- Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 -
Apparently, the first photograph of the Sphinx, although the photographers C. & G. Zangaki and the years of shooting 1880 - 1900 are indicated. But the Sphinx was taken, of course, earlier.
Photographers have been photographing Egypt since 1870, but this is hardly their photo. In many photographs, even in the 1850s, the state of the Sphinx in the back of it is much more "new", the back is "restored". What we don't see in this picture.
The condition of the Sphinx and the stele suggests that this EARLY photo of the Sphinx was taken around 1850-54.
The stele of Thutmose IV is out of place, and only the upper part is from it. That is, its upper part has just been brought in and installed. After this, the photo will be placed in its final place and cast in its final form.
The back of the Sphinx, one of four stacks of construction debris and rejected blocks, hasn't even joined the rest into a single torso yet.
In 1867, the second half of this supposedly "natural rock at the base of the Sphinx" was supplemented with mortar, bricks and debris.
Promotional video:
In 1870 it continued to grow with the same rubbish.
This was the end of construction at Giza.
***
The hike, confirmation that by 1801 the objects of Giza, the Great Pyramids and the Sphinx, had not yet been completed, were before our eyes all the way. And not only with us, but with everyone, and for two centuries now.
And they were left by none other than Dominique Vivant, better known by the title of Baron Denon (Dominique Vivant Denon, January 4, 1747 - April 27, 1825), French artist, founder of the Louvre, the founder of Egyptomania and the founder of applied Egyptology, who accompanied Napoleon's corps in Egypt and who left an outstanding work - a book of drawings, maps and diagrams of monuments of Egypt.
Dominique Vivant Denon took part as an artist in the Egyptian expedition of Napoleon Bonaparte 1798-99; published "A Journey through Lower and Upper Egypt" (1802) with his own engravings (over 300). In 1802 he was appointed general director of museums in France: the Central Museum of Arts of the Republic (later the Museum of Napoleon, then the Louvre), also Versailles, porcelain manufactories in Sevres, tapestries in Beauvais, the Mint and Medal Court, etc.; Denon's powers as the 1st director of the Louvre were confirmed by Louis XVIII (1814). During the Napoleonic conquests in Europe, Denon directed the replenishment of French collections at the expense of requisitioned art monuments from various countries, especially Italy. In 1812 he received the title of Baron. Based on his drawings, engravings were made for the 20-volume edition "Description de l'Egypte" (1809-22) by E. F. Zhomara. Denon's name now bears one of the wings of the Louvre.
The Great Forgery of the Great Pyramids in Deno's Egyptian Albums
Surprisingly, but the most outstanding historical site of Egypt, the Giza plateau with the Great Pyramids and the Sphinx, is only a couple of pages devoted to this wonderful work. From a pedant who stood up for the accuracy of descriptions in science, who carefully removed the dimensions and drew diagrams of the mass of temples and monuments - in itself an amazing disregard for the most outstanding buildings of the ancient Egyptians, the "Wonder of the World" of the Great Pyramid, etc.
Here you can flip through his book, navigation is convenient, and you can look at pictures with a magnifying glass - this is the collection of the library of the University of Heidelberg.
Pages.
The pyramids are hastily sketched. So will an artist who has come to acquaint the world with the architecture of Egypt draw the greatest building in the world? An artist who, with great care, painted each curl of elements of much smaller objects? Of course not.
The perspective of the Great Pyramids is not without difficulty.
This is the closest I could find. From left to right - Mikerin, Khefren, Cheops.
Only Khafren does not have the famous "cap", two of the three pyramids of the Queens have not yet been built.
And the Nile is not here and never was, it is to the east of Giza.
For understanding. The engraver's gaze is directed north, he himself is south of the Great Pyramids. The Nile is far to the east, parallel to the direction of sight.
This is exactly a sketch. General idea, hastily indicated, and no more. The author did not see the Pyramids of Giza where and what they are in finished form, did not know that Khafre would be decorated with a "hat", but knew that they would be.
Nevertheless, the plan of the tunnel and the burial chambers is already there, detailed, neat, to scale and in the typical Denon manner.
This means that they were ready, but they had not yet poured sand onto these buildings into the main body of the pyramid, and had not yet laid them in blocks cast in place.
On the second page - the entrance to the Cheops pyramid, which corresponds to the real one, up to the chips on the blocks. It is at a height of 15.6 m.
It has already been done. Photo of 1867, this is the earliest photo of the entrance that was found.
I would also like to draw your attention to the fact that the perspective of a very accurate drawing of Denon is impossible at the present time.
It can only be obtained while in the air.
What was Denon standing on when sketching this engraving?
Only on a poured hill serving as a surface for moving materials from the builders of the pyramid, which was removed after construction was completed.
As the observer approaches a tall object, the proportions of the object change: its lower part increases relative to the upper one.
You can also show the height of Denon's eyes in comparison with a modern image from a drone.
The drone was slightly to the left and further, but there was no better angle. The proportions are the same in height.
There were no photographs or drones in Denon's time. The artist could only stand on the building embankment.
The picture with the Great Sphinx is the only one in Denon.
Photos of the head from the north until 1931, when it was very seriously named during the reconstruction, were taken extremely rarely.
I managed to find two photos, and those of the imprecise angle, 1900 and 1906, and the most correct angle in the photo of the 1920s, which is impossible to make today, Photo:
Contemporary photography is impossible after 1927. And it makes no sense after the restoration of 1931, when the head of the Sphinx was significantly changed, the mane was extended, the left upper part of the head was completed, etc.
At the place from where the last picture was taken, the eastern necropolis of Giza, the tomb of Queen Neresanh, was excavated and receives tourists. The hill from which the photographer was shooting has been torn down.
A picture was taken from the hill above this object. The tomb of Meresanh III was discovered by archaeologist George Reisner on April 23, 1927. After that, a photo of the Sphinx from the photographer's height in profile from the north side could not be.
But I think that these are enough for a conclusion: Denon could not copy his Sphinx from nature.
He had a sketch. The same as that of the builders. For the founder of the Louvre, an unconditional shopkeeper who saw all the unfinished objects of Egypt and dragged masterpieces of ancient art from all over Europe, it is not at all surprising to have a sketch of the future Great Sphinx. But the builders seriously deviated from the sketch, especially with the back of the head.
The next drawing by the same Denon from the book "Description of Egypt" 1810.
- this is another proof that the author did not see the main objects of Giza in his eyes, he painted only from sketches and pictures in his head. The objects were not completed at the time of Denon's visit, while they were still in the stage of laying.
A foreshortening of Denon's 1810 drawing is impossible. The maximum that can be seen from the southern side of the Sphinx is Cheops and Chefren, but even then not in the profile of the Sphinx, as in the picture, but in a half-full face, from the southeast. Once again, to make it clear where everything is -
Mikerin, Chefren and Cheops in a row, as in the figure, are possible only when viewed from the east, relative to the Sphinx - strictly in the full face.
After 1802, the date of the publication of the book with engravings, and 1810, the date of the release of the album "Description of Egypt", the next image of the pyramid, I recall, was in Pushkin in 1831.
Judge for yourself at what speed the construction of the pyramid went from the height of the entrance in 1802 to the base of the summit in 1831.
And now the fun part.
At the end of the Heidelberg edition, the author, having drawn all the bas-reliefs and hieroglyphs that caught his eye, remembers his skills as a sophisticated engraver-artist, returns to Giza and supplements the album with two pages with a view and plan of the Great Pyramids from the northeastern side - now of normal proportions, perspectives that perfectly match the modern look and location.
We go to the New York Public Library.
The local edition of Denon's work does not have these two pages.
Something painfully familiar, isn't it? Some instances do not know anything about objects, and there are at least one instances with an object. Readers of my magazine will immediately remember where they have already seen a similar trick.
During the construction of Stonehenge, some sources were thrown into some sources, and therefore in the Diderot-D'Alembert encyclopedia there are copies of volume 15 with Stonehenge and without Stonehenge))
And those ancient images of Stonehenge that were made before the construction of Stonehenge in 1949 are just as little similar to the original. as well as the first images of the Great Pyramids of Denon.
Somehow, the Great Pyramids of Ancient Egypt are no longer painted at all by the fact that they were inscribed and legalized by the same methods as this insane monument in the island kingdom.
Well, to summarize this part.
Denon's album is valuable because it contains those monuments of Ancient Egypt that were built by the workshop of history makers in the 18th century. Objects of the Giza plateau were not included in their number. They were being completed almost before the era of photographs. Who cares, about this three parts of "Egyptian hassle".
Denon's album seems to be the earliest evidence of the construction of monuments of Ancient Egypt at the turn of the 18-19th centuries. The builders added autographs.
Formwork builders history in the first photo
Great pyramid
Found the very first picture of the Great Pyramid, made by the Obscura camera. But before we look at it, flip through this excellent selection of Egyptian Pyramids. They were painted before the construction and for their time, and they were painted for "sending to the past" by the workshop of the creators of history. All pyramids, pointwise thrown into the "documents of history" before the 18th century, shown to contemporaries during the 18th century and in the 1800-1830s of the 19th century, are approximately the same, equally similar to the pyramid of Cestius in Rome and equally different from the Egyptian real ones.
We will admire them below, and now we note that the metaphor of the appearance indicates that the construction of the real pyramids on Giza was completed by about 1840.
And this means that the sample, the pyramid of Cestius, was actually executed at the beginning of these injections; Rome is one of the oldest objects of the workshop; by the turn of the 17-18 centuries it was already ready in the form of major monuments.
Let us once again recall the drawing of Pushkin in 1831,
made after talking with the Egyptologist Gulyanov and his working notes-sketches. The poet sketched the Great Pyramid in a near-completion stage, but still "Roman" in shape, since the main body of the pyramid was under the formwork.
Let's take a look at the first photograph of the Great Pyramid taken by the camera Obscura in 1842.
The sand level is almost three times closer to the top than to the bottom. The part sticking out over the sand is about twice the level noted by Gulyanov-Pushkin. On the sand, the builders' huts sank into oblivion and some kind of mortar-concrete dump. The same construction camps were at all the monuments of Egypt, and they still lived for almost 100 years, up to Palmyra, the settlement of builders of which Tadmor was liquidated in the 1930s.
Comparison with a photo of 1890.
It is absolutely impossible to combine a 175-year-old photo with the current view, and in general with any subsequent photo; a similar angle can be obtained only by raising one hundred meters above the ground. In the current photo from the surface, the angle of the pyramid will be different, and the distance to the top of the pyramid is greater. But the hem is quite recognizable at the bottom of it; and the higher, the more the discrepancies with the current view will go according to the laws of geometry. In addition, over 175 years these blocks of ugly quality crumbled.
I did it like that.
Old on top of less old. The difference in height comes from the difference in angles. The 1842 photographer was at about three-quarters of the pyramid of Cheops and much closer to the top of the pyramid than the 1890 photographer; these are inevitable visual distortions.
Large edge.
The bottom matched one to one. Then twenty rows were higher in 1842. Either the blocks sank into the sand in the first half century, or a large batch was crumbled, or the restorers trimmed the edges a little, threw off an extra layer in this area back in the 19th century. Why not?
Further, it is quite tolerably superimposed, although distortions grow strongly due to the difference in shooting points. At a height of about one hundred meters in 1842, from the building ground, and from the current level in 1890.
This is a building ground. Which, ten years before the first photograph, during Pushkin's lifetime, I recall, was generally at the level of the object.
Another mega-monument of Egypt, Abu Simbell, was completed 10 years after the objects of Giza.
When the construction of the Great Pyramid began
With the end of the construction of the Great Pyramids, it is more or less clear.
When did the construction start?
In articles about the pyramids, Egyptologists often refer to Grigorovich-Barsky.
The pilgrim Vasily Grigorovich-Barsky traveled to holy places in 1723-47. He left 4 volumes of notes and 137 original drawings, published in 1778 at the initiative of Grigory Potemkin. The third edition of Travels, 1793, is here.
In 1727, Barsky lived for eight months in Cairo.
He described many buildings, streets, bazaars, manners and customs of the inhabitants.
The pyramids are indeed mentioned.
In one phrase.
This is followed by another phrase, obvious stupidity: built by the pharaohs to escape on them when the Nile floods.
From which it is quite clear that there were no current pyramids under Barsky.
They are still visible from anywhere in Cairo, and even more so in a one-storey building of six hundred houses. It is impossible not to notice them and not become interested in 8 months.
Illustrating the book, Barsky drew a panorama of Cairo and found no place for the pyramids. Mosques and temples, towering over the city, painted, they are described in his book, and in great detail. I painted the fortress, which - from his own book - is in the highest place of the city. The pyramids are not.
He could not help but notice the greatest, it is believed, buildings of that time on the planet. In Alexandria, for comparison, I noted on the panorama of the city Pompey's column and Cleopatra's igloo - the only completed monuments of Ancient Egypt in the city at that time. The objects are incomparably smaller in comparison with the pyramids.
He carefully sketched them up close, separately reproduced the ancient Egyptian letters, analyzed them, compared them with the signs of the Cyrillic alphabet, Latin, Greek.
And he did not notice the pyramids when sketching and described with the only stupid phrase, at the end of the first volume, between the mentions of attractions - the Cairo stock exchange and crocodiles.
It turns out like with the Great Wall. The founder of Sinology, Alekseev, traveled all over China, studied culture, architecture, history, crossed the Great Wall at least eight times, but did not see it, did not hear about it, and knows nothing about it. There is not a word about her in Alekseev's work))
From this it is clear that the phrase about the pyramids in Barsky's book is a supplement by the publisher, or rather, the protégé, the shop-owner Potemkin. At the same time, he did not have any concrete idea of the pyramids: man-made mountains, Pharaoh's mountains, the pharaohs made them to wait out the floods.
Let me remind you that in the odes of the shopkeeper Lomonosov, a contemporary of Barsky, there are a couple of references to the pyramids, but without details.
In other words, in the 1760s and 70s, there were already pyramids in the project, and the key figures of the workshop, the creators of history, knew about them. They wedged them pointwise into the current documents of the era. But they had the most murky idea.
It is very similar to the inclusions of Stonehenge made before its construction in 1949: mentions by Blavatsky, Hardy, Blake, drawings by Stuckley, Wood, Orby, which are not at all similar to the real object.
Since the mentions have been going on since the 1760s and 70s, it is clear that then they were founded.
Two words about the background of this event. It was during these years that the monumental inscribing of the Russian history of Tatishchev-Lomonosov into the existing antique, that is, world history, took place. In 1749-1762, Trediakovsky published in 10 volumes a translation of Rollin's work, compiling Herodotus, Pliny, Strabo … In 1763-1764. the story of Herodotus the translator Nartov was published. In 1774-1775 - six volumes of Diodorus Siculus … In this set and began to make the pyramids, first, as usual, in literature, less than a century later - in natural form.
Herodotus made the Great Pyramid with the help of an embankment, along which slaves dragged 3 million blocks. The authors of Herodotus almost did not lie. There was a mound. They just dragged around sand for the core and components for casting the shell blocks in place.
About the appearance of the Great Pyramids before and after their construction at Giza. Information injection and their subsequent construction as a typical workshop technology
References in written sources and subsequent construction in kind are the usual algorithm of the history makers' workshop. Technology.
The biblical cities of Babylon and Nineveh were considered literary images, then they were made and discovered at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Stonehenge was pointwise thrown into literary sources - Harley, Blavatsky, Diderot-D'Alembert - then it was made in its natural form near Salisbury.
So are the pyramids.
The pyramids were mentioned pointwise (including by Lomonosov a couple of times) and were drawn before their construction by the early 1840s. Check out this excellent selection of Egyptian pyramids. They were painted before they were built for their time and published in current literature. And they painted for "sending to the past", fabricating "literature of past eras." It is quite a familiar practice of the history creators' workshop, well known today, for example, by the darkness of the "cards of tartaries", which are planted by centners by an artel of the USE victims and thrown into the "sources of the past" after the "discovery" by Fomenko-Nosovsky against the will of the authors themselves)) in one of the editions of the work "Empire" and "additional discovery" by Academician Levashov in 2004 of "Great Tartary", unknown nowhere, never, to any sources before. Almost all pyramids, pointwise thrown into the "documents of history" before the 18th century,shown to contemporaries during the 18th century and in the 1800-1830s of the 19th century, are approximately the same, equally similar to the pyramid of Cestius in Rome and equally different from the Egyptian real ones.
The same Roman pyramids "from Cestius" became a familiar sign in 1776 when writing the US Declaration of Independence and decorated the dollar in 1778.
This means that the construction of the pyramids at Giza was completed by about 1840.
And this means that the sample, the pyramid of Cestius, was actually executed at the beginning of these injections; Rome is one of the oldest objects of the workshop; by the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries it was already ready in the form of major monuments.
The same "Roman" pyramids began to denote the pyramids in the writing of the ancient Egyptians. Which means: it was made after the construction of the Cestius pyramid in Rome, but before the construction of the real pyramids.
Two exceptions were shown above - realistic depictions of the Giza pyramids in Denon's 1802 and 1810 albums. At the same time, the Sphinx under these pyramids is drawn from the head and does not correspond to the real one.
This means that these drawings were made in that short period of time when the pyramids were close to completion, and those who knew about it could draw them realistically, but the Sphinx, the last object on Giza, was not even roughly ready yet.
This is also confirmed by the map-diagram in Denon's 1802 album, where instead of the Sphinx it is not known what is drawn in a completely different place.
And this is confirmed, as has been shown more than once, by the Sphinx itself in the first photographs, where it is still composed of stacks of defective beams and castings, not yet closed by the "restorations of the pharaohs."
Mind and health!