Related papers: The architect Kha's protractor
I have recently proposed that an object, found in an Egyptian tomb and exposed at the Egyptian Museum of Torino, could be a protractor. The tomb was that of architect Kha, supervisor at Deir El-Medina during the 18th Dynasty, and his wife…
The study of the mathematics and geometry of ancient civilizations is a task which seems to be very difficult or even impossible to fulfil, if few written documents, or none at all, had survived from the past. However, besides the direct…
We will discuss about a possible method of using the cubit rod by the architects and the surveyors of Ancient Egypt to measure and draw lengths, comparing it with the other interpretations present in Literature. Instead of the modern…
As proposed in a previous paper, the decorations of ancient objects can provide some information on the approximate evaluations of constant {\pi}, the ratio of circumference to diameter. Here we discuss some disks found in the tomb of…
A series of peculiar, visual alignments between the pyramids of the pharaohs of the 4, 5 and 6 Egyptian dynasties exists. These alignments governed from the very beginning the planning of the funerary monuments of successive kings and, in…
It is known since the 19 century that in the layout of the pyramid field of the pharaohs of the 4 th Egyptian dynasty at Giza, a main axis exists. Indeed, the south-east corners of these monuments align towards the site of the temple of…
We describe a balance weight dated to the Early Islamic Period from the Hecht Museum at the University of Haifa (Israel) Its polyhedral shape was attributed to a truncated elongated octagonal bipyramid. To our knowledge, the earliest…
This study is based on Roman wooden force pumps. It appears that they were used in small numbers to raise water from wells, and more commonly as portable pumps to fight fires. The force pump is attributed to Ctesibius of Alexandria (fl.…
We have conducted an experimental study of the linear transport properties of the magnetic-field induced insulating phase which terminates the quantum Hall (QH) series in two dimensional electron systems. We found that a direct and simple…
We study ancient Khmer ephemerides described in 1910 by the French engineer Faraut, in order to determine whether they rely on observations carried out in Cambodia. These ephemerides were found to be of Indian origin and have been adapted…
Estimating of the overhead costs of building construction projects is an important task in the management of these projects. The quality of construction management depends heavily on their accurate cost estimation. Construction costs…
We present a new statistical approach to analyzing an extremely common archaeological data type -- potsherds -- that infers the structure of cultural relationships across a set of excavations. This method, applied to data from a set of…
In a recent work, arxiv:2412.20407, we have mentioned two Egyptian kings, Shepseskaf and Userkaf, of the IV and V Dynasties. Here we continue discussing their burial places, that is their pyramids, in a new framework based on the study of…
These are excerpts from the closing talk at the "XIIth Conference on Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum", which took place last Summer in Thessaloniki --an excellent place to enjoy an interest in archeology. A more complete personal…
This expository article outlines the construction of De Concini-Procesi arrangement models and describes recent progress in understanding their significance from the algebraic, geometric, and combinatorial point of view. Throughout the…
The topography of the royal pyramids of the 12th dynasty is investigated in its historical and chronological context, in order to highlight connections between the architectural choices, the religious ideas and the traditions inspiring the…
On folio 855 recto of the Codex Atlanticus, Leonardo da Vinci drew three 'easily movable' bridges, but one of them is enigmatic: all 'replicas' in Leonardo museums and exhibitions come as a surprise, to say the least, to any engineer or…
The swinging counterweight trebuchet was at its full blossom in the Late Middle Ages an artillery piece of great importance that could destroy the defenses of castles under siege by bombardment with stones from considerable distances. The…
We discuss the classical, and forgotten, notion of perpetuants. We give a proof of the Theorem of Stroh computing their dimensions, and exhibit a basis of perpetuants, thus closing an old line of investigation.
In recent years, different scientific disciplines, from Physics to Egyptology, from Geology to Archaeoastronomy, evidenced a series of clues pointing to the possibility that the original project of the pyramid complex of Khufu at Giza…