On Measuring Ancient Egyptian Architecture

Abstract

This article discusses the meaning and function of the act of measuring ancient Egyptian architecture in the present-day context, in which the advent of digital culture has allowed the accumulation of extremely precise and accurate data. Our expectations on our modern measurements may lead us to select the ancient data through a filter that does not correspond to the ancient perspective, thus affecting the validity of the results. In order to disentangle past and current perspectives, it may be useful to discuss two aspects: the difference between ancient measures obtained from calculations and observations, and the meaning of precision and accuracy in modern and ancient times. A reconstruction of the planning and building process of ancient monuments is likely to take a successful path only if we are willing to look at the evidence from a slightly different perspective, in which numbers become part of a larger and more complex operation.