machu Pichu in the Andes Mountains of Peru) aligned to the constellation the Pleiades (the 7 sister stars), while Teotihuacan and Giza are both aligned to the constellation of Orion's belt stars (the 3 kings). Their alignment is exact and precise both within their own confines, to their own cultures, as well as in alignment with one another across the aeonic spans of time, however, they are not aligned to the stars exactly as they appear in the heavens.

The "3 kings" of Orion's belt, the stars (from west to east) of Mintaka (Delta Orionis - a double star system), Alnilam (Episilon Orionis) and Alnitak (Zeta Orionis) do align to the Giza Necropolis' 3 Pharoahnic pyramids, however, in Egypt, the smallest of the three pyramids, the pyramid of Menkere, signifying the smallest, double-star system Mintaka, whose alignment is slightly off-set (by around 10°) is in the furthest west-most position, and Khufu's Pyramid (the largest) symbolizing the star Alnkitak, is facing east-most of all three. This makes the arrangement of the Giza pyramids "upside down and backwards" from if their appearance in the sky were to be plotted as descending directly down onto the surface of the earth. Instead, they are symmetrically mirror-reflected.

3A2. Yucatan alignment is north to south along the "avenue of the dead"

The second site of the two primary pyramid complexes known to be aligned to the "3 kings" stars of the constellation of Orion's belt, in Teotihuacan, is also, likewise, not oriented to an exactly accurate reflection nor direct imagining of this constellation's orientation upon the earth. As mentioned, it is inclined at an angle of about 15.5° from modern "true" geographic north-south / east-west orientation, in keeping with the theory it is aligned to a previous position of earth's geo-magnetic polar axis locations, prior to 12,000 years ago. However, the "Avenue of the Dead" itself is aligned along a north-south axis, rather than along an east-west axis, and so this places the alignment of these pyramids geographically perpendicular to the Giza Necropolis, which is oriented along an east-west angle. This fact, that Teotihuacan and Giza form a right-angle with one another's orientations, is often overlooked. Teotihuacan was, most likely, built about the same time that Jesus walked the earth in Galilee and Roman Judea, or about 2,500 years after the Giza pyramids of Egypt, Africa.

[Jonathan Barlow Gee]

3B. of the pyramids to one another

But Angkor Wat was built most recently of all, some 1,600 years ago, around the same time as Machu Pichu in Peru, sometime around 1,650 years ago) and both are aligned to the Pleiades constellation of the "7 sister" stars. It should be obvious to map the progress of this pyramid-building culture that they have progressed from the Orient ever westward, until finally returning again to S. East Asia. However, this assessment fails to regard the "sunken cities" of Japan, Crete and Cuba. Where do they fit in? They are, within a meager margin, also in line along the same "Giza Equator" and form a smaller measurement within the "great triangular circumference" of planet earth formed of Giza, Teotihuacan and Angkor Wat. This smaller measure consists of a total distance equal to the distance between any of the two locations on the global arcing "Giza Equator." From Cuba to Crete to Japan and back to Cuba forms a second, though irregularly distanced "great triangle" around the earth along another equatorial latitude line, slightly off-set from the Giza Equator. These facts are incontrovertible, however they remain foggy in the eye of the mind's reasoning faculty yet because the question as to "why" remains unaddressed.

3B1. Giza pyramids are aligned along a "phi" spiral (Sphynx facing east)

The off-setting of alignment between the two primary pyramid structures, in Giza of Khufu and Khefren, and in Teotihuacan of the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon (both symbolizing the primary "belt" stars of the Orion constellation, Alnitak and Alnilam) from the single, separate, smaller structure, the pyramid of Menkere in Giza and the Temple of Quetzalcoatl in Teotihuacan (both symbolizing the dual-star Mintaka) of about 10° can also be explained differently using the "Fibonacci" or 1:2 / 3 (the 0.33 or 1/3rd "Golden Ratio") based "phi" spiral. If you compute such a "phi" spiral, as one might find in an average chambered nautilus mollusk shell, over the Giza plateau's schematic lay-out, you arrive at an axial line connecting the center of this spiral to the southeastern most corner of the Khufu Pyramid that crosses the location occupied by the Sphynx. The Sphynx had once been used as a ceremonial chamber, where the dressings for wrapping the mummy were prepared by the Egyptian Empire's priest-craft. 

3B2. Yucatan pyramids are aligned north-south along the "way of the dead"

Like the Sphynx, the pyramids of Giza themselves are aligned along an east-west orientation relative to our present "true" geographic north. Off-set by no more than 15.5°, oriented to the present magnetic poles or perhaps to the past geographic poles, the "Avenue of the Dead" at Teotihuacan in Mexico is oriented in a more-or-less north-south direction. Thus, as I have pointed out, the Giza Necropolis and Teotihuacan "Avenue of the Dead" may be thought of as, figuratively, forming a right angle to one another. The reasons for this remain unclear, however this fact itself cannot be excluded from discussions now tendered.

3B3. global alignments of all sites relative to the "Giza Equator"

Think of these 3 sites along the "Giza Equator" as alike or equivalent to the 3 seasons of the Egyptian Sothic calendar. "Inundation season," called "Akhet," consisted of 4 months of 30 days each, each month of 3 weeks of 10 days each. "Emergence Season," called "Peret," was likewise equivalent and divided. "Harvest Season," called "Shemu," was comprised of the last 120 days of the "Sothic" year, and the difference between the "Sothic" year of 360 days and the "renpet" or "mean year" of 365 days was taken up by 4 seasonal and one annual "holiday" between one "Shemu" (harvest) and the next "Akhet" (inundation). These were considered the 5 "heru renpet" in Egypt, and were very akin to the 5 "xama kaba kin" of the Mixtec calendar used in the MesoAmerican Yucatan. Just as the Cuba / Japan / Crete equatorial latitude arc might have once been aligned to an even more ancient polar position, so too is the "Giza Equator" aligned to the location of the geographic poles from 17,000 to 12,000 years ago. Now we must pause and ask why.