The Pyramid Folio: Comments

Robert Schadewald

My paper, “The Slope of the Great Pyramid,” was written before I saw the portfolio, and is a bit more informal than some of the other papers.  I drew heavily on Willy Ley, who took his arguments from Ludwig Borchardt.  I expanded the thesis, corrected a couple minor errors and added some new material.  I noted no references to Borchardt’s work in the portfolio (perhaps it’s only available in German), so I think the material will be new to most. 

In “Numerical Coincidences and Pyramidology,” Forrest notes that the slopes of the ascending and descending passages are very nearly 1:2 (errors of 0.16% and 2%).  It then seems that the simplest hypothesis is that the passages were built to a slope of fourteen palms per ell. 

Also, in “A Comparison of Pyramidology and the Shakespearean Authorship Problem,” Forrest notes that the pyramid might have been built so that the face edges rise nine units for every ten units of run.  If, as Borchardt (and Ley and I) suggested, the pyramid was built to a pitch of five and a half palms of run per ell of rise, the edge angle would be 41° 59′ 9″ and its tangent = 0.899954+.  This differs from 9/10 by only about 0.005%, another pretty numerical coincidence. 

Mr. Saunders has appended a Xerox of a method for calculating great circle distances.  While I presume it will work, the method is unnecessarily complex.  Using the same notation:

cosD = cosLA cosLB cosLD + sinLA sinLB

This goes very rapidly on a good scientific calculator. 

From the number and diversity of theories presented, it seems to me that the various dimensions of the Great Pyramid constitute a Rorschach, in which seekers can find whatever they want to find.  In the past, the pyramid has provided numerous dates for the End of the World.  So far, they have failed in turn.  Now the Pyramid provides links to extraterrestrials.  Well …

Whatever their true value, the contributions are all interesting.  I hope the contributors enjoyed writing them as much as I enjoyed reading them. 

R. J. Schadewald
March 1977