Ancient Egyption science

[Digit]

Apart from constructing massive buildings that we would struggle the build did the Egyptions have other knowledge that took us many years to acheive?
I've seen this before and perhaps some of you have but I offer if for discussion anyway.

http://www.catchpenny.org/model.html

[Forum Monk]

Digit:
About the article in particular. It amazes me that some guy goes to all the trouble to build a scale model to test if the thing was capable of flying. I could have saved him many hours of work. There is NO evidence anywhere, that the AE had any knowledge of flight or aerodynamics.

Further, I must question the notion that the AE had other advanced knowledge as well. Especially the many, many things people claim are "encoded" into the pyramids. They are an old and complicated culture to be sure, but I don't feel they were any more advanced (i.e. more scientifically knowledgable) than any other culture of their day.

[Charlie Hatchett]

I suck at the history of Egypt, but, if I recall correctly, an iron dagger was part of burial way before the iron age. If I recall correctly, the dagger was made of meteoritic iron.

[Digit]

It's not ony the Pyramids that are 'encoded' Monk, some tell me the Bible is and playing cards as well, then of course you've got Stonehenge, some people will make a mystery out of anything. Never could understand why somebody would write a book as long as the Bible then hide its meaning.
Tends to sound like the plot of some books I've tried to read in the past.
PS It still looks like a carving of a Hawk to me, Horus?

[Forum Monk]

It's not ony the Pyramids that are 'encoded' Monk, some tell me the Bible is and playing cards as well, then of course you've got Stonehenge, some people will make a mystery out of anything. Never could understand why somebody would write a book as long as the Bible then hide its meaning.
Tends to sound like the plot of some books I've tried to read in the past.

Its bunkum, Digit. You don't spend thousands of manhours to design and build secret messages. You put it right up front where people can see it.

As for the Bible codes, those who believe it, claim it was put there by God. The writers could never have known about it at the time it was being written. But I have heard that some debunkers applied the same decoding methodology to Melville's Moby Dick and found similar "secret" prophecies.

PS It still looks like a carving of a Hawk to me, Horus?

But the tail is vertical, like a fish. Most birds have horizontal tails.

[Charlie Hatchett]

PS It still looks like a carving of a Hawk to me, Horus?

Agreed. A depiction of a bird. Horus and equivalent in Mesopotamian mythology, Anzu:

[Digit]

Total agreement here Monk. The tail is weird I agree, but as regards it's flight characteristics anything made of Balsa and thrown hard enough will cover the few yards mentioned in the link.
Aircraft can of course fly without horizontal tail surfaces, but not with that wing shape, if the Egyptians were supposed to be experimenting with flight they still had some way to go.
As regards the wing dihedral, I wouldn't jump to that conclusion myself as warping is already present in the original, and any designer who understood the stabilising effect of dihedral and anhedral angles would, I would have thought, known the need for a tail plane where the wings were straight.

[Forum Monk]

Well, as you know birds are capable of both wing angles. Watch any bird soaring or gliding and you will see classic dihedral angles. Very rarely will you see anhedral angles, except perhaps prior to a rolling dive when the bird pulls in his wings. On the otherhand, some birds such as ducks dispaly classic anhedral angles as they glide to water, but stabilization must be accomplished by their extended feet.

[Tech]

There are anomalies in the past worth serious consideration , ie:

After a century of study, scientists have unlocked the secrets of a mysterious 2,100-year-old device known as the Antikythera mechanism, showing it to be a complex and uncannily accurate astronomical computer.

The bronze-and-iron mechanism, recovered in more than 80 highly corroded fragments from a sunken Roman ship in 1901, could predict the positions of the sun and planets, show the location of the moon and even forecast eclipses.

The international team of scientists reported today that the 1st century BC Greek device, the earliest known example of an arrangement of gear wheels, shows a technological sophistication that was not seen again until clockwork mechanisms were introduced in the 14th century.

The steam engine was invented by Heron, an ancient Greek geometer and engineer from Alexandria. Heron lived during the first century AD and is sometimes called Hero. Heron made the steam engine as a toy, and called his device "aeolipile," which means "wind ball" in Greek.The Greeks never used this remarkable device for anything but a novelty. A steam engine designed for real work wasn't designed until 1690, when Dionysius Papin published plans for a for a high-pressure steam engine

[Digit]

Almost all the early aviation pioneers studied bird flight Monk, the brighter ones soon realised that the bird's mastery could not be copied.
As you rightly comment about angles, the birds can vary them, along with camber, angle of attack, wash in or out, and the larger ones are even fitted with flaps and slots. The puzzling thing about the Egyption 'model' is the vertcal tail surface, is it poetic license or an attempt at stability.
All the early pioneers had trouble with stability, even the early Wright flyers and gliders were only marginally controllable in all three axis at best.
The puzzling thing Tech about the two inventions that you mention is not that they were invented but that they were not developed further.
Nearly 2000yrs passed before the Greeks were surpassed.
Even their boats have left puzzles as to how they managed so many oars.

[Forum Monk]

If I recall correctly, the Antikythera is still a mystery and the best guess we have as to its purpose is the one Tech has mentioned. And why not? We certainly have no monopoly on intelligence. The brain capacity and reasoning power of human beings has probably been fairly constant for tens of thousands of years. Humans are remarkably clever and as I have said before, if one percent of people are born with genius IQ why would it have been different then?

The odd fact of human culture is, we tend to use our advanced technology to dominate other people rather than for benevolence and so, to understand who possessed great technology for any given era, just look at who was dominating the others.

[Digit]

True Monk I read an article some time ago that suggested that the Greeks failed to follow up on some of their ideas because they were a slave owning society and saw little advantage in invention with a ready supply of cheap labour.
If my understanding of the situation is correct then a similar result occurred in the US southern states.

[Cognito]

The odd fact of human culture is, we tend to use our advanced technology to dominate other people rather than for benevolence and so, to understand who possessed great technology for any given era, just look at who was dominating the others.

It doesn't always start out as an attempt at a new military application, but it almost always end up that way, doesn't it. There are countless examples where superior military technology makes that country rich. It's the world's oldest protection racket: Pay me (tribute) and you'll be protected from your nasty neighbors (the other gang).

[Minimalist]

Long ago I saw a show which claimed to have found a model of an aircraft in an Egyptian tomb.

The Club of course said it was a bird...naturally. It really did not look like a bird. It looked more like the space shuttle!

Anyway, they put it in a wind tunnel and found it had an aerodynamic design.

[Digit]

An aerodynamic design Min is as simple as having an inclined plane.
Look just how long it took the pioneers to crack the problems of control.
I have designed numerous model aircraft and the design principles are fairly easy. Once you know how!