and numerals and their ancient religious uses in our e-book
Ancient Creation Stories told by the Numbers
by H. Peter Aleff
| and numerals and their ancient religious uses in our e-book Ancient Creation Stories told by the Numbers by H. Peter Aleff |
| Seshat's emblem in Luxor shows the tools | ||||||||
of her rope-stretching trade | |||||||||
Detail of Seshat's emblem on a Luxor temple wall, enlarged from a photograph by Werner Forman in Werner Forman and Steven Quirke: “Hieroglyphs & the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt”, University of Oklahoma Press, 1996, page 11, posted with permission. This picture of Seshat's emblem on a temple wall in Luxor dates from around 1250 BCE. It shows the seven- part leaf of the hemp plant used to make Seshat's surveying rope. That leaf is here framed by a large numeral "ten" with a smaller version of that same numeral on top. This juxtaposition of "tens" clearly described her mastery of numbers from large to small, and her duty to convert the large numbers of the cosmos into the smaller ones used to lay out its reduced replica, the temple. The five-pointed star at the center of the hemp leaf is a pentagram, slightly distorted to accommodate the stem. The pentagram requires analytical geometry for its construction. Its design was used some 750 years later by Pythagoras as a symbol for his secret mathematical teachings which he had picked up mostly in Egypt. It appears that the Luxor sculptor used this geometric figure here already with a similar meaning. The context of Seshat's role makes it a symbol for the advanced mathematics at the core of Seshat's temple geometry which Pythagoras would later come to study. | |||||||||
| |||||||||
Contact us at recoveredscience.com | |||||||||
