The Great Pyramid Hoax - Part 3

originally posted by: Scott Creighton
a reply to: Blackmarketeer
SC: Of course, I see that. I have said to you repeatedly that the 'master source' was originally aligned horizontally, . . .

Really? Were you with Vyse in 1837? Did you see this master source? Can you show it where it is, or even where it was?

Readers may form their own opinions on Creighton’s evident delusion that his repeating something makes it so.

M.

originally posted by: Scott Creighton
SC: Stop personalising this discussion. If you have something useful and relevant to say about the topic in hand then by all means say it. Otherwise take it elsewhere.

You, laddie, are in a poor postion to make any such complaint.

He’s perfectly entitled to call you on your inconsistency.

M.

originally posted by: Scott Creighton
a reply to: Blackmarketeer

BM: You are forgetting he (along with Hill and Perring) also recorded the hieratic inscription bearing the horus name Medjedu which no one in 1837 knew of, since learned it was also a name for Khufu. Vyse et. al. weren't aware of it's royal significance as the name wasn't placed within a cartouche. This is where your claims strays into the surreal, as you have asserted Vyse et. al. simply copied these from an unknown and as yet discovered source.

SC: I am forgetting nothing of the sort. The king’s full titulary is often found together. If Vyse found some glyphs elsewhere outwith the pyramid and recognized ‘Khufu’ (which, by his own admission, he could recognize), then he simply copies everything he finds from that source into the chambers. He might not know what he’s copying but he does know one important thing--that whatever it says, it is most certainly related to Khufu—the one set of glyphs Vyse could recognize. . . .

Creighton, Creighton, Creighton . . .

If Vyse had access to Rosellini’s book (as you allege) and to Wilkinson’s publication of 1835 (as he actually did), why on earth would his knowledge of hieroglyphs be confined to the name “Khufu”? In what conceivable set of circumstances could this situation arise?

If Vyse knew enough to recognise the cartouche name “Khufu”, he knew enough to recognise a cartouche name as such. He knew enough to recognise “Khnum-khufu” as a cartouche name. Think about it.

And Creighton, if you want to have any credibility in these discussions, learn what a titulary is. What’s present in the pyramid is not a titulary—while names of different kings may be found together. Understanding the context is not an optional extra—whereas all you’ve done is reproduce Alford’s silly “blind luck” theory.

M.

originally posted by: Scott Creighton
a reply to: Blackmarketeer

BM: Previously you've posted Vyse was an expert enough in hieroglyphics and hieratic scripts to create forgeries.

SC: Really? Show me.

Didn't think so.

He’s perfectly right. You’ve credited Vyse with knowledge and nescience quite arbitrarily, to suit the argument of the moment.

Try reading:

“expert enough . . . to create forgeries”

Clearly you are claiming this.

M.

originally posted by: Scott Creighton
a reply to: Blackmarketeer
SC: And the Inventory Stele tells us Khufu repaired a number of structures at Giza. How do you know these were not mere repair works being made to an already ancient structure in the 4th dynasty?

The “Inventory Stele”? This is a reliable 4th-dynasty document?

Well, no, actually, it isn’t.

It does, however, tell us that Khufu built his pyramid at Giza. There is nothing in the text to indicate that repair work is intended: the word used is the usual one for “built”.

M.

a reply to: mstower

SC: And the Inventory Stele tells us Khufu repaired a number of structures at Giza. How do you know these were not mere repair works being made to an already ancient structure in the 4th dynasty?

He's latching onto a widely debunked Sitchin claim that the inventory stela "proves" Khufu only found the pyramid rotting away in the desert.

That stela was made during the 26th Dynasty, late 6th C. BC, nearly 2,000 years after the life of Khufu, the mere fact that it firmly attached the name Khufu to the Great Pyramid should be impressive. Knowledge was difficult to pass down in antiquity.

a reply to: Scott Creighton

SC: Yes—he has, as you can see, copied the glyphs from the Tomb of the Trades EXACTLY AS THEY APPEAR. That’s the point—exactly as they appear. Why didn’t Vyse rotate any of these drawings 90 or 180 degrees like he has done with the Khufu cartouche (and crew name) he copied into his private journal? And why did Hill make the VERY SAME 'mistake' with the VERY SAME glyphs?

He drew both of the Khufu cartouches from Campbell's Chamber and the Tomb of the Trades with the proper upward orientation in his journal. The Tomb of the Trades is written vertically - that is, the glyphs are stacked vertically. The Campbell's Chamber cartouche is written horizontally and turned on its side. All he did was write it in his journal with the proper upward orientation.

Again, there is a difference between text that is stacked vertically, and text that is turned onto its side.

Why on earth would you think doodles and sketches written into the margins of his personal journal are some blueprint for "how to draw fake cartouches in the relieving chambers" is beyond me.

BM: BUT - do you not see that the Khufu cartouche in Campbell's Chamber is not written "vertically," but is rather turned 90° on its side?

SC: Of course, I see that. I have said to you repeatedly that the 'master source' was originally aligned horizontally, copied that way and then the copy flipped 90 degrees in order for it to be inscribed over a single block—the gabled roof trussing in Campbell's Chamber.

So for your claim to hold water, you have to conjure up a hidden mystery source for the hieratic inscriptions found in the relieving chambers, a source that has continued to escape 150 years of subsequent investigations in Egypt. Then you allege that because these master forgers couldn't squeeze the hieratic phrase they found elsewhere onto a single block in Campbell's Chamber they just decide to flip it 90° on its side? THIS is your theory???

And how do reckon some of the relieving chamber inscriptions got turned completely upside down? What, they didn't have enough room to write them horizontally so they wrote them upside down? I can imagine how that conversation took place:

Hill: "But Mr. Vyse, there isn't enough room to write this unknown hieratic inscription we found in the place of mystery onto the wall of Campbell's Chamber!"

Vyse: "Have you tried turning it upside down?"

Hill: "Genius!"

a reply to: Blackmarketeer

BM: That stela was made during the 26th Dynasty, late 6th C. BC, nearly 2,000 years after the life of Khufu…

SC: To dismiss the information within the Inventory Stele purely because of its Late Kingdom date is like having only a 20th Century translation of the Bible available and concluding from that, that the Bible is a 20th century document because of the language.

Egyptologist Selim Hassan acknowledges that Gaston Maspero believed the Inventory Stele to be a copy of an older original and indeed, even goes as far to acknowledge himself that with regards to the Inventory Stele:

“It is… quite possible that this stela is a copy of an older document…”, Selim Hassan, The Sphinx, p.226

SC

a reply to: Scott Creighton

No one is dismissing it. But we're also not attaching fictitious claims to it either. The stela has been a topic of debate in its own right, as well as a subject of fantasy from the Sitchin camp.

originally posted by: Blackmarketeer
a reply to: Scott Creighton

No one is dismissing it. But we're also not attaching fictitious claims to it either. The stela has been a topic of debate in its own right, as well as a subject of fantasy from the Sitchin camp.

SC: You were dismissing it as a Late Kingdom document produced 2,000 years after Khufu. You did not make clear that other Egyptologists believe it to be a copy of a much older text.

SC

a reply to: Blackmarketeer

SC: Yes—he has, as you can see, copied the glyphs from the Tomb of the Trades EXACTLY AS THEY APPEAR. That’s the point—exactly as they appear. Why didn’t Vyse rotate any of these drawings 90 or 180 degrees like he has done with the Khufu cartouche (and crew name) he copied into his private journal? And why did Hill make the VERY SAME 'mistake' with the VERY SAME glyphs?

BM: He drew both of the Khufu cartouches from Campbell's Chamber and the Tomb of the Trades with the proper upward orientation in his journal. The Tomb of the Trades is written vertically - that is, the glyphs are stacked vertically. The Campbell's Chamber cartouche is written horizontally and turned on its side. All he did was write it in his journal with the proper upward orientation.

Again, there is a difference between text that is stacked vertically, and text that is turned onto its side.

SC: Let me repeat—Vyse DID NOT copy the Khufu cartouche from Campbell’s Chamber into his private journal EXACTLY AS IT APPEARS, did he? And neither did Hill.

As I have told you now repeatedly—and which you seem to be sticking your fingers in your ears—Vyse has drawn other characters in his private journal upside-down, exactly as they appear in the chamber. And Hill did the same thing—he drew the characters onto his facsimile drawings EXACTLY as they appear in the chambers. Why do you keep ignoring this? If we are to believe your line of thinking Vyse and Hill would have drawn all the glyphs in such a way that they are easily readable rather than how they actually appear in the chamber. But it doesn’t wash because we can see from other drawings that they made that they ensured the correct orientation was maintained. Here’s an example from Mr Hill:



SC: The above image shows the four possible orientations of these particular glyphs. For your argument to be true then Mr Hill would have drawn these glyphs as per the orientation in #1. Well, he didn’t. He drew them as they actually appear in the chamber i.e. orientation #2 with all the characters drawn sideways. And he did this time and time again with his drawings—every single one (22 out of 24 that I have been able to check) have the correct orientation with regards to the chamber original EXCEPT the Khufu cartouche and its crew name drawings he (supposedly) copied from Campbell’s Chamber. So, as you can see, your argument simply doesn’t hold up.

BM: Why on earth would you think doodles and sketches written into the margins of his personal journal are some blueprint for "how to draw fake cartouches in the relieving chambers" is beyond me.

SC: Why sketch two tiny dots under the snake glyph and not sketch the three lines within the disc? Why leave out an essential element of his sketch?

BM: BUT - do you not see that the Khufu cartouche in Campbell's Chamber is not written "vertically," but is rather turned 90° on its side?

SC: Of course, I see that. I have said to you repeatedly that the 'master source' was originally aligned horizontally, copied that way and then the copy flipped 90 degrees in order for it to be inscribed over a single block—the gabled roof trussing in Campbell's Chamber.

BM: So for your claim to hold water, you have to conjure up a hidden mystery source for the hieratic inscriptions found in the relieving chambers, a source that has continued to escape 150 years of subsequent investigations in Egypt. Then you allege that because these master forgers couldn't squeeze the hieratic phrase they found elsewhere onto a single block in Campbell's Chamber they just decide to flip it 90° on its side? THIS is your theory???

SC: The evidence strongly suggests that the Khufu cartouche (and its crew name) were inscribed over a gabled roof trussing by Mr Hill upon the instruction of Vyse. Initially the Campbell’s Chamber cartouche was copied into the Chamber with a blank disc (because that is how their ‘master’ had it written). However, after observing Khufu cartouche disc with hatched lines later at the Tomb of the Trades, Vyse realizes that the unhatched disc they had placed into Campbell’s Chamber (around 27th May, 1837) required the lines to be added to the hitherto unhatched disc. This is what all Vyse’s deliberation on 16th June, 1837 was all about. After adding the hatched lines to the chamber and to Hill’s facsimile drawing, the drawing (verified ONLY by Hill) was then sent off to London.

[snip] If you want this discussion to continue, be sensible.

SC

a reply to: Scott Creighton

You're now lumping the facsimiles made by Hill (which Vyse commissioned) with his journal doodles.

Ultimately what it comes down to, is you are latching onto any minute difference between the actual inscriptions/cartouches on the walls of the relieving chambers and Vyse's depictions of those in his journal, which he obviously drew by hand, as some basis that those minute differences indicate a fraud, that the sketches and doodles and facsimiles somehow precipitated the worker graffiti. You've got the cart before the horse.

I challenge anyone to go up into those chambers with a measuring rod and sketchbook and working by torchlight to make exactly perfect copies of those inscriptions in all their minutia. If 99 people were to try this you would get 99 versions of those sketches.

Vyse drew what he felt he needed to draw in his journal to help him with his studies. Just because they do not capture perfectly every last detail is no reason to allege he was a fraud, the guy was not a camera but a human being, and he was working under difficult circumstances. When it comes to the Khufu cartouche from Campbell's Chamber, I think he drew them as you would read them, with UP orientated UP. Both the Tomb of the Trades cartouche and the Campbell's Chamber cartouche were drawn by Vyse orientated UP.



You have yet to name your mystery source for the hieratic inscriptions found in the relieving chambers. No one alive in 1837 had knowledge of the use of this type of script or the existence of Khufu's Horus name Medjedu and the way it was used in complete sentences. Under no circumstance could Vyse have faked this, it would be decades later before confirmation of these inscriptions would be made by Lepsius and Flinders-Petrie.

originally posted by: Scott Creighton
a reply to: Blackmarketeer
SC: To dismiss the information within the Inventory Stele purely because of its Late Kingdom date is like having only a 20th Century translation of the Bible available and concluding from that, that the Bible is a 20th century document because of the language.

So you accept the information within the “Inventory Stele” that Khufu built his pyramid at Giza?

You know, Creighton, what it actually says in the text of the stele and not what one fringe numpty after another has misattributed to it.

originally posted by: Scott Creighton
a reply to: Blackmarketeer
Egyptologist Selim Hassan acknowledges that Gaston Maspero believed the Inventory Stele to be a copy of an older original and indeed, even goes as far to acknowledge himself that with regards to the Inventory Stele:

“It is… quite possible that this stela is a copy of an older document…”, Selim Hassan, The Sphinx, p.226

The usual double standard: the opinions of Egyptologists suddenly count, when they say something you like the sound of.

Petrie presented several good reasons for doubting that the “Inventory Stele” is a copy of an Old Kingdom original. The text of the stele is all of a piece with the other inscriptions in the Isis Temple and serves the purposes of the cult established there, by claiming for the temple the credit of an association with Khufu and his pyramid.

M.

originally posted by: Scott Creighton
a reply to: Blackmarketeer
SC: Let me repeat—Vyse DID NOT copy the Khufu cartouche from Campbell’s Chamber into his private journal EXACTLY AS IT APPEARS, did he? And neither did Hill.

Creighton,

You’ve been known to produce the odd inaccurate drawing yourself—and this for public consumption and not in a private journal.

Some news for you: a drawing is always selective. Exactly as it appears? It depends how you look at it. Have you never been in a bookshop? How do you read the titles on the spines of the books?

M.

a reply to: Blackmarketeer

BM: You're now lumping the facsimiles made by Hill (which Vyse commissioned) with his journal doodles.

SC: “doodles” with essential elements completely missing—why? And I have always said that BOTH men drew the Khufu cartouche and its crew name with the wrong orientation. I am not suddenly “lumping” the drawings of the two together. I have always made the point—and will continue to—that it is unlikely in the extreme that BOTH men would draw both the cartouche (and its crew name) with the wrong orientation. That they BOTH did so strongly suggests that they both made their drawings from a source outwith Campbell’s Chamber; a source that had these glyphs aligned horizontally, had two small marks under the snake glyph and had no hatch lines in the disc.

BM: Ultimately what it comes down to, is you are latching onto any minute difference between the actual inscriptions/cartouches on the walls of the relieving chambers and Vyse's depictions of those in his journal, which he obviously drew by hand, as some basis that those minute differences indicate a fraud, that the sketches and doodles and facsimiles somehow precipitated the worker graffiti. You've got the cart before the horse.

SC: I rather suggest that what you are latching onto is any flimsy excuse to try and explain away the evidence that is presented here from Vyse’s private journal and from Hill’s facsimile drawings. You have never yet explained why Vyse would doodle two non-essential tiny dots and completely fail to sketch in three essential and much more obvious hatch lines into the disc. And how could he fail to do this TWICE when he tells us, in his own words, that he “minutely examined” Campbell’s Chamber for hieroglyphic markings. This needs to be properly addressed. The scenario I present is entirely logical and consistent with the actual evidence.

BM: I challenge anyone to go up into those chambers with a measuring rod and sketchbook and working by torchlight to make exactly perfect copies of those inscriptions in all their minutia. If 99 people were to try this you would get 99 versions of those sketches.

SC: And yet Vyse was able to observe the two tiny dots under the snake glyph but somehow manages to miss the much more obvious three hatch lines TWICE and did so after “minute examination” of the chambers. Furthermore, given his experience of opening the previous three chambers and finding six other discs (of Khnum-khuf) with markings in the centre (which he draws in his private journal btw), he would have been fully expecting to observe markings within the Khufu cartouche disc. And why finally draw these disc lines in his final cartouche drawing of 16th June 1837 only after his visit to the Tomb of the Trades where he saw such cartouches with hatched discs?

Of course, none of this will seem suspicious to you at all because you simply do not want to accept its devastating implication. Fine. Bury your head in the sand then because this isn’t going to go away.

BM: Vyse drew what he felt he needed to draw in his journal to help him with his studies.

SC: Deal with the ACTUAL evidence and not how you think Vyse felt. You have no idea how Vyse felt. You weren’t there in 1837 to ask him how he “felt”.

BM: Just because they do not capture perfectly every last detail is no reason to allege he was a fraud, the guy was not a camera but a human being, and he was working under difficult circumstances.

SC: It sure as hell is highly suspicious. And doubly so coming from someone known to have committed fraud earlier in his life.

BM: When it comes to the Khufu cartouche from Campbell's Chamber, I think he drew them as you would read them, with UP orientated UP. Both the Tomb of the Trades cartouche and the Campbell's Chamber cartouche were drawn by Vyse orientated UP.

SC: And there you go again—fingers stuck firmly in ears, shouting “La, la, la, la…” at the top of your voice. You can “think” what you like but the evidence begs to differ. In every case Vyse & Hill drew what they saw and maintained the correct orientation of what they were looking at with the single exception of the Khufu cartouche and its crew name in Campell’s Chamber. Why would they do that?

BM: You have yet to name your mystery source for the hieratic inscriptions found in the relieving chambers. No one alive in 1837 had knowledge of the use of this type of script or the existence of Khufu's Horus name Medjedu and the way it was used in complete sentences. Under no circumstance could Vyse have faked this, it would be decades later before confirmation of these inscriptions would be made by Lepsius and Flinders-Petrie.

SC: Look—I am not about to go around here in a perpetual loop with you. I have explained this already elsewhere in this thread. Go look.

SC

originally posted by: Scott Creighton
a reply to: Blackmarketeer
SC: Let me repeat . . .

As I have told you now repeatedly . . .

Creighton,

You really should get some help with this repetition delusion. It looks at this point very like megalomania.

Reality is not changed by your incantations.

M.

originally posted by: Scott Creighton
a reply to: Blackmarketeer
SC: Why sketch two tiny dots under the snake glyph and not sketch the three lines within the disc? Why leave out an essential element of his sketch?

You’re serious? Should I repeat the explanation you’ve already had of this? Seeing as how you think that repetition is some kind of magic.

No need to repeat:

www.grahamhancock.com...

www.grahamhancock.com...

www.grahamhancock.com...

I will, however, repeat my earlier challenge: let’s see you do, on camera, with a nibbed pen, what you say Vyse could easily have done.

This is of course the usual Creighton trick of taking the same duff argument from one forum to another and ignoring all of the rebuttals he’s had (which I note with gratification he’s been called on here).

M.

originally posted by: Scott Creighton
a reply to: Blackmarketeer
SC: Deal with the ACTUAL evidence and not how you think Vyse felt. You have no idea how Vyse felt. You weren’t there in 1837 to ask him how he “felt”.

originally posted by: Scott Creighton
a reply to: Blackmarketeer
SC: It sure as hell is highly suspicious. And doubly so coming from someone known to have committed fraud earlier in his life.

You weren’t there in 1807. You have no idea what Vyse knew or felt about payment of voters. (Such payments, as a rule, were made by local agents and not by the candidate directly.)

All of this has been explained to you in detail and at length. Deal with the evidence and not your wishful-thinking inferences from it.

You project an elaborate conspiracy theory onto the content of the journal, yet when someone else makes a modest and natural inference from that content, you fault him for it. Suddenly an epistemic rule is invoked which you fail to observe but would have others observe.

Perhaps in such cases, Creighton, you should specify which of your two faces the remark is coming from.

M.

I find it laughable that you feel that any minute variation in Vyse's drawings from the actual hieroglyphs are proof that his drawings in his journal came first and the ancient worker graffiti second. You know if all he wanted to do was commit a forged cartouche of Khufu he could easily have kept it as a solar disk and left it at that. That was the conventional thought in his day, and would have comported with the Khufu cartouche found in the Tomb of the Trades.

I find your hyperbole over the drawings orientations on paper much ado about nothing. It is obvious they fit the drawings on the sheets as best they could. They had no real convention to follow as to how they would be laid out, it was up to the artists eye. I would hazard that Hill of Perring crumpled up many a sheet where they didn't quite get the drawing centered or ran out of room. More importantly is those drawing were signed by witnesses, attributing to the correctness of those drawings. You claim where they signed their names on the sheets gives the orientation of the hieroglyph on the walls of the chambers, but that is utter conjecture on your part. Hill's measured drawing of the chamber's walls and the locations of the hieroglyphs and hieratic inscriptions gives the proper orientation. Perring's drawings only capture the hieroglyphs themselves and not how they were orientated (up, down, sideways) on the walls. If a later researcher wanted to study Perring's facsimiles, he would surely turn the page to read it as best suited him/her.

If you want to see how accurately Vyse et. al. did capture the layout and orientation of the hieroglyphs, then see his published works here:
Operations carried on at the pyramids of Gizeh in 1837: with an account of a voyage into Upper Egypt, and an appendix.
You just have to remind yourself this was drawn by hand by a human being, taking measurements by torchlight in a very confined space.

Robert Bauval's take on Scott Creighton's claim:

Two dots or not two dots? That is the question…
(myblog.robertbauval.co.uk)

He raises very valid points.

The obvious discrepancy between the original drawing by Howard Vyse and the drawing made by Scott Creighton in the Atlantis Rising article in issue 106, July/August 2014 has already been pointed out by Martin Stower. I tend to agree with him that Scott WANTED to see TWO DOTS when they may in fact not be there at all. For without those precious TWO DOTS, his hypothesis does not work.

My own interpretation is that what can be derived from that page in Howard Vyse’s diary is that he was correcting himself of how the Khufu cartouche should be drawn rather than plan a forgery as claimed by Scott. Would not this make more sense than to to imagine that Howard Vyse left such alledged incrimination ‘evidence’ in his diary for posterity?…