Sunday, September 27, 2015

Double Sunset

A text only post, and about history, afield from fauna and flora, sort of...and grim, so dear readers, a caution to read on...

There are Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, and are lost to history, at least history told by dna, and archaeological remains...but not so lost to the imagination!...over the centuries they have been conjectured to be all the races on earth, in one fashion or another...many many  books and web pages about this...going back centuries...

I even tried once to pry out of my Jewish friend Malcom if the Trojans of Homer's Illiad might have been Israelites, one of the Tribes...Troy was located on the shores of Turkey (not so far from where that drowned refugee kid washed up...on the web, someone in India did a sand sculpture of this scene on a beach...just really sad to see!), and I was trying to picture just how extensive was King Solomon's lands...and find out why so many Medieval and Renaissance European Kings and Queens and such, claimed descent by blood from Trojans...famously, the Romans too claimed descent from the Trojans....I've always been partial to USC Trojan football...which is neither here nor there!...but Malcom was circumspect!

But why the fascination with the fallen Trojans.?..they didn't win the Trojan war, the Greeks did...and the whole story appears for the most part in just one source, Homer's Illiad...

quote

The events of the Trojan War are found in many works of Greek literature and depicted in numerous works of Greek art. There is no single, authoritative text which tells the entire events of the war. Instead, the story is assembled from a variety of sources, some of which report contradictory versions of the events.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_War

unquote

checking my own thinking, I see that Homer had sources to draw from, and the story well known in his time...

anyway, the Greeks destroyed Troy even more completely than the Tenth Legion destroyed the Temple at Jerusalem, and the Trojans that survived, fled, or were taken captive, like Cassandra...there was a diaspora of Trojans, albeit likely an imagined one...but they turn up all over like the Lost Ten Tribes...refugee diasporas are a kind of repeating theme in history!

There's no dna evidence for the Lost Tribes, and there's not much evidence of Jewish religions practices being found wide spread in ancient Peoples' religions...seems the Tribes would carry such with them...but the Bible itself suggests the Tribes were wayward, and didn't keep to the ordinances...so, so, it's a muddle, and murkey enough that all manor of imaginings about the Tribes emerge from the murk...

my Mormon friend would show me Egyptian like drawings supposedly made by Lost Tribes in the Americas, and I'd wince, 'they're not even drawn right'...and asked, 'how can you believe in all this stuff, and not believe in aliens?'...'oh!, but we do!' he answered...I, I just assumed religious sorts don't believe in aliens!

While there isn't any dna evidence, or religious ritual evidence, of a Jewish world wide Ten Tribes refugee diaspora back in  earliest times (that would come later with the two known Tribes), there are some other things that seem to connect up...I don't know if these things radiated outward from Jerusalem, or Jerusalem was a part of a world wide set of self similar things...

famously, there are pyramids all over, and no apparent connection between the ancient cultures that built them...

quote

The Pyramids of Güímar refer to six rectangular pyramid-shaped, terraced structures, built from lava stone without the use of mortar. They are located in the district of Chacona, part of the town of Güímar on the island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands. The structures have been dated to the 19th century and their original function explained as a byproduct of contemporary agricultural techniques.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid

unquote

Those Spanish pyramids may explain how pyramids got started...farmers clearing their fields stacked up the stones...from there imagination took over!

What ancient monuments all have in common is that they are works of our imaginations...

on that Spanish island there is something called a double sunset...

quote

Also, standing on the platform of the largest pyramid on the day of the Summer solstice it is possible to experience a double sunset, as first the sun sets behind a mountain top, then it emerges again from behind the mountain and sets a second time behind a neighbouring peak.

same as above

unquote

I was trying to imagine if the Great Pyramid in Egypt is some kind of static sky telescope...thought is if one stands back from it, and looks at its silhouette against the night sky and stars, one could observe and time  movements of night time celestial bodies...it's well known that obelisks were sun dial clocks...the pavement around them had markings that the point of the obelisk would cast a shadow on, marking the hours...

quote

There is nothing I love more than a great astronomical history mystery story and today our sister site LiveScience has this great one to share: Using NASA data and computer simulations, scientists have managed to finally reveal exactly how the sun lined up with an Egyptian obelisk at the heart of an ancient Roman sundial.

http://www.space.com/24119-ancient-roman-sundial-secrets-revealed.html

unquote

I think the notion of the Pyramid being used to watch the stars is in Tompkins' book...one thought had it that the Pyramid was at first truncated...a platform on top where the priests would observe...then, for some reason, it was built up to a point...

my thought is that the Pyramid/Pyramids at Giza provides the opportunity to watch double sunsets...a star passing one edge, then appearing at the other edge...a priest stands closer, or further back to the Pyramid to watch different stars...I'll have to go to Las Vegas and see if this could work!...probably too many city lights there to see the stars...

if nothing else, the Great Pyramid is a stimulus to the imagination...and maybe that is all it was intended to be...

more tomorrowmorrow!

DavidDavid


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