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Abstract:
The remarkable degree of accuracy with which some of the Old Kingdom pyramids are oriented towards the cardinal directions is one of the most challenging problems in the history of science. The progressive deviation of the orientation of the 4th Dynasty pyramids from true north was long understood to be a consequence of the pyramids having been aligned to a star whose celestial position changed due to the effect of the general precession of the rotational axis of the Earth. Instead of a single star, recent proposals considered a possible orientation towards some notable vertical or horizontal stellar configurations. The main idea behind these recent attempts at explanation was to justify the gradual deviation of the pyramid alignments by way of the selected target stellar configuration exhibiting a similar azimuthal trend. Considering conventional Egyptian chronologies of this period to be only relative, and the astronomically determined data to be fully reliable, the researchers tried to make the two trends match perfectly by shifting the conventional Old Kingdom chronologies by some, often significant, number of years. Too little attention, however, was paid to allowing for systematic and random errors in the surveying of stars and in the orientation of pyramids towards the observed asterism, which may obfuscate the real accuracy of the methods and conceal the actual targets of observations. In this text, we consider recent proposals and analyze their errors. We propose and discuss two new solutions whose systematic errors are minimal among all the known proposals: one based upon the horizontal alignment of Alioth and Mizar, and another one upon the vertical alignment of Kochab and ζ UMi. In contrast to other methods, the latter pair has the advantage that it could have been observed at lower altitudes. Both variants show an impressive degree of agreement with the trend in the orientation of the pyramids for von Beckerath’s (lower estimates) as well as for Baines and Malek’s chronologies of the period. It appears to us that the preserved Egyptian astronomical diagrams are fully consistent with our new proposals.
