William Glyn-Jones <wibliom@yahoo.co.uk> wrote about Stonehenge on 11 October 2005 as follows:
"My suggestion is that the diagonal of the station stone rectangle represents diagrammatically the Earth's axis of rotation where the circular henge itself is the Earth. But I have not suggested an orientation of this diagram to the pole star, rather it is aligned so the Earth to Sun line is marked out by the line of the avenue towards midsummer Sun."Andis Kaulins (then at akaulins@aol.com) wrote:
"In Stonehenge Decoded by Gerald S. Hawkins, his illustration at p. 108 clearly indicates that the line to the polestar (North Celestial Pole) did not pass through the diagonals running through the two mound Station Stones 92 and 94. Rather, as Hawkins states at p. 170:
"The reference azimuth is the line from the heel stone through the nearest sarsen archway and STNX [the center of the Sarsen circle]. From Lockyer's survey this azimuth is 51.23° east of north (The latitude of Stonehenge is 51.11 North). By ciné film measure of a sunrise, I obtained a value differing by only 0.15°; in this work I have used Lockyer's figure."
Since the diagonal meets that azimuth line at 45°, we have here a discrepancy of nearly 6 1/2° from your theory - a discrepancy by the way that I find in all of the major megalithic lines that I have been able to estimate for the ancient survey of the earth - they all diverge by somewhat more than 6° from true north. This has puzzled me for years. Why would that be? I now may have an answer, see further below.
Hawkins notes starting at page 94 with two diagrams at p. 95 that the daily journey of the sun combined with the spin of the earth around its axis makes it appear as if the Sun rises, moves around the celestial pole in a circle, and sets. The ancients would have seen this too and would have regarded it to be important, obviously.
Hawkins writes on p. 6:
"[R]emember that [the Sun] seems to move in a small circle around the polestar once every 24 hours, and as one moves north on the earth the polestar is higher overhead. When the path of the sun is raised, it cuts the horizon closer to due north.... Therefore, the farther north you are, the more northerly the summer sunrise."
Accordingly, we have every reason to believe that the ancients would have marked the South and North celestial poles, as you suggest, as an integral part of solar observations. But where is the 6 1/2° difference? And that now is the remarkable thing!P.S. We use the ancient Greek term Cheops as much more correct than the modern transliteration Khufu, which is clearly incorrect, assigning an "F" value where Old Kingdom Egpytian surely had no so letter. Now THAT is bad linguistics and bad archaeology. That the moderns think that their transliterations are more correct than ancient Greek renditions of a Pharaoh's name is amusing.
We have always presumed that the ancients knew "exactly" where the north celestial pole in the heavens was. However, this may not be true. We have every reason to believe that they picked the nearest brightest star to where the "eye of God" was, and the star they appear to have used is in Ursa Minor, here, specifically, Kochab, which - according to my astronomy program, Starry Night Pro, in 1750 BC is about 7° removed from the actual North Celestial Pole, at that time marked exactly by no star at all. And that's pretty close.
And if Kochab was the star the ancients used as their celestial north pole, then Kochab = Cheop(s).
See in this regard the discussion at http://www.grahamhancock.com/forum/BauvalR1-p1.htm