Victor Reijs
Self taught in the area of astronomy and pre-history (so archaeoastronomy). Received in 2015 my MA (merit) on Cultural astronomy and astrology. Did Internet video broadcasts from Maeshowe and Callanais (and resp.winter solstice and lunar standstill event). Provide tools around archaeocosmology (astronomy, geodesy, acoustics, etc.)
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Papers by Victor Reijs
journals arguing that the ancient Egyptians coded the lunar cycle and the variability of Algol in their almanacs. The document on which they base their study is a kind of almanac from the 13th century BC with prognoses for a propitious and unpropitious course of events during an Egyptian civil year, each day divided into three parts with its own prognosis. The authors expressed the sequence of prognoses as a series of time points and checked with the Rayleigh test whether the points are randomly distributed or show periodicity. They found a period which is apparently lunar, but also a period of 2.85 days, which they explain as correlating with the period of Algol’s change in brightness. This paper questions these findings from several angles: the influence of time point location over the day, an arithmetic evaluation of found periodicity and a statistical evaluation of several different statistical techniques. This results in the authors conclusion that any celestial recurrency is not per definition coded in the
almanacs. Independent ethnographic evidence would be needed.