Ramses' Perfection
Nowhere else but here will you find a piece discussing both Ronald McDonald and the great Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II. Stick with us on this.
McDonald’s restaurants across America and the world feature benches where you can sit next to, and pose for a photo with, a life-size figure of everybody’s favorite hamburger clown. And no matter where you go, Ronald always looks the same – same size, same grin, same arm and leg positioning, and even the same pattern of wrinkles in his yellow jumpsuit.
“Of course!” you say. “We live in a technologically advanced world and there is a factory somewhere cranking these figures out.”
When you are finished with your Happy Meal, head for Egypt – to places like Cairo, Memphis, Luxor, and Abu Simbel, where you will find more than 100 ancient statues of Ramses II in many different sizes but all larger than life and often made from hard minerals like granite and diorite. You will notice something remarkable.
Ramses’ face always looks the same – exactly the same.
Identically contoured. And perfectly symmetrical. And if the statue is wearing a Hedjet (the tall bowling pin-like crown of the Pharaohs), that too is always exactly the same. Wherever you go, you will see a precise recognizable design rendered again and again with absolute symmetry and geometric perfection. This is so even if you look at the statue from an odd angle, like directly underneath – the eyes, the lips, the nostrils, and even the rise of the cheekbones are perfectly symmetrical. And the ears too. How does a sculptor form an ear on one side of a head that is an exact mirror image of the one on the other side the sculptor cannot see? Do you see where this is headed?
Countless people through the centuries have viewed the Ramses statues and never given much thought as to how they were so perfectly rendered, other than perhaps thinking, “Those ancient Egyptian sculptors must have had a lot of talent.”
Then along came Christopher Dunn.
Dunn is the kind of man that could not have existed in centuries past. He is a child of the technological age – a manufacturing engineer with decades of experience, who has worked primarily in the aerospace industry with an emphasis on precision and laser application. Dunn came to Egypt and, because of his training and experience, saw things others did not. He spent years studying the Great Pyramid and, as set forth in exquisite detail in his landmark book The Giza Power Plant, theorized it was an ancient power plant that converted Earth’s vibrations into usable microwave energy.
Dunn observed the Ramses statues and was astounded. He sensed, and after extensive detailed observation concluded, that the Ramses statues are not the work of talented freehand sculptors with chisels – they are advanced mathematical and engineering marvels. He understood that their identical flawless curves had been crafted through a system of complex elliptical geometry.
And there is more, as Dunn chronicles in his book Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt. Using digital photography, 2D and 3D projections, and computer software analysis, he reveals the geometric precision with which Pythagorean triangles, Fibonacci spirals, and Golden Rectangles are incorporated into the facial features of every Ramses statue. To Dunn, this feat is every bit as wondrous as the Great Pyramid and the huge granite boxes of the Serapeum at Saqqara – and all the more amazing given that many of the statues are made from the hardest of materials.
And there is even more. Like Ronald McDonald, the Ramses statues have an iconic smile. Only in the case of Ramses, the reason for the smile is far more interesting.
If you look a Ramses statue in the face (at the Luxor Temple entrance, for example), you will see a pleasant but curiously unnatural upward smile. The reason for this is that the Ramses statues were designed to be viewed not head-on, but from below. When viewed from below, the upturned lips look straight and normal. The statues’ eyes were also designed to look normal when viewed from below. These are examples of a technique known as entasis – geometric warping to achieve a visual effect. In later eras, the Greeks and Romans employed entasis when designing and building their temple columns.
By the way, Ramses II is not ancient Egypt’s only “Mr. Perfect.” The geometric precision incorporated into the 100+ Ramses statues is also incorporated into 250+ statues of Pharaoh Amenhotep III.
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