JOHN REID - EGYPT'S PRECISION TECHNOLOGY IN THE PYRAMID AGE

 

 In the final years of the last millennium, there was much speculation about the precision technology of the ancient Egyptians, especially during the Pyramid Age. So exact was the cutting, drilling and manufacture of sarcophagi, building blocks, life-like statues and portable items, such as jars and bowls, all fashioned from some of the hardest rocks in the world, that some historical researchers proposed that the Pyramid Builders must have used modern-day techniques. These included lathes and diamond- or sapphire-tipped cutting tools. It was a theory first explored in the nineteenth century by the British Egyptologist W Flinders Petrie, who made a detailed study of ancient Egyptian stone technology.

Then the millennium came, and such revolutionary ideas crashed as the New Egyptology, created by the likes of Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock, fell quickly out of favour. Yet one engineer who remained fascinated by Egypt's precision stone technology was John Reid. He has not just dedicated his life to exploring the evidence first hand, but has also successfully recreated the drills and tools that might have been used by our distant ancestors. This fascinating research project has shown that the Pyramid Builders really did have an amazing stone-cutting technology unequalled even in our own day.
Fresh back from Egypt, where he has accumulated even more evidence of this extraordinary technology, John will present a breathtaking audio-visual show that will leave the audience speechless.

John Reid is an acoustics engineer who studied the acoustics of public buildings, churches and cathedrals for 30 years in his role as a consultant with a private company. He retired from business in 1999 in order to follow a career in specialist acoustics research and he is the inventor of CymaScope, a machine with worldwide patents which exhibits the complex structure of sound in a visual medium. The CymaGlyph patterns, which appear on a membrane, are then analysed mathematically. This Cymatics research led him to use the technique to study the acoustics of the King's Chamber in the Great Pyramid, where he stretched a membrane over the sarcophagus and sat back to watch, for the first time in history, the harmonic structure of the 4-ton granite box.

The results of this research led to a unique hypothesis, in collaboration with his colleague, David Elkington, a previous speaker at QuestCon and author of IN THE NAME OF THE GODS, to which John also contributed. Their joint work may explain how the language and iconography of a culture are linked at a fundamental level. John has a booklet EGYPTIAN SONICS which gives a detailed account of his sonics research in Egypt and copies will be available at QuestCon.


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