Who can count the windings?

[_Mortal Man]

Is the number of windings equal to, or greater than, in importance to the colour of the ink used.....?

It depends on if you're using your physical eyes or spiritual eyes.

[_Mortal Man]

OK, Mortal Man!

Now please clue us in ... I am fascinated by the Book of Abraham trainwreck, but must confess to having forgotten some of the details, such as the role of Papyrus Toronto (when did the ancient Egyptian colony in Canada start, I wonder? Before or after the arrival of Lehi's party in the US?).

Papyrus Toronto (Amenemhat's Book of the Dead) was buried in Thebes a little over two centuries after Lehi's party landed in "Chili". Sometime after its discovery the outer section was cut away and preserved under glass; whereas the inner (still-rolled) section was put in a drawer (sound familiar?) The inner sections of the Hor scroll and the Amenemhat scroll were each visited by a famous person who didn't know about the connection with the outer portion at that time. Each visitor declared the inner section to be "long". The visitor to the Hor scroll observed it being unrolled and wrote down her observations a week or two later. The visitor to the Amenemhat scroll did not observe it being unrolled and wrote his recollection of its "diameter" 11 years after the fact.

[Guest]

Is that part of the same scroll, at the end of the table? (Visible in the upper-left just before they pan?)

Yes, that's the innermost section of the scroll. It appears they placed it there because the tables weren't long enough to lay out the entire (previously rolled) section in a straight line.

[_Kevin Graham]

Is that part of the same scroll, at the end of the table? (Visible in the upper-left just before they pan?)

Yes, that's the innermost section of the scroll. It appears they placed it there because the tables weren't long enough to lay out the entire (previously rolled) section in a straight line. Gee said he counted the windings in the "contiguous" portion. My calculations and observations indicate that this refers to the straight section laid out on the black and wood tables and does not include the 15 windings of the innermost section nor the 7 windings in the outermost glass-mounted section. It's also possible, however, that he started at the inner end and quit somewhere along the straight section where it starts to get more broken up. Either way, there are far less than "73" windings in this entire scroll.

I don't know Andrew, at 1:18-1:23 when she is telling us it is "going to be six meters in length," the camera scrolls all the way across the entirety of the scroll, and there are several sheets of papyrus that could be described as contiguous. I froze the screen every second to count as much as I could and I actually came up with around 80 distinct segments, but that was including the outer portion. It could be that Gee was saying he counted 73 windings from the inner portion of the scroll, only excluding the tail end of it where the scroll deteriorates (becoming no longer contiguous?) and windings can no longer be reliably counted.

In any event, I'm not seeing how this is an important point for either of you.

Not yet anyway...

[_Carton]

Here's a fun exercise. Around 1:15 in this podcast on Papyrus Toronto ROM 978x43.1 they scan the camera along the entire length of the scroll. It is possible to count the windings during this scene. There's a right way to count them and a wrong way to count them. Who can get the right number? Who can guess what Egyptologist got the wrong number? Who can guess why he got the wrong number?

Once again I just don't understand what these people are thinking!? Do they really think no one will confirm the things they claim?

Are you planning on writing up something to demonstrate how Professor Gee has attempted to deceive everyone ....................... again!?

This is shameful.

[Guest]

What we have here is, it appears, a papyrus roll that has been squashed flat and cracked into rectangular segments.

Bingo.

Squash a roll, and that produces two cracks for each layer, one on the left side and one on the right if the roll is upright in front of you, so that each layer produces two rectangular bits of papyrus. That would mean that the number of windings would be half the number of segments,

Double bingo

How many windings did John Gee conclude there had been? And what effect did that have on his calculations? I can't see any way he can have come up with 73. Surely the worst possibility would have been 26-28, if he had made the mistake of counting one segment per winding.

He stated on the FAIR WIKI:

The calculation of the length of the windings is determined by selecting artifacts on the papyri, such as rips or tears, which occurred while the papyri were rolled up. The precise selection of these points is dependent upon accurate measurements of the papyri themselves.

The papyrus is split all the way down the middle. Looking only at "rips or tears" on the bottom half, how many windings do there appear to be?

[_Kevin Graham]

So we're talking about folds instead of windings for this scroll.

And of the 70-80 segments we're seeing, these actually suggesting 35-40 windings.

Am I right so far?

And your image link didn't work for me.

[_Joe Geisner]

Thanks MM for pointing out this interesting video. I kept waiting for the part where one of the curators tells about the story of Abraham and his life in Egypt found in the papyrus Toronto. Is this part of the program found in the missing video?

[_Mortal Man]

Andrew, are you certain this clip represents the entire scroll? Later on the lady says it is more than 6 meters but this clip looks like 3 meters or less. Further along in the video you can see this portion set beside another portion that makes it look much longer. If it is actually 6+ meters in length it makes sense that they would divide it up into segments. Maybe we're looking at just one segment here?

Roberta shaw states

We’ve discovered this in our storage and it’s going to be six metres—
it’s the length of these two tables.

The clip shows only the inner portion that was rolled up in storage. It does not show the outer glass-mounted portion (slightly less than a meter), which she talks about later. The mounted portion is essentially irrelevant to Gee's paper.

[Guest]

I don't know Andrew, at 1:18-1:23 when she is telling us it is "going to be six meters in length," the camera scrolls all the way across the entirety of the scroll, and there are several sheets of papyrus that could be described as contiguous. I froze the screen every second to count as much as I could and I actually came up with around 80 distinct segments, but that was including the outer portion. It could be that Gee was saying he counted 73 windings from the inner portion of the scroll, only excluding the tail end of it where the scroll deteriorates (becoming no longer contiguous?) and windings can no longer be reliably counted.

There are 36 or 37 windings in the straight section of the scroll laid out across the two "six meter" tables (they may only be ~5 meters). Count half-winding segments along the bottom and you get ~73.