Giulio Magli

ABSTRACT The topography of the pyramids of the twelfth dynasty is explored here in its full historical and chronological context, with the aim of highlighting connections between the architectural choices, religious ideas, and traditions inspiring the reigns of the Pharaohs of that period. There emerges a clear and close connection between the conceptual landscapes devised by the architects of these rulers, and the two “'double” building projects carried out more than six centuries before by Snefru at Dahshur and at Meidum-Seila. This connection encompasses geometry, perspective, and astronomical alignments in the progressive planning of the pyramidal complexes, and it is confirmed by an important text of the period, the tale entitled Prophecy of Neferti. In such a context, an attempt can be made to interpret several architectural and topographical choices that have remained so far unexplained. In particular, the funerary project of the last great king of the dynasty, Amenemhet III—who built two pyramids, one at Dahshur and the other at Hawara—appears to stem largely from symbolic, as opposed to practical, reasons.

ABSTRACT In the wide area of the ancient Latium Vetus - roughly enclosed within the coast and the Apennines between Rome and Terracina, in Central Italy - there are several examples of town's walls and buildings constructed with the spectacular megalithic technique called polygonal, in which enormous blocks are cut in irregular shapes and perfectly fit together without mortar. In many cases, for instance in Alatri, Arpino, Circei, Norba and Segni, the megalithic size of the blocks and the ingenuity in construction reach the same magnificence and impression of power and pride which characterize the worldwide famous Mycenaean towns of Tiryns and Mycenae, constructed around the XIII century BC. In Italy however, all polygonal walls are currently attributed to the Romans, and dated to the first centuries of the Roman republic (V-III century BC), although for most of these constructions no reliable stratigraphy is available. In the present work, which is part of an ongoing project aiming at a complete study of these buildings, we investigate the possible astronomical references in the planning of two among the most imposing of them, namely the so called Acropolis of Alatri and Circei.

In many of the “wonders” of our past, information about their meaning and scope has been encoded in the form of astronomical alignments to celestial bodies. Therefore, in many cases, understanding the ideas of the ancient architects turns out to be connected with the study of the relationship of their cultures with the sky. This is the aim of archaeoastronomy, a discipline which is a quite efficacious tool in unraveling the original projects of many monuments. This issue is briefly discussed here by means of three examples taken from three completely different cultures and historical periods: the so-called “air shafts” of the Great Pyramid, the urban layout of the capital of the Incas, and the design of the Pantheon.

ABSTRACT The gamma metric, a static axially symmetric vacuum solution of Einstein field equations, is reviewed, the nature of its singularity and the shape of its sources are studied. This space-time is matched with an interior metric satisfying physically viable conditions. The model obtained, which can represent a dense astrophysical object, is used to investigate the boundary between black hole (i.e. Schwarzschild) and naked singularity as a function of the shape of the source.

ABSTRACT Via Appia was built by the Romans around 312 BC to connect Rome with Capua during the Samnite wars. The road is an astonishing engineering masterpiece. In particular, the segment which runs from Collepardo to Terracina – 61 km long – is renowned for being virtually straight; however such a “straightness” was never investigated quantitatively. As a consequence, the techniques used by the ancient surveyors and their very scope – whether it was only practical, or also symbolical – remain obscure. We report here a high-precision GPS survey of the road, performed with a u-blox receiver and further checked with a dual frequency receiver. We give a detailed analysis of the methods used and of the errors, which are shown to be less than 6’. To our knowledge it is the first time that such a long ancient manufactured structure has been surveyed with such a high accuracy. The results lead to conclude that astronomy was certainly used in the construction of the road and in that of the associated grid, oriented to the setting of the star Castor and to the cardinal points respectively.

Anasazi is the name given to the ancestors of the present-day Hopi and Zuni tribes that live along the Rio Grande in New Mexico and Arizona. The Anasazi civilization flourished in the centuries around 1000 AD in the region that corresponds to the border area joining Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. This is not a particularly fertile area, but the Anasazi succeeded nevertheless in building a thriving economy based on hunting and efficient farming (Brody 1990). The Anasazi dwelt in villages that often boasted monumental architecture. Around 1250 AD, however, their life changed drastically: many villages were abandoned, and new settlements were built in out-of-the way, almost inaccessible, places. Abandonment of sites is a phenomenon common also to other civilizations of the Americas, but the Anasazi version was extremely striking and difficult to account for. For example, the Anasazi constructed an enormous 420-room building at Sand Canyon, which was created, inhabited, and abandoned, all in the space of 50 years around 1200 AD. We have little information about the life and society of the Anasazi. As far as we know, they did not have writing, and until recently they were thought to be (along with the Mayas) a sort of “sons of the flowers.” This view, however, now has been modified considerably. For instance, at the so-called Castle Rock site, in Colorado, also inhabited for an extremely short period between 1256 and 1274, there is no doubt that the occupation ended in a massacre. The human remains discovered there show unmistakable signs of can nibalism and scalping. It is thus clear that isolation in inaccessible villages was due to the need for defense. And yet this question of abandonment is far from being fully explained, although there is evidence of repeated droughts, invasions, and social and demographic tension (Nelson and Scachner 2002). It is also possible, as we shall see, that the Anasazi social customs, religion, and way of thinking played a role in this large-scale desertion and to further explorer these issues it is essential to trace their astronomical ideas, as the study of celestial cycles was undoubtedly one of the basic constituent of their very existence.

Any discussion about Egypt seems darned to begin by quoting an extremely banal sentence of the historian Herodotus, who called Egypt “the gift from the Nile.” Actually the Egypt that we know today is quite different from the swampy land with a tropical climate that was the typical habitat of that part of Africa until circa the year 4000 BC.

There are places on this planet where the intellect vacillates and common sense protests, places that unsettle and overwhelm, where sometimes the only response is that odd indifference which is the mind's last defense. Well, we had better get used to it, because these places are exactly where this book is taking us. The first such places we will visit

ABSTRACT The towns founded by the Romans over the course of some eight centuries of history were always inspired by rigid principles of spatial organization, followed by the Roman military camps as well. The symbolism embodied in such rules was tightly and undubitably connected with the power of Rome. According to a variety of ancient sources, city planning involved ritual procedures inherited from the Etruscans and closely connected with the equipartition of the Cosmos according to cardinal directions. As a consequence, a role for astronomy has to be expected in Roman city planning. However, attempts at establishing a common rule have been doomed to failure up to now due both to methodological issues and to the practical mentality of the Romans, which in many cases appears to have overruled symbolic principles. We discuss these issues and present recent results obtained on the towns of Italy and of the Iberian Peninsula, which help to clarify the matter.

Behaviour of singularities of the rotating black holes under an arbitrary boost is considered on the basis of a complex representation of the Kerr theorem. We give a simple algorithm allowing to get explicit expressions for the metric and the position of the singularities for arbitrary direction and magnitude of the boost, including the ultrarelativistic case. The non-smoothness of the ultrarelativistic limit is discussed. The Kerr-Sen BH-solution to low energy string theory is also analyzed.

The null tetrad formalism is used to investigate the structure of the Einstein field equations for Kerr–Schild gravitational fields in the presence of an elastic solid source. It is shown that such equations may be reduced to five nonlinear partial differential equations for five variables. It turns out that, when the interior solutions admit the same preferred null congruence of

The Domus Aurea, Nero's last "palace" constructed in the very heart of ancient Rome, is a true masterpiece of Roman architecture. We explore here symbolic aspects of the emperor's project, analysing the archaeoastronomy of the best preserved part of the Domus, the Esquiline Wing. In particular, we study the so-called Octagonal Room, the huge vaulted room which is in many respects a predecessor of the Pantheon. The project of the room turns out to be connected with astronomy, as will be that of the Hadrian's Pantheon 60 years later. Indeed, the divinization and "solarisation" of the emperor placed at the equinoxes as a point of balance in the heavens are shown to be explicitly referred to in the rigorous orientation of the plan and in the peculiar geometry of the design of the dome.