The Glen R. Dash Charitable Foundation
The Glen R. Dash Charitable Foundation
Formally known as
The Glen Dash Foundation For Archaeological Research
© 2024 Glen R. Dash
Charitable Foundation
Archaeology
Working Papers
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How Nefertiti's Tomb Should Appear on Radar
This paper predicts what Nefertiti’s tomb should look like on radar, should it exist in substantially the form Nicholas Reeves theorizes.
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Simultaneous Transit and Pyramid Alignments: Were the Egyptians’ Errors in Their Stars or in Themselves?
In a 2000 paper in the journal Nature, Kate Spence captured the imagination of the Egyptological world by using the circumpolar stars to calculate the date upon which the Great Pyramid was commenced and showing how the Egyptians might have used those stars to align the pyramids of the Old Kingdom with due north. It has been nearly fifteen years since Spence published her theory. How well has it held up?
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Did the Egyptians Use the Sun to Align the Pyramids?
The Egyptians aligned pyramids of the fourth dynasty, including the Great Pyramid of Khufu and its neighbor, Khafre, to cardinal points with amazing accuracy. For the most part, scholars who have studied the issue have concluded that the Egyptians must have used the stars to achieve such accuracy. In this paper, I demonstrate that they could have achieved that accuracy using the sun.
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Where, Precisely, are the Three Pyramids of Giza?
Those wishing to study the monuments at Giza may be surprised to find out that there are few readily available maps fixing the locations of its three major pyramids to an accuracy of better than a meter. In this paper, I convert Flinders Petrie’s 1880-1 data into a modern coordinate system and combine Petrie’s data with more recent survey data to produce a map which locates the Pyramids of Giza with sub meter accuracy.
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How the Pyramid Builders May Have Found Their True North
The builders of the Great Pyramid of Khufu aligned the huge monument to true north to within six minutes of arc, or one tenth of a degree. How they managed to do that has long been debated. In this article we will examine four prominent theories, test one, and compare and contrast the others.
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New Angles on the Great Pyramid
In this article, we derive new estimates for the size and orientation of the Great Pyramid using data compiled by Mark Lehner and David Goodman in 1984. We can fix the locations of the casing corners to within ten centimeters. The Lehner/Goodman estimates for the location of the casing’s corners proved to be remarkably close to Flinders Petrie’s estimates.
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The Solar Alignments of Giza
In this paper, we identify those places on the Giza plateau where the Egyptians might have observed the solstices. Our goal was to test the hypothesis that Giza might have functioned not only as a funerary complex to serve the dead king, but also to serve the living Egyptians as a platform for observing the solstices.
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The Great Pyramid Diagonals: Do They Point to a Hidden, Inner Platform Within the Pyramid?
Of all the alignments associated with the Great Pyramid, the “pyramid diagonals” are among the most precise. The Great Pyramid’s diagonals are lines drawn between the outside corners of four “sockets” that ring the pyramid. They cross at the center of the pyramid, where they form a nearly perfect right angle. How could the Egyptians have achieved such precision? One possibility is that the Egyptians, at the very outset of the project, leveled a surface around the center of what would become the pyramid and used that leveled surface as a stable platform to establish the direction of due north and to lay out the pyramid’s diagonals.
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The Man Who Put the Mast Atop the Great Pyramid
Look at the Great Pyramid today and you will see something less than the ancient Egyptians saw 4,500 years ago. The original white, gleaming limestone casing stones, more than 21 acres in all, are all but gone. However, there is one thing that has been added, a mast on top. Who put that there and what was its purpose?
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What We Can Learn from the Remarkable (Mis)Alignments at Dahshur
The north facing entrance passageway of the Bent Pyramid at Dahshur, also known as the north descending passageway, is aligned to due north with an accuracy of 30 seconds of arc, or 1/120 of one degree. That’s about the width of a finger viewed from across a football field, and represents an achievement in surveying that would not be equaled for another four thousand years. How the Egyptians did it, and why, is one important question Egyptologists have sought to answer. Beyond that though, there is another mystery here: Why does it seem as if the rest of the Bent Pyramid was deliberately misaligned with its entrance passageway?
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How the Pyramid Builders May Have Found Their True North Part II: Extending the Line
In recent years various teams have field tested at least three methods the ancient Egyptians may have used to find true north, the “simultaneous transit method”, the “pole star method” and the “solar gnomon method”. Using any of these methods, the Egyptians could have located the meridian, the line that connects the observer to the North Pole, to within a few minutes of arc. However, all three methods are, by themselves, incomplete. They do yield two points on the ground in a cardinal direction, but the points are only a few meters apart. How could the Egyptians have extended the line a hundred of meters or more, the distance needed to build a pyramid, while preserving its accuracy?
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What this Cliff Face May Reveal about the Building of the Pyramids and the Origin of the Sphinx
This limestone cliff face may be the one of the most important places at Giza that no tourist ever visits. Not even many archaeologists know it is there. But as Mark Lehner has pointed out, it is important, as it is one of the few places to the south and east of the pyramids where the original surface of the plateau is preserved. It lies directly south of the eastern edge of the Great Pyramid and may have served as a distant marker to aid the ancient surveyors. It could have had a ceremonial purpose as well, since the sun set behind it on the winter solstice when viewed from the junction of the Khafre causeway and the Khafre Valley Temple. Finally, it is geologically linked with the Sphinx and may offer clues as to the original purpose of the great mound of rock from which the Sphinx’s head was eventually carved. It has no official name; we refer it as GCF1 for the modern survey control monument on its top.
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The 2006 Geophysical Season at Giza
In 2006, the Glen Dash Foundation, in cooperation with Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA), conducted a ground penetrating radar survey over selected areas of the Giza Plateau. This report details the findings from that survey.
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How Deep Can We See? The Depth Penetrating Characteristics of Ground Penetrating Radar
In 2001, Professors Kathryn Bard of Boston University and Rodolfo Fattovich of University of Naples “L’Orientale” (UNO) began their excavations at Mersa/Wadi Gawasis. In 2004, Kathryn Bard punched through a layer of overburden on the western side of a coral terrace, discovering the first of seven known caves, several of them containing cedar ship timbers and fiber ropes in a remarkable state of preservation. In 2005, the Glen Dash Foundation began a series of remote sensing surveys to find additional caves. During our 2005-2006 geophysical season we measured soil properties with electromagnetic induction tools. We employed numerical models to predict absorption losses and determined that ground penetrating radar could be used to locate additional caves. In 2006-2007, we conducted a radar survey and found that we could detect the caves despite their being more than six meters below the surface.