The Egyptians had paper, and they had large stone buildings with little slits & holes in them. Suppose that someone had a piece of paper on a wall, the room was dark, and there was a small hole (pinhole) in the room to the outside. Over the course of several hours or days, it is conceivable that the paper could have taken on the image of the world outside the pinhole. Re the paper: my daily newspaper has a high acid content, and even a few hours in the sun turn it noticeably yellow, so a large piece of newspaper without any printing on it would work. However, I have no idea whether Egyptian paper was nearly as acidic or photosensitive. There is another problem of "fixing" the image, so that it would last several thousand years down to the present age. That is why I think that the best hope is finding images that haven't been "developed" yet, but this will require not exposing the "film" to additional light when we find it. I'm not sure that archeologists have been that careful, to date. At 05:43 PM 11/1/03 +1300, M. Stay wrote:
I said that he was trying; not that he was successful. I do keep hoping that someone will come up with a scheme to extract sound "recordings" of some type from ancient times -- ditto with "photographs".
Here's a way someone *could* have taken a photo, though there's no evidence that anyone ever did: http://www.grand-illusions.com/roman.htm -- Mike Stay staym@clear.net.nz http://www.xaim.com/staym