Text: At the present state of the remains, it has proved impossible to calculate the slope with mathematical exactness. Petrie performed several tests on the North side, which is best preserved, and arrived at an average of 51° 50¹ 40². But in one test on the South side he obtained 51° 57¹ 30² ; this caused him to raise the question whether the slope was different on different faces. The reason why he raised this issue is that he believed that the height of the Pyramid was determined by the ³1 factor,² and he wanted to prove that the empirical data are in agreement with a slope 51° 51¹ 14² that would be indicated by the exact value of 1. Petrie, instead, was unduly impressed by the unevenness of the terrace and somehow took the aberrant single datum for the South side into account; he concludes: ³On the whole, we probablyŠ cannot do better than take 51° 52¹ ± 2¹ as the nearest approximation to the mean angles of the Pyramid, allowing some weight to the South side.²

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