"The hymn says that in its long -distance voyage each day, for it a mere instant , the sun travels across a distance ...of millions and hundreds of thousands of leagues . Now let's do the math: one league is 10.5 kilometers . So a million leagues is 10,500,000 kilometers, while a hundred thousand leagues is 1, 050,000. According to the text, then , the distance travelled by the sun in the mere instant that a day represents to it, is several million plus hundreds of thousands of kilometers.
"We know that light travels from the sun to the earth, a distance of 150 million kilometers, in eight minutes and 22 seconds. We also know that sunlight takes 5 hours to reach the farthest of the known planets, Pluto. As for the moon, it is just a second distant from the earth, at the speed of light. Such are the enormous distances, crossed in a flash, by the light of the sun.
"Swthi and Hor's hymn to Amon is one of an exceedingly small number of ancient texts to refer to the speed of sunlight . And it uses orders of magnitude that , given the truly astronomical--that is to say, unimaginable--distances involved, seem quite realistic.
"It may be worth recalling here that the ancient Egyptians calculated the size of the earth, whose shape they knew to be spherical , by tracking shadows left by sunlight on earth. They knew the Great Bear. The Great Pyramid is oriented almost exactly true north. Somers Clark and R. Engelbach (1930) thought that the precise orientation might have been by using sightings of the movement of a star, plotting its positions at its rising and setting, then bisecting the angle between the two positions."
P.142-143, "The Speed of Light and the Astronomical Distances of the Universe, (Stele 826, British Museum)" AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY: THE PHARAONIC PERIOD 2780-330 B.C. by Theophile Obenga (2004)
Friday, September 23, 2016
AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY, excerpt....
"The hymn says that in its long -distance voyage each day, for it a mere instant , the sun travels across a distance ...of millions and hundreds of thousands of leagues . Now let's do the math: one league is 10.5 kilometers . So a million leagues is 10,500,000 kilometers, while a hundred thousand leagues is 1, 050,000. According to the text, then , the distance travelled by the sun in the mere instant that a day represents to it, is several million plus hundreds of thousands of kilometers.
"We know that light travels from the sun to the earth, a distance of 150 million kilometers, in eight minutes and 22 seconds. We also know that sunlight takes 5 hours to reach the farthest of the known planets, Pluto. As for the moon, it is just a second distant from the earth, at the speed of light. Such are the enormous distances, crossed in a flash, by the light of the sun.
"Swthi and Hor's hymn to Amon is one of an exceedingly small number of ancient texts to refer to the speed of sunlight . And it uses orders of magnitude that , given the truly astronomical--that is to say, unimaginable--distances involved, seem quite realistic.
"It may be worth recalling here that the ancient Egyptians calculated the size of the earth, whose shape they knew to be spherical , by tracking shadows left by sunlight on earth. They knew the Great Bear. The Great Pyramid is oriented almost exactly true north. Somers Clark and R. Engelbach (1930) thought that the precise orientation might have been by using sightings of the movement of a star, plotting its positions at its rising and setting, then bisecting the angle between the two positions."
P.142-143, "The Speed of Light and the Astronomical Distances of the Universe, (Stele 826, British Museum)" AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY: THE PHARAONIC PERIOD 2780-330 B.C. by Theophile Obenga (2004)