Pyramid Facts and Fancies

James Bonwick
1877

James Bonwick (1817-1906) was born in Great Britain but immigrated to Australia, where he pursued a fruitful career as a writer on historical and educational topics. He also founded a school near Melbourne. His writing covered many topics, including the colonial history of New South Wales, ancient Irish religion, and the wool trade. But it was for two books on Egypt that Bonwick earned a place in the history of Ancient Astronautics. The second book was Egyptian Belief and Modern Thought (1878), which attempted to seek out the religious practices of ancient Egypt and relate them to modern religious and philosophical beliefs, especially as they could be seen as prefiguring Christianity. The earlier work, Pyramid Facts and Fancies (1877), attempted to synthesize all of the wildly divergent theories on the Pyramid then in circulation for the general reader for whom such information was inaccessible or incomprehensible. As Bonwick wrote in his preface to Pyramid Facts:

The question of “Why was it built?” has been here answered in nearly fifty different reported teachings from the rocky tomb. The divergence of opinion, while exciting a smile, illustrates the marvellous suggestiveness of the grand old edifice. The writer has no special ideas of his own to propound, but simply claims the merit of collecting intelligence for those whose time and opportunities will not warrant research.

Bonwick’s summary remains to this day the standard list of historical Pyramid theories, and it continues to be cited in modern works on Pyramid theorizing. While this summary is incredibly useful for the understanding of the development of the ancient astronaut theory, Bonwick was not an infallible scholar. Many of his citations are incorrect, with authors misspelled or misidentified, quotations incorrectly reproduced, and, in one case, a hoax taken for fact. Beyond this, many of the authorities Bonwick cites have passed into obscurity. Following the conventions of his time, he refers to these individuals only by their last names, making it difficult for all but the most dedicated readers to identify those under discussion. In this volume, I have fully annotated Bonwick’s work, providing biographic and bibliographic information about each authority upon first reference, though in a few cases Bonwick’s references are either too incomplete or too obscure to identify. I have also provided notes where relevant to clarify statements or correct errors where they occur.

The preceding introduction and my notes below are adapted from my 2012 anthology Pyramidiots! in which they first appeared. The text below reproduces Bonwick’s discussion of 47 popular pyramid theories, but omits a lengthy treatise on pyramid measurements.

PYRAMID FACTS AND FANCIES

INTRODUCTION

Sir Walter Scott, commonly supposed a man of taste and cultured imagination, spoke of the pyramid as “disagreeable in form, and senseless in utility.” [1] A certain writer [2] once remarked of these monuments, “They are nothing at all but heaps of stones.” A prosaic Yankee [3] thus recorded his sentiments: “A pyramid is nothing but dollars.—We have got the pyramids in our pockets, and can set them up any day we please.”

On the other hand, we have Mr. Gliddon [4] saying, “What monuments on earth have given rise to more fables, speculations, errors, and misconceptions” This, at any rate, proves the interest they have excited in the minds of men. It is only in our own day that literature and science, not less than poetry and religion, have been directed thither with perfect enthusiasm. To no one man are we so much indebted for the popular feeling in favour of the Great Pyramid, as to Prof. Piazzi Smyth. [5] By making it truly holy ground, by demonstrating, to the satisfaction of many, the divine authorship of the institution, he has surrounded it with a halo it never wore before.

The views entertained as to the object of the erection will now be mentioned.

NOTES

[1] Bonwick misquotes from Scott’s “Account of the Poems of Patrick Carey” (1810): “Had the pyramids of Egypt, equally disagreeable in form and senseless as to utility, been the work of any living tyrant, with what feelings, save those of scorn and derision, could we have regarded such a waste of labour?”

[2] Bonwick makes the following quotation grander than it was. The line appears as the words of an anonymous friend of the Rev. F. Barham Zincke on page 87 of his Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé (2nd ed., 1873).

[3] The owner of a New York dry goods store, touring Egypt and quoted in Zincke’s book on page 79.

[4] George Robbins Gliddon (1809-1857), a British-born American Egyptologist, in his Ancient Egypt (10th ed., 1847), p. 54. Gliddon held that the Egyptians were Caucasian based on measurements of their skulls, equating large brain size with intelligence and white skin.

[5] Charles Piazzi Smyth (1819-1900), the Italian-British archaeologist who believed that the Great Pyramid contains esoteric measurements. His credulous book on all mystic pyramid matters was Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid (1864). Bonwick consulted the revised and expanded 1874 edition, to which, unless otherwise noted, these footnotes will refer.

1. BARRIERS AGAINST THE DESERT SANDS.

This opinion was expressed by M. Fialin de Persigny [1] in 1845, who spoke of “the destination and permanent utility of the pyramids of Egypt and Nubia against the sandy irruptions of the desert.”

[1] Jean Gilbert Victor Fialin, Duc de Persigny (1808-1872), a supporter of Napoleon III and the author of De la destination et de l’utilité permanente des Pyramides (1845), which argued that Egypt’s pyramids were meant to prevent desert sand from blowing into the Nile Valley.

2. SATAN’S SEAT

Sir Thomas Browne, [1] who flourished in the Elizabethan age, declares that “these dark caves and mummy repositories are Satan’s abodes.”

[1] Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), English author on science and the esoteric. The quotation comes from the “Fragment on Mummies,” an 1830s literary hoax written by James Crossley and first exposed in the 1880s.

3. IMITATION OF NOAH’S ARK OR TOWER OF BABEL.

Mr. Thomas Yeates, [1] in 1833, wrote, “The Great Pyramid soon followed the Tower of Babel, and had the same common origin.” Again, “Whether it was not a copy of the original Tower of Babel? And, moreover, whether the dimensions of these structures were not originally taken from the Ark of Noah?” Elsewhere he has it: “The measures of the Great Pyramid at the base do so approximate to the measures of the Ark of Noah in ancient cubit measure, that I cannot scruple, however novel the idea, to draw a comparison. The form of the Ark was quadrangular, and consisted of equal sides or parallelograms, of which the measures of one is given in three numbers, 300, 50, and 30 cubits.” He assures us that it was made for floating only; and that its four sides were each of three stories to accommodate the large number of persons required to look after so many animals for a whole year.

[1] Thomas Yeates (1768-1869), Orientalist and author of Dissertation on the Antiquity, Origin, and Design of the Pyramids of Egypt (London: 1833), from which Bonwick takes the following quotations.

4. FILTERING RESERVOIRS.

A Swedish philosopher [1] gave it as his opinion that pyramids were simply contrivances for purifying the water of the muddy Nile, which would pass through their passages.

[1] I cannot identify this particular figure, but a similar theory was suggested by L. Vernon Harcourt in his Doctrine of the Deluge (1838).

5. TO PLEASE THE WOMEN.

Mr. Gable [1] informs his readers that, as pyramids have no access, “it appears not that the founders of them had any such laudable design of transmitting to posterity scientific specimens,” as some had supposed; “hence they appear to have been erected for no geometrical purpose.” Having, however, ascertained (how, he says not) that they were raised by those, “who, after their intermarriages with the daughters of men, became, not only degenerate despisers of useful knowledge, but altogether abandoned to luxury,”—it is not surprising that he should have found out that it was to please these women, who requested the sons of God to employ their leisure after that fashion.

[1] Bonwick here refers to the Rev. Thomas Gabb, who wrote Finis Pyramidis (1806), which tried to link the Egyptian pyramids to the Great Flood and Solomon’s Temple.

6. THE QUEEN OF SHEBA’S GIFTS.

Orientals may be excused telling romantic tales of this romantic lady traveller; but Mr. Wathen, [1] in 1842, said that “the offerings of the Queen of Sheba are now beheld in the indestructible masses of the pyramids.”

[1] George H. Wathen, architect and author of Arts, Antiquities, and Chronology of Ancient Egypt (1843). Bonwick provides an abridged quotation. Wathen added that the treasures had first been “carried off by Shishak” and “hoarded by Rhampsinitus.”

7. JOSEPH’S GRANARIES.

Benjamin of Toledo, [1] the travelled Jew of the Middle Ages, advanced this opinion, which he had gathered in the East. Vossius [2] heard somehow that the Pharaoh had “magazined” a great quantity of wheat there. The Monk Fidelis [3] says the same. An American writer, [4] in 1876, must have astonished and shocked some folks, by his bold assertion, learnt somewhere or somehow, that “according to the hypothesis of Prof. Piazza Smyth, the object of the Great Pyramid was to convert it into a granary in time of famine” (!).

Maundeville, [5] about 1330, got the complete story. “The Gernares of Joseph,” says he, “that he lete make, for to kepe the greynes for the peril of the dere zeres. Thei ben (are) made of ston, full welle made of masonnes craft, of the whiche two ben merveyllouse grete and hye, and to these ne ben not so gret; and every Gerner hath a zate (gate) for to entre withinne, a lytille highe fro the Erthe, for the lond is wasted and fallen sithe the Gerners were made. And withinne thei ben alle fulle of serpentes. And aboven the Gerners withouten ben many Scriptures of dyvcrse languages. And sum men seyn (say) that thei ben sepultures of grete lordes that weren sometyme; but that is not trewe; for alle the comoun rymour and speche is of alle the peple there, both for and nere, that thei ben the Gerners of Joseph. And so fynden thei in here Scriptures and in here cronycles. On that other partie, zif thei weren sepultures thei sholden not ben voyd withinne. Eor yee may well knowe that tombes and sepultures ne ben not made of such gretnesse, ne of such highnesse.”

[1] Benjamin of Tudela (1130-1173), a medieval Jew from the Kingdom of Navarre who wrote about his Travels to the Holy Land. Benjamin related the idea that the pyramids were granaries, but asserted [in one late version of the text] his belief that they “are constructed by witchcraft and in no other country or other place is any thing equal to them. They are composed of stones and cement and are very substantial” (trans. A. Asher).

[2] Gerardus Vossius (1577-1659), a Dutch classical scholar.

[3] A ninth-century CE Irish monk, possibly a pseudonym of Dicuil, whose description of Giza is given in Dicuil’s the Liber de Mensua Orbis Terrae (c. 825 CE): “After sailing on the Nile for a long time, they saw, like mountains, the seven storehouses […] which Holy Joseph had built, four in one place and three in another” (3.2; my translation).

[4] I am not able to identify the author of this quotation.

[5] Sir John Mandeville, the (probably) fictional medieval writer.

8. DISPLAY OF ROYAL DESPOTISM.

Aristotle, [1] while admitting this motive, considered the priests had persuaded the king to undertake the work, in order to find employment for the idle. Pliny [2] deemed it proper for a great conqueror to keep his captives busy. Greaves, [3] the Oxford Professor, 250 years ago, goes into the question. “But why,” he says, “the Egyptian kings should have been at so vast an expense in the building of these pyramids is an enquiry of a higher nature. Aristotle makes them to have been the workes of tyranny; and Pliny conjectures that they built them partly out of ostentation, and partly out of state policy, by keeping the people in employment, to divert them from mutinies and rebellions.” Sandys [4] thought it was “for feare lest such infinite wealth should corrupt their successors, and dangerous idlenesse beget in the subject a desire for innovation.” He gives a rude translation from Lucian [5]:--

“When high pyramides do grace
The ghosts of Ptolomies lewd race.”

Marietta Bey [6] is indignant at this supposition, exclaiming, “They are not monuments of the vain ostentation of kings.” Hekekyan Bey [7] shrewdly remarks: “It is well known that a tyrant scarcely ever completes a work left unfinished by his predecessor. It is evident that these pyramids were national undertakings; their plan and execution were decided after mature deliberation; laws were passed, and revenues provided, to carry out the public decision by the executive authorities.” M. Dufeu [8] adds his affirmation, that, “far from being the works of the pride and despotism of Pharaohic kings, they are, on the contrary, testimonies of their exalted wisdom, and of the profound knowledge of their colleges of priests.”

The Rev. E. B. Zincke [9] has a practical suggestion. “In those days,” says he, “labour could not be bottled up.” Egypt was so fertile, and men’s wants were then so few, that surplus labour was available, and much food, from taxes in kind, accumulated in royal hands. Although the pyramid was of no earthly use, “still,” thought he, “it was of as much benefit to the man who built it as leaving the surplus labour and food he had at his disposal, and the valuables he had in his treasury unused would be.”

[1] Aristotle mentions the pyramids as one example of tyranny among many in Politics 1313b: “Another art of the tyrant is to sow quarrels among the citizens; friends should be embroiled with friends, the people with the notables, and the rich with one another. Also he should impoverish his subjects; he thus provides against the maintenance of a guard by the citizen and the people, having to keep hard at work, are prevented from conspiring. The Pyramids of Egypt afford an example of this policy; also the offerings of the family of Cypselus, and the building of the temple of Olympian Zeus by the Peisistratidae, and the great Polycratean monuments at Samos; all these works were alike intended to occupy the people and keep them poor” (trans. Benjamin Jowett).

[2] Natural History 36.16.

[3] Mathematician, astronomer, and antiquarian John Greaves (1602-1652), author of Pyramidographia (1646), which correctly identified pyramids as tombs meant to preserve royal corpses to guarantee their souls’ passage into the afterlife.

[4] George Sandys (1577-1644), author of A Relation of a Journey (1621).

[5] Bonwick means Lucan, not Lucian. The quotation comes from Pharsalia 8.896-7.

[6] Auguste Mariette (1821-1881), a French archaeologist in Egypt who held the rank of “bey.”

[7] Yusuf Hekekyan (1807-1875), an Armenian in the Egyptian service and author of A Treatise on the Chronology of Siriadic Monuments (1863), arguing that the pyramids were part of an astronomical cult devoted to the star Sirius.

[8] A. Dufeu, a French member of the Egyptian Institute and author of Decouverte de L’age et de la veritable destination des Quatre Pyramides de Gizeh, principalement de la Grande Pyramide (1873), which speculated on the existence of advanced science in ancient Egypt.

[9] Bonwick means F. B. Zincke.

9. PRESERVATION OF LEARNING FROM THE EXPECTED DELUGE.

It having been revealed by the antediluvian astrologers that a great flood was coming, the pyramid was built to preserve the memory of then-existing learning. We are indebted to Arabian authors for this interesting tradition, which has several variations. Firouzabadi [1] was not very clear upon the subject. He speaks of the erection “by Edris, to preserve there the sciences, and prevent their destruction by the Deluge; or by Sinan ben-almoschalshal, or by the first men, when informed by observation of the stars of the coming Deluge; or to preserve medicines, magic, and talismans.”

Murtadi [2] is another authority. He wrote in 992, at Tihe in Arabia, or in the year of our Lord 1584, says one. The work was translated in 1672. This is the story:--

“There was a king named Saurid, the son of Sahaloc, 300 years before the Deluge, who dreamed one night that he saw the earth overturned with its inhabitants, the men cast down on their faces, the stars falling out of the heavens, and striking one against the other, and making horrid and dreadful cries as they fell. He thereupon awoke much troubled, and related not his dream to anybody, and was satisfied in himself that some great accident would happen in the world. A year after he dreamed again that he saw the fixed stars come down to the earth in the form of white birds, which carried men away, and cast them between two great mountains, which almost joined together and covered them; and then the bright, shining stars became dark and were eclipsed. He thereupon awaked, and extremely astonished, and entered into the Temple of the Sun, and beset himself to bathe his cheeks and to weep. Next morning he ordered all the princes of the priests, and magicians of all the provinces of Egypt, to meet together; which they did to the number of 130 priests and soothsayers, with whom he went and related to them his dream, which they found very important and of great consequence, and the interpretation they gave of it was that some very great accident would happen in the world.

“Among others, the priest Aclimon, who was the greatest of all, and resided chiefly in the king’s Court, said thus to him:— ‘Sir, your dream is admirable, and I myself saw another about a year since which frightened me very much, and which I have not revealed to any one.’ ‘Tell me what it was,’ said the king. ‘I dreamt,’ said the priest, ‘that I was with your Majesty on the top of the mountain of fire, which is in the midst of Emsos, and that I saw the heaven sink down below its ordinary situation, so that it was near the crown of our heads, covering and surrounding us, like a great basin turned upside down; that the stars were intermingled among men in diverse figures; that the people implored your Majesty’s succour, and ran to you in multitudes as their refuge; that you lifted up your hands above your head, and endeavoured to thrust back the heaven, and keep it from coming down so low; and that I, seeing what your Majesty did, did also the same. While we were in that posture, extremely affrighted, methought we saw a certain part of heaven opening, and a bright light coming out of it; that afterwards the sun rose out of the same place, and we began to implore his assistance; whereupon he said thus to us: “The heaven will return to its ordinary situation when I shall have performed three hundred courses.” I thereupon awaked extremely affrighted.’

“The priest having thus spoken, the king commanded them to take the height of the stars, and to consider what accident they portended. Whereupon they declared that they promised first the Deluge, and after that fire. Then he commanded pyramids should be built, that they might remove and secure in them what was of most esteem in their treasuries, with the bodies of the kings, and their wealth, and the aromatic roots which served them, and that they should write their wisdom upon them, that the violence of the water might not destroy it.”

This is a version of the story of Shem engraving the learning of the old world upon two pillars—Jachin and Boaz, Pillars of Hercules.

Ibn Abd Alhokm [3] is the chronicler of a tradition, also, of a like import with that retailed by Murtadi. The translation is an old one. The Arabian historian thus discourses:--

“The greatest part of chronologers agree that he which built the pyramids was Saurid Ibn Salhouk, King of Egypt, who lived 300 years before the Flood. The occasion of this was because he saw in his sleep that the whole earth was turned over, with the inhabitants of it, the men lying upon their faces, and the stars falling down and striking one another with a terrible noise; and being troubled with this, he concealed it. Then, after this, he saw the fixed stars falling to the earth, in the similitude of white fowl, and they snatched up men and carried them between two great mountains, and these mountains closed upon them, and the shining stars were made dark. And he awoke with great fear, and assembled the chief priests of all the provinces of Egypt, 130 priests, the chief of them being Almamon. He related the whole matter to them, and they took the altitude of the stars, and made their prognostications, and they foretold a deluge. The king said, ‘Will it come to our country?’ They answered, ‘Yes, and will destroy it.’ And there remained a certain number of years to come, and he commanded in the mean space to build the pyramids, and that a vault (or cistern) should be made, into which the river Nile should enter, whence it should run into the countries of the west, and into the land Al-Said.

“And he filled them (the pyramids) with talismans, and with strange things, and with riches and treasures, and the like. He engraved in them all things that were told him by wise men, as, also, all profound sciences. The names of alakakirs, the uses and hurts of them, the science of astrology and of arithmetic, of geometry and physic. All these may he interpreted by him who knows their characters and language. After he had given orders for this building, they cut out great columns and wonderful stones. They fetched massy stones from the Ethiopians, and made with them the foundations of the three pyramids, fastening them together with lead and iron. (?) They built the gates of them 40 cubits underground, and they made the height of the pyramids 100 royal cubits, which are 500 of ours in these times. He also made each side of the pyramids 100 royal cubits. In the beginning of this building was a fortunate horoscope. After that he had finished it he covered it with coloured satin (marble) from the top to the bottom, and he appointed a solemn festival, at which were present all the inhabitants of his kingdom. Then he built in the Western Pyramid thirty treasuries, filled with store of riches and utensils, and with signatures made with precious stones, and with instruments of iron, and vessels of earth, and with a mes which rots not, and with glass that might be bent and yet not broken, and with strange spells, and with several kinds of alkakirs (query alkalis), single and double, and with deadly poisons, and with other things besides. He made, also, in the East Pyramid divers celestial spheres and stars, and what they severally operate in their aspects; and perfumes which are to be used to them, and the books which treat of these matters.

“He put, also, in the Coloured Pyramid (the third) the commentaries of the priests in chests of block marble, and with every priest a book, in which were the wonders of his profession, and of his actions, and of his nature, and what was done in his time, and what is, and what shall be, from the beginning of time to the end of it. He placed in every pyramid a treasurer. The treasurer of the Westerly Pyramid was a statue of marble stone, standing upright with a lance, and upon his head a serpent writhed. He that came near it, and stood still, the serpent bit him of one side, and writhed round about his throat and killed him, and then returned to his place. He made the treasurer of the East Pyramid an idol of black agate, his eyes open and shining, sitting upon a throne with a lance. When any looked upon him he heard on one side of him a voice which took away his senses, so that he fell prostrate upon his face, and ceased not till he died. He made the treasurer of the Coloured Pyramid a statue of stone called Albut, sitting. He which looked toward it was drawn by the statue till he stuck to it, and could not be separated from it till such time as he died.”

So much for the Arab yarn of the pyramids before the Flood.

[1] Abu-t-Tahir Ibn Ibrahim Majd ud-Din ul-Fairuzabadi (1329-1414), a Persian lexicographer. The quotation derives from Fairuzabadi’s dictionary, Al-Qamus Al-Muhit (s. v. Haraman), though I am unable to determine the source for the translation Bonwick used.

[2] Murthada ibn al Khalif (previously transliterated as Murtadi ibn Gaphiphus) (c. twelfth century), author of The Egyptian History, translated into English in 1672 by J. Davies.

[3] Abu’l-Qasim ’Abd al-Rahman ibn ’Abd Allah ibn ’Abd al-Hakam (c. 803-871 CE), an Egyptian chronicler who wrote a History of the Conquest of Egypt and North Africa and Spain. The following quotation is taken from the translation given in Greaves’ Pyramidographia, but Greaves was mistaken about the author. It does not appear in any known work of al-Hakam.

10. TOMB OF THE KING.

Herodotus, describing the building of the pyramid by Philitis, says that “Cheops ordered Philitis to prepare him a tomb.” [1] But many, seeing the pit there, and erroneously thinking it a well, ask with Mr. Yeates, “What have the dead to do with wells of water? Water is not for the dead, but the living.” A Syrian writer, [2] of the ninth century, observed, “They are not granaries of Joseph, as some say, but mausoleums erected upon the tombs of ancient kings.” The Rev. Mr. Zincke, who positively asserts that “every pyramid in Egypt was intended for a tomb,” is of the conviction that the very word means a mound or cairn; he therefore talks of the Aryans who “built the cairn of Gizeh.” Servius [3] is clearly of that mind when he writes, “With the ancients, noble men were buried either under mountains or in mountains, whence the custom came that over the dead either pyramids were made or huge cairns erected.”

Professional architects generally take the tomb side. Thus Mr. Fergusson [4] decides upon it, and Mr. Guilt [5] says the pyramids are “sepulchral monuments, whether or not the todies of the monarchs were ever deposited in them.” We have remaining on a tablet the prayer of a certain priest, Ahra, that his son would make his name live again, whilst he reposed in his pyramid, or tomb. Chevalier Bunsen, [6] who paid such attention to Egyptian antiquities, has no doubt but that all pyramids were “exclusively gigantic covers of rocky tombs.” The word of M. Maillet [7] is justified, that, “with regard to the design they had of securing their bodies from any insult, they could not have contrived more certain means for succeeding in it.” Mariette Bey, who for explorative ardour rivals the energetic Belzoni himself, is an advocate for the tomb theory. This is his language: “With regard to the use to which the pyramids were destined, it is to do violence to all that we know of Egypt, to all that archaeology teaches us of the monumental customs of that country, to see them any other thing than tombs.” Again, “tombs, massive, full, everywhere stopped, even in their passages, most carefully, without windows, without doors, without exterior opening.” He alludes to the care taken to throw seekers off the scent. He compares tombs with pyramids, showing the devices in both sorts to deceive attempting violaters of mummy-homes.

An account of an Egyptian tomb is necessary to enable the reader to form a judgment upon the question.

In case some should suppose the tombs remaining here to be of more modern date than the Giant Pyramids, it must be borne in mind that Marietta Bey has distinctly laid it down that every pyramid is in the middle of a cemetery. And M. Chabas [8] writes of the Necropolis of Gizeh, with its vast collection of massive tombs: “A certain number of these tombs have been constructed at the same time as the Great Pyramid, and finished before that colossal monument.” Lepsius [9] got what he calls an official almanac of the Court of the Kings Cheops and Cephren, the tombs giving so many names of their officers. Our own Dr. Birch [10] adds this striking testimony: “The tombs around the Great Pyramid are those of the princes and other members of the family or time of Khufu” (builder of that pyramid). M. Grobert [11] affirms, “I believe these grottoes more ancient than even the pyramids.” Lepsius opened a hundred of them, and was satisfied of this assumed antiquity. Mariette Bey has been able to show that the funeral fields of both Gizeh and Saqqarah were absolutely closed as early as the time of Teta, king of the sixth dynasty, a hundred years or so after the building of” the Great Pyramid. He has unearthed the splendid tomb of a grandson of Snefrou, king of the third dynasty, besides several Mastabas of the age of Snefrou, and declares that the period of some “ascends even to the predecessors of the founders of the Great Pyramid.” Renan [12] adds, “The tombs, so numerous in the sands of Sakkara and at the foot of the pyramids, are all dated from the first six dynasties.”

If all the above statements are not arguments enough to prove that tombs exist which are at least as old as the pyramid, we are now assured by such an authority as Lepsius, the first of German Egyptologists, that there are at least sixty inedited tombs at Gizeh and Saqqarah, which are of the first dynasty—or far more than 6000 years old.

What, then, is an ancient Egyptian tomb?

There are three parts essentially different. First there is the Mastaba, or exterior chapel; then, the pit near it; and, below, the subterranean chamber for the corpse. The body was taken down the pit into the tomb proper, and laid in the sarcophagus there. The pit was then effectually closed up and all communication cut off.

There are whole streets of stone tombs, the funeral chapels of which only are to be seen. Though of stone, Mr. Fergusson [13] says they show “evident symptoms of having been borrowed from a wooden original” He styles these Mastabas “truncated pyramids.” One has been discovered 400 feet long. One to the west of the valley is 320 feet. But in the earliest tombs the chamber is so small that few can stand in it. The plan has the form of a cross. Many tombs later than the fourth dynasty possess more than one chamber, with more careful orientation. Though yellow brick tombs prevailed during the first four dynasties, the fifth has none but stone ones. The Mastabas, in general appearance, are like unfinished pyramids, but only in the inclined sides.

The Mastabas of Gizeh are more uniform and symmetrical than those near Memphis. “They are ranged like a chessboard,” says M. Auguste Mariette, “with their squares uniformly elongated towards the north.” Generally 8 yards high, there are many of them 50 yards long by 25 yards wide. In the sixth dynasty the roof is vaulted. The entrance is from the east. The pit is never round. Though mostly in the middle of the great axis of the Mastaba, there is no connection with the upper chapel. To reach the orifice, in many cases, one has to mount to the platform of the Mastaba
.
Dr. Lepsius gives an interesting account of a tomb-discovery. He explored first the Mastaba, a noble apartment 70 feet long, 14 wide, and 15 high. On the walls, as usual, there was the written and pictorial history of the individual buried beneath. The tomb, which was on the west side of the Great Pyramid, proved to belong to Prince Merhet, of the time of Cheops. The learned gentleman writes: “It is more than probable that Merhet was a son of Chufu” (Cheops). He is styled “Superintendent of buildings” to that monarch. “One may, therefore,” says he, “conjecture that he himself superintended the building of the largest pyramid.” Lepsius descended, after much difficulty, the heretofore closed-up pit, and found at a depth of sixty feet the hypogeum, or sepulchre chamber, and the sarcophagus, or real tomb.

A wonderful discovery awaited him. After being unmolested since the interment, 6000 years ago, the relics of the mighty dead were revealed. It was, doubtless, with feelings of pride and gratification that he afterwards wrote, “I have carefully preserved the venerable remains of the skull of the ancient prince of the House of Cheops, which I found in his mortuary chamber.” [14]

The sarcophagus contained the coffin. The earliest coffin, or mummy-case, that ever reached England was described by Dr. Perry, [15] 1743. He who has seen the richly-carved alabaster sarcophagus of the nineteenth dynasty, in Sir John Soane’s Museum, [16] Lincoln’s Inn, especially if favoured with a description from the lips of the octogenarian librarian and curator, Mr. Bonomi, [17] of hieroglyphic artistic renown, will have a high conception of the symbolic religion of the ancient Egyptians. But the observer of the more ancient funeral repositories would have more simplicity of style before him. One of the twelfth dynasty, an era of great advancement and high culture, is described by M. Rougé [18] as “cut with great precision, but is only adorned by a simple hieroglyphical legend,” naming the individual and his occupation. But ascending still higher, to the age of the pyramids, and regarding the sarcophagus of the monarch who raised the Third Pyramid of Gizeh, we recognise good workmanship, but no fanciful adornment. The learned Frenchman writes:—“That of the King Menkeres (fourth dynasty) presents the appearance of a little edifice. It was not decorated by any figure: simple architectural lines, disposed with infinite taste, alone compose its ornamentation.”

There is no space to devote to a discourse on ancient tombs, or attention would have been drawn to the highly interesting explorations of Dr. Schliemann [19] at Troy and Mycenae. The tombs of Atreus and of King Alyattes are well known to readers; the platform of the latter, at Sardis, is even now 3700 feet round. Tumuli exist in Asia of enormous proportions. One in Afghanistan has a boundary of 1800 feet. The Topes of India are suggestive. The mound-builders of America have left one monument in Illinois which is 2000 feet in circumference. [20] The Galgals of Brittany, and the one-chambered or severil-chambered Barrows of Britain, are also massive and gigantic memorials of the dead. The Teocalli of Mexico were equally devoted to purposes of burial.

The so-called Temple of the Sphinx, near the pyramid, has been looked on simply as a tomb; and, if so, is the most ancient, and one of the most costly and magnificent in the world. Mariette Bey thus speaks of it:—“The exterior appearance is, we must declare, rather that of a tomb. Further, the monument can present itself to the visitor as a Mastaba, hardly greater than those which one finds, for example, at Abousir and at Saqqarah. In the interior, the chamber shows six superposed niches, which have the air of having been constructed, as those of the Third Pyramid, and of the Mastabat-el-Faroun, to receive mummies.”

Turning now to the Great Pyramid, what do we notice—apart from certain peculiarities—but the same arrangements for the burial of a body as occur in an ordinary ancient tomb? The simplicity, spoken of in connection with the sarcophagus of the builder of the Third Pyramid, is apparent in the First. The King’s Chamber, with its so-called sarcophagus, was no more the mortuary chamber than the Mastaba of the tomb. The real burial-room was below the surface, and at the end of a pit. That pit is to be seen inside the Great Pyramid, and that mortuary space is extant as the Subterranean Chamber. That the latter was found without an occupant proves no more than the tenantless tombs.

But it will be asked, what answers to the Mastaba—the Chapel? Inside that open and accessible place, with a doorway in the east, apparent to any passer-by, the friends of the deceased could assemble for the anniversary rites. There, too, they could read the story of the departed. Where is the parallel of this in the Great Pyramid?

Only two chambers, called the King’s and the Queen’s, have been revealed. There is reason to think others are still hidden. But they, in their naked aspect, with no sculptured memorial and no painting, though partaking of the simplicity of the last home of King Menkeres, were never designed for observation, could never have been entered by friends and relatives, but were from the first most carefully blocked up and secreted. The temples once standing before each pyramid served as chapels.

[1] Histories 2.124-134

[2] Muwaffaq al-Din Muhammad ’Abd al-Latif ibn Yusuf al-Baghdadi (1162-1231), a scholar in Saladin’s employ, writing in his Account of Egypt (5.4), quoting Denys of Telmahre, the patriarch of Antioch, who traveled to Egypt with Caliph Al-Ma’mum, who opened the Great Pyramid. The exact source of the translation used I cannot determine, but is likely Bonwick’s own translation of the French edition of Silvestre de Sacy (1810), or if not, then the Latin edition of Joseph White (1800).

[3] Maurus Servius Honoratus, a fourth century grammarian, in his commentary on Vergil’s Aeneid at 3.67. See note 185, p. 124.

[4] James Fergusson. See note 41, p. 18.

[5] Bonwick is referring to Joseph Gwilt, the author of the Encyclopedia of Architecture (1842), from which the quotation is taken.

[6] Christian Charles Josias von Bunsen (1791-1860), German scholar and diplomat, author of Egypt’s Place in Universal History (1848).

[7] Benoît de Maillet (1656-1738), French diplomat and natural historian, author of Description de l’Egypte (1735).

[8] François Joseph Chabas (1817-1882), French Egyptologist and author of several books on the subject.

[9] Karl Richard Lepsius (1810-1884), Prussian Egyptologist and author of several books on the subject.

[10] Samuel Birch (1813-1875), British Egyptologist and author of Egypt from the Earliest Times to B.C. 300 (1875), from which the quotation is taken.

[11] Jacques François Lois Grober, a French Egyptologist who flourished c. 1800.

[12] Ernest Renan (1823-1892), a French Orientalist and accused anti-Semite.

[13] James Fergusson (1808-1886), author of A History of Architecture in All Countries (1865), from which this quotation is taken.

[14] Quoted from Lepsius’ Letters from Egypt, as translated by Leonora and Joanna B. Horner (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1853).

[15] Charles Perry (1698-1780), traveler in the Near East and author of A View of the Levant (1743).

[16] Still extant today, Sir John Soane’s Museum, an architectural museum in London, has been in continuous operation since 1837. It still displays the sarcophagus of Seti I, referenced here, in the basement “Sarcophagus Room.”

[17] Joseph Bonomi the Younger (1796-1878), English sculptor and Egyptologist.

[18] Emmanuel, vicomte de Rougé (1811-1872), curator of Egyptology for the Louvre.

[19] Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890), the German amateur archaeologist who discovered the ruins of Troy and excavated the Bronze Age ruins of Mycenae.

[20] Monk’s Mound at Cahokia, built by the Mississippian Native Americans between 900 and 1100 CE, but in Bonwick’s time thought to be the work of a “lost race,” or some combination of Hebrews, Phoenicians, or Vikings.

11. A STANDARD OF WEIGHTS AND MEASURES.

This is, perhaps, the most important and practical issue from pyramid enquiry. One question is—does the building indicate any special standard? The other question follows—does that measure proceed from a scientific basis?

Opinions upon the state of ancient learning range between absurd depreciation and unreasonable exaltation. Still there can be no question but that the tendency of modern thought is to value increasingly the results of ancient study. But we, as Europeans, have so prided ourselves upon our mathematical skill, and the approximate perfection of our methods of calculation, as to suppose it highly improbable, to say the least, that men who lived in Egypt 6000 years before Newton and Laplace [1] could know more than the rudiments.

Yet, what says M. Gosselin [2] in his Systematic and Positive Geography of the Ancients? It is this: “The itinerary measures of the ancients are more exact than is thought. In comparing them with the plan of the earth, as it is known to us, it is often difficult, sometimes even impossible, to decide if the errors, which are fancied to be observed in these itineraries, ought to be rejected upon the report of the ancients rather than upon the imperfection of our actual knowledge.”

But M. A. Dufeu, the learned author of Decouverte de L’age et de la veritable destination des Quatre Pyramides de Gizeh, principalement de la Grande Pyramide, has these weighty remarks: “An extreme precision, a thing at which the mind stands truly confounded, appears to have presided at the operations and geodesic calculations of the ancient Egyptians; and it seems that modern science has not yet been able to rise to that height to which that ever-memorable people had already arrived.” The testimony of this French savant is thus confirmatory of the supposed extravagant estimate of Prof. Piazzi Smyth, if not recognising with him a special inspiration.

Although the Edinburgh Professor is credited with the fatherhood of the idea that the pyramid contains a standard of measure, it will be seen that he has but accepted the theory of those before him. Yet he has done much. By the exercise of mathematical skill he has developed the theory; and by the energy and enthusiasm of his appeals to the public he has given it an interest and a popularity never realised before.

But that which has intensified the interest is the excitation of the marvellous in man by the announcement that this said standard was an ordinance from heaven--a gift from God. By bringing the religious faculty into the arena of discussion, a vast increase of force has been acquired. Argue as philosophers will upon materialism, they are confronted with the practical reply, from all the ages, of the intuitive in humanity. There is a something at the back of all that cannot be accounted for by the rude logic of facts. There is in man a perception, however obscure and ill-defined, of spiritual existence, that sometimes comes with such power as to sweep away all dykes of reason and philosophy, and stir to the very depths the hearts of nations as of individuals. The mass are, and perhaps ever will be, governed more or less by a feeling of the supernatural. The alliance, therefore, of religion with the pyramid idea of measurement at once lifted the theory from the field of abstract, scientific enquiry into the domain of sympathetic belief. So long as Hindoo and European casuists squabble over free-will, the doctrine never got beyond the schools; it was quite otherwise when it sharpened the sword of the Saracens, and nerved the arm of Cromwell’s Ironsides.

But let us, for the present, put aside the supernatural prop of the theory, and take a prosaic view of the pyramid standard of measure.

When Prof. Greaves, 240 years ago, took his ten-feet rule, accurately divided into thousandths of a foot, and laid it upon the hoary monument by the Nile, he was not a little astonished at the result.

On his return to the Oxford Observatory he published a series of letters. The work—“printed by G. Sawbridge, at the Three Flower-de-Luces, in Little Britain”—was entitled, Origins and Antiquity of our English weights and measures discovered by their near agreement with such standards that are now found in one of the Egyptian Pyramides.

In his preface to the Skilful Reader, he says: “The standards in this pyramid, so nearly agreeing with our perfect English measures, and with those of the antient Persians, Greeks, and Romans, deserve the consideration of the learned, as being in all likelyhood introductory to the discovery of other matters of greater importance.”[3]

In agreement with the spirit of those Puritan times, not less than our own, he deals largely with Scripture, and discusses Hebrew cubits, baths, &c. He concludes that the pyramid cubit was 21.875 inches, or 21 ⁷/₈ inches.

Naturally he was most attracted toward the sarcophagus, or tomb as he calls it, seeing there a resemblance to the Jewish laver. [4] The Bible represents several lavers before the altar of the second temple; but, though Josephus [5] speaks of the first laver being a hemisphere, the Old Testament adds no confirmatory testimony. Mr. Greaves has these observations on the coffer: “We shall find that every dimension of the tomb’s cavity is the axis of a sphere, within whose hemisphere such an inscribed polygone is a standard for some antient measure of capacity; for which cause I conjecture that this figure of a vessel in old times was well known, and seems to be the same with that of the laver, in which the priests of those days were used to wash.”

Sir Isaac Newton, both as a mathematician and a religious man, took much interest in the Oxford astronomer’s speculations.

He wrote a work in Latin upon “The sacred cubit of the Jews, and the cubits of the several nations; in which, from the dimensions of the greatest Egyptian Pyramid, as taken by Mr. John Greaves, the ancient cubit of Memphis is determined.” [6]

He was much struck with the fact that, among other convincing measurements, the banks or benches in the Grand Gallery were 1,717 feet broad, and 1,717 feet deep; “that is,” says he, “in breadth and depth one cubit. Who will, therefore, imagine that so many dimensions, not at all depending upon each other, should correspond by mere chance with the length of the cubit assigned by us?” But he clearly inclines to a belief that his 20½ inch cubit was preceded by one of greater length, which may have approximated to 25 inches.

M. Pancton [7] distinctly deserves the honour of the astronomical idea of Egyptian measurement. In 1780 he found the base, 8754 inches, was a five-hundredth portion of a degree of meridian. Well might M. de l’Isle [8] declare that theory of his learned friend to be “one of the principal labours of the human mind.”

M. Jomard, [9] in Egypt during 1798-9, comes next in order of time. He was amazed to find the sarcophagus so nearly agree with the newly-declared French mètre, and suspected that the former system was based upon astronomical data like the new one. He boldly avowed that “no one can any longer affirm that the idea of invariable measures belongs only to the moderns.” He even goes so far as to say, “The history of the sciences demonstrates that the moderns have made several of these measures with much less precision than the ancients.” This is exactly the principle contended for by Mr. Piazzi Smyth, who holds the ancient Egyptian mode was more philosophically correct than that of the French metric system.

The French savant of 1799 laid down the principle that the sarcophagus did reveal a system of measures. And although his rule was not correct, he hit upon the cubit idea; “sacred,” he says, “and the object of worship with the Egyptian people.” From the box he learns that “the cube root of a quantity composed of one forty-eighth of the solid resulting from the three exterior dimensions which had been given by the art of the workmen, and of the twelfth part of the solid contents of its interior, is equal to the Nilometric cubit.”

He thus upheld the dignity of the sarcophagus:--

“Can it be compared to the sarcophagi of these royal tombs, and has it ever had their destination? This same vessel,—was it a tomb, an image, or was it even a sort of particular vase, having no other object than to receive the mummy of a prince? To admit the supposition that such may have been really enclosed there, would it not be to abandon the witness of Herodotus, who said in formal and positive terms that the place of the king’s sepulchre was in an island formed by a canal, and executed in the subterranean passages dug in the rock of the pyramid? And has not Diodorus [10] declared that each of the two kings who built the Great Pyramids was buried there, and that their bodies were put in secret places? It is, then, not at all proved that the pretended King’s Chamber had ever enclosed the body.”

The Rev. Thomas Gabb, in 1806, gave some interesting tales about the pyramids, and clearly forestalled the present advocates of the measurement theory. He remarks, however, “the very incongruities discovered in dimensions recorded by Vitruvius, Pliny, [11] and Herodotus, in the acceptation of any of the monumental feet, had long since convinced me these authors must have made their calculations by a foot-measure very different from those of the Greek foot published in our tables.” He concludes the Egyptian foot, or cubit of Herodotus, to be 8.7553 inches, nearly 8 ¾.

He contends for the Centesm standard of measure. The box was “never intended,” he thinks, “for a sepulchral monument,” as it indicates one-hundredth part of the base of the pyramid. “The founder of this surprising pile,” says he, “whoever he may have been, caused that excavated chest to be deposited where it stands, and whence it could not be taken away, as a perpetual criterion whereby, without actual measurement, the exact size of the base might always be known.”

Further, he writes, “Copies of which standard chest were, no doubt, dispersed over Egypt and its dependencies; and that brought by Lord Cavan from Alexandria, measured without the astragals at the ends, is the same in length as that in the pyramid, as declared to me by Mr. Hay, of Portsea, who measured it on board the vessel while it remained in Portsmouth harbour.” This was 10 Egyptian feet, like the coffer, or 10 × 8.7553 inches. He held that a cubit was 2½ pyramid feet, or 1.824 feet. A degree near the equator would thus be 500,000 pyramid feet.

Count Caviglia, [12] who took up his abode for a time in Davison’s uncomfortable chamber, dwelt more upon the mystical than the mathematical exponents of the pyramid.

Mr. Wild, [13] C. E., of Zurich, published in 1850 some marvellous results of his calculations. He assumes that not the Great Pyramid alone, but the other pyramids of Gizeh, in relation, not only indicate a standard measure, which he assumes to be the Memphis one of 20, not 25 inches, but that that cubit has definite reference to astronomical data. His work appeared as a letter to Lord Brougham.

To Mr. John Taylor, [14] of Gower Street, London, are we most deeply indebted. His work of 1856--The Great Pyramid: why was it built, and who built it?—set Mr. Piazzi Smyth to work, and provoked the subsequent interesting discussion. He brought out old revelations, and made known new. He contended for the cubit of 25 inches as the sacred one, and as being a ten-millionth part of the earth’s semi-polar axis.

He repeats the language of Greaves and Jomard, saying, “The porphyry coffer in the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid was intended to be a standard measure of capacity and weight for all nations.” English measures were founded thereon, as the coffer held four quarters of our corn-table. “When,” said he, “we find in so complicated a series of figures as that which the measures of the Great Pyramid and of the earth require for their expression, round numbers present themselves, or such as leave no remainders, we may be sure that we have arrived at primitive measures.” Thus he points out that a pyramid inch, which is 1.00099 English, will be exactly one five hundred millionth part of the axis of the earth. A cubit he puts at 25 inches. The Karnac cubit and the coffer, he says, “are irresistible proofs of an identity of measure existing from 3000 to 4000 years ago.”

But while he shows that the cube root of the contents of the coffer is the length of the Karnac cubit, he puzzles us with the affirmation that the cubit before the Flood was 24.90 inches, but 25 inches after that event; and yet that both were inspired! He accounts for this most satisfactorily to himself, though perhaps not so conclusively to men of science, by assuming that the Deluge exercised so disastrous an effect upon the world—though geologists fail to discover a single material evidence of that Flood at all—that the diameter is less by nearly thirty-seven miles than it was before the ark of Noah was seen to rest upon Mount Ararat.

Hekekyan Bey, in 1863, declared that the “king’s stone,” as he calls it, was “deposited by the Arions in the sanctuary of the First Pyramid, as a record of their standard metric measure.” Prof. Piazzi Smyth brought to the enquiry unquestioned scientific ability, singular tenacity, tremendous energy, exalted enthusiasm, and orthodox piety. The combination is a singularly rare one, and at once placed him as leader of a devoted, intelligent, and numerous party. We may judge of the strength of his convictions, or his haughty defiance of objectors, from the fact that he publicly renounced his fellowship with the Royal Society when that learned body failed to recognise his theory.

Still, all who love the old pyramid will not only thank Mr. Smyth for the light he has shone on their path, but highly esteem the man so loyally attached to their common centre of interest.

Mr. Smyth seeks to enforce the arguments of Mr. Taylor. He identifies pyramid measures with Bible ones, and is pleased to find that these “still preserve some very recognisable traces.” He con-tends that the Great Pyramid is unlike others; they are Epimethean and thriftless, while that is Promethean, of heavenborn origin. In-stead of being a tomb, it is but the covering of a standard for measure. Such a constructed vespel as the coffer, filled with water, kept at uniform temperature by solid walls and efficient ventilation, must be a reliable one for weight as well as measure.

As a standard, the coffer must be for inspection and reference. Copies of it, exposed to mischances of all sorts, must need checks, and require to be brought to the original and tested by it. There is no sense in having a standard, especially a Divinely-authorised standard, without it could be seen from time to time, and made available for the purpose of correcting ordinary weights and measures. The concealment, absolute and total concealment of it, would be an anomaly, an absurdity. Rulers could establish metrical sys-tems without reference to it, or in ignorance of it. The very intention of revelation is conveyed in the term revelation. That which cannot be revealed, even if existent, could hardly be termed a revelation.

Mr. Piazzi Smyth is so conscious of this that he dwells upon it. “The King’s Chamber,” he tells his readers, “was ventilated in the most admirable manner by the ‘air-channels’ discovered by Colonel Howard Vyse; [15] evidently so that men might come from time to time and look on and deal with that open granite trough, and live, and not die.”

He is perfectly right. If it were really intended, by special inspiration or not, as a standard, then it must be accessible. But what are the facts? Simply, and he himself affirms the same in another place, that immediately upon the completion of the pyramid the King’s Chamber was blocked up so securely that not till force was applied by the Caliph, in 820, was it ever entered again.

What, then, is the natural deduction? Is it not that, though measurements of the pyramid-coffer were agreeable to what was then a recognised standard, and symbolically represented recognised ideas, yet the coffer itself was not intended by its constructors as a reference-standard.

But it is time that we look more closely into the measurements more or less affected by the lines in the pyramid.

Those found by Greaves, and described by Newton, are termed by the Edinburgh Professor “the profane measures of the Egyptian people;” inasmuch as they dealt with other calculations than those regarded as Divine, like the sacred cubit of 25 inches. Yet Newton refers to a “proper and principal cubit” of the Israelites. After various trials he gets something between 24 and 26 inches, but does not decide upon anything. He notes a cubit received through Mersennus and a knight of St. Michael’s, supposed to be a Jewish secret, and which was 24.91 inches. He thus clearly distinguishes two sorts of cubits.

By another interesting method the 25, or its double measure, is obtained. The transverse height of the passage is 44.8 inches; but at the angle of 26° 18′ this becomes the vertical height, 50 inches. “Thus,” says the professor, “a measure in which the Egyptian work-men could see nothing more than some of their profane cubits and palms, is converted by means of that angle into another indication of the great linear standard of the pyramid, or the one ten-millionth of the earth’s axis of rotation.”

The cubit question, though dry enough, has its points of interest. Mr. Smyth says that Moses adopts the sacred or 25 inch cubit, while the pro-fane Egyptian, in that day, was less. He says that “we may with perfect safety and hierologist support regard the length of 20.7 inches as the veritable hereditary measure of the Egyptians.” How, then, did Moses get the other? He believes, from the pyramid. “In the Great Pyramid,” he says, “we have found enshrined and sealed up, from those pre-Abrahamic to these latter days, that identical sacred measure-space of the Jews.”

As he states elsewhere that the building “had remained sealed in all its more important divisions from the date of its foundation up to an advanced period of the Christian dispensation,” Moses could never have looked at the coffer. But, as an admitted Egyptian priest, and married to the daughter of the high priest of the sun, at the temple of On or Heliopolis, he may have been admitted to a knowledge of some of the mysteries of Egypt. If so, no adept can charge him with having published the secrets, though Mr. Smyth believes he retained in the ark the secret of measure. Anyhow, he nowhere reveals that secret, any more than others, though, like the Egyptians, typifying ideas by numbers and things.

Some have supposed that Moses got his knowledge when he fled to—what had been for ages before the sacred mount of the Arab race—Sinai. There, from some venerable priest, he may have got the sacred cubit. The desert men, Divinely inspired to conquer Egypt, and to build a pyramid for the standard measure, according to Mr. Piazzi Smyth, retreated afterwards to their Arabian wilderness, and, doubtless, carried there some of the old teaching.

After all, it may be asked, why take 25 as a sacred cubit? Messrs. Taylor and Smyth contend for 5 being the test number of the pyramid. Five squared makes the required number. Out of a variety of different measurements, Mr. Smyth professes to take a mean of 9; yet that is not his 25.07, but 25.29. Taylor’s cubit was presumed to be the ten-millionth of the radius of the earth, and 25.025. Sir John Herschel [16] recognises such a cubit as probably existing among the Jews.

But, however pretty the theory, is it according to facts? Can the cubit of 25.025 be found in the pyramid? If not, it is in vain we speak of the 25 pyramid inches’ cubit being one ten-millionth part of the polar semi-axis. Sir Edmund Beckett, [17] among the first of British architects who has given some attention to pyramid matters, distinctly says that Mr. Smyth’s 25 inch cubit is not to be found in the building. Here are his conclusions:--

“It is not worth while to say more of those theories here than to mention the unlucky fact that neither the Jewish sacred cubit of 25 inches, which is the imaginary basis of them all, nor any multiple of it, is to be found in a single one of all Mr. Smyth’s multitude of measurements, except two evidently accidental multiples of it in the diagonals of two of the four corner sockets in the rock, which are not square, and could never have been seen again after the pyramid was built if the superstructure had not been broken up and stolen, which was probably the last thing that Cheops or his architect expected. The idea that a building was designated to perpetuate a measure which it exhibits absolutely nowhere!”

His conclusion is emphatic:—“I reject altogether the idea of recording standard measures by hiding them with the utmost ingenuity.”

Sir Henry James, [18] the Director of the Ordnance Survey, and supposed to understand measurement, objects to the unscientific way Mr. Smyth has conducted his calculations, by first assuming a theory, and then dragging in figures to accommodate it. He complains that his averages have been incorrectly made. The Professor has certainly acknowledged certain errors. While Vyse made 9168, why did he take 9142 for his base? especially after Mr. Inglis of Glasgow had, for the first time, laid bare the four corner sockets, getting 9120, 9114, 9102, and 9102. Sir H. James, accepting 9168, finds the 360 Derahs, or Egyptian land cubits, go into it 25.488 times; therefore he concludes that “the measures for the base of the Great Pyramid were set out on the ground with the Derah or cubit of 25.488 inches. This differs from Mr. Taylor’s 25.025, and Sir Isaac Newton’s 20.699.

As to the exact relation between this cubit—changed at times by the professor himself—and the earth’s axis, it is rather curious that while the professor took the polar measure, and Mr. Taylor that for lat. 30°, both gentlemen agree in their round numbers.

Sir James T. Simpson [19] is sharp upon the professor, styling his theory fit “only for old women and womanish men.” He makes merry about the number five. As to the polar axis story, he shows his calculation of a page of Mr. Smyth’s book, which is just one eighty-millionth part of the polar axis, &c. But banter is not argument; neither is there logic in the funny but hardly proper way in which he thus refers to the coffer:--

“In short, to use the words of Prof. Smyth, ‘that wonder within a wonder of the Great Pyramid, viz., the porphyry coffer,’—that ‘chief mystery and boon to the human race which the Great Pyramid was able to enshrine,’—‘this vessel of exquisite meaning,’ and of ‘far-reaching characteristics,’—mathematically formed under alleged Di-vine inspiration as a measure of capacity (and, according to M. Jomard, probably of length also) for all men and all nations, for all time,—and particularly for these latter profane days,—is, in simple truth, nothing more and nothing less than an old and somewhat misshapen stone coffin.” Sir James was neither a mathematician nor a poet.

Still, he has some reason to say, “The coffer, though an alleged actual standard of capacity measure, has yet been found difficult or impossible to measure.” After the professor’s quoting 25 for a measure, he finishes by adding another of his own. In 1864 he had the capacity 70,970 English, or 70,900 pyramid inches. In 1867 he advanced to 71,250. Mr. Taylor had 71,328, the cube of the cubit of Karnac.

While, however, Sir Edmund Beckett shows the inconsistency and inapplicability of Mr. Smyth’s 25 inch cubit standard, he admits the teaching qualities of the sarcophagus, though believing it indicated another cubit. “At the same time,” says he, “the pyramid and the famous marble coffer in the King’s Chamber (which was doubt-less, also, Cheops’ coffin, until his body was “resurectionised” by the thieves who first broke into the pyramid) do contain clear indi-cations of having been designed in very careful proportions, and by means of another ‘rule,’ or cubit, of which definite multiples appear everywhere, unlike Mr. Smyth’s imaginary cubit, nowhere, with an astronomical indication of its date, which satisfied no less an astronomer than Sir John Herschell.”

The mystical philosopher, the Chevalier de B, [20] wrathfully ex-claims, “And so the huge sarcophagus of the mighty temple of Cheops, in which Initiates were designed to be typically born again of water and of the spirit, becomes a corn-measurer in the eyes of the great British mathematicians.” Dr. Birch, our chief Egyptologist, is quite opposed to the standard measure argument.

M. Dufeu views the professor’s theory as very imaginary, and adds, “Each of these authors, preoccupied with his own system, has rejected all those of his predecessors in order to give advantage to his own.” Yet he, too, has his theory, and his cubit too. “The sarcophagus,” says M. Dufeu, “was the standard of the national measures of Egypt; that is to say, of the Nilometric cubit.” The latter is nearly 20 3/4 inches.

He thus lays it down:—“We have combined together the three exterior dimensions and the three interior, and we have arrived at a result very certainly as unforeseen as unhoped for; that is to say, to discover in that double and marvellous combination of exterior and interior dimensions of the monolith together, the standard of the Nilometric cubit of 360 noctas.” [21]

By his system of calculation he reduces everything to noctas. A cubit is divided into six palms; the palm into four dactyles; and the dactyle into fifteen noctas. There are thus 360 noctas to the cubit, or about 17½⅙ to an inch. He proceeds on the system of tens. Thus he multiplies the box length, 7.3027 feet by 100, making 730.27 feet for the base. That he takes as a stadium, 500 to a degree of earth’s surface.

He distinctly says that “almost all the monuments of Egypt are material, and consequently destined to preserve some ancient measure.” This is perfectly true, as could easily be proved, and is an-other indication that the pyramid was not intended as the one standard of measure, though marking what was a standard at the time.

His Nilometric cubit is what Sir Edmund Beckett points out in the mean of 20.73 inches, though the coffer to him is “no exact multiple of a cubit in any of its dimensions.” He deems it contained the measure of “the cube of a double cubit of about 41.46.” The half of that is the cubit of 20.73 inches. The double Karnac cubit, he. says, was between 41.398 and 41.472. That is assumed by Mr. Tay-lor a Jewish measure, while Ezra’s cubit, he believes, is the royal or Memphis cubit. The measures of 2 Chron. iii. 3 are different from the thirty cubits of 1 Kings vi. 2; he supposes those thirty equal to the 120 others.

The variety of cubits is very confusing. M. Jomard gives in metres the following:—cubit of Megyas, or Nilometer of Rhoda Island, 0.5385; Pykbelady, or country cubit, 0.5773; Black cubit of Caliph, 0.5196; Royal Arab, 0.6157; Roman, 0.4434; Hebrew, 0.5541; Nilometer, or New Greek, 0.5390; Constantinople, or Cairo, 0.674; Elephanta, 0.527; Royal Babylonian, 0.5131; cubit of Hero-dotus, Samos, Moses, Ezekiel, Babylon, &c., 0.4618, or 17 inches. Sir Gardner Wilkinson [22] refers to cubits from 24 to 32 digits. The Talmudists had a cubit for the proportions of the human body, 25.61; but, to the steps of the inner court, 24.74. The supposed secret cubit was 24.91. The Harris cubit of Thebes is 20.65 inches. Perring’s cubit of the pyramid is 20.628 inches. Wilkinson gives one at 20.5786. The Babylonian, afterwards Jewish, has been rated at 20.886 and 20.676. In the British Museum may be seen the double cubit of Karnac, found enclosed between two stones. Though 3250 years old, the wood is not decayed. The length is 41.46 inches. Mr. Taylor declares that the cube root of the contents of the sarcophagus will give the length of the Karnac cubit. The shorter Greek cubit was only 18.24 inches. The Memphis cubit, recently found, is said by Drovetti [23] to be 522 millemetres, or an eighth more than the ancient cubit. Jomard is of opinion that the ancient Egyptian was twice lengthened in ancient times 3 digits, and by a palm or 4 digits in modern times. Sir H. James found the Derah still in use as the cubit of Egypt, being 25.488 inches. Roubiliac Couder, [24] on Ancient Metrology, declares that Fergusson’s statement of the Jewish cubits being respectively 15, 18, and 21 inches, is contrary to Scripture.

There is a similar difficulty about the stadium. The Olympium is put at 606.9 feet. Mr. Wilson [25] has a stadium of 281 feet from 600 Greek feet. But Mr. Fergusson says, “The English is to the Greek or Egyptian foot as 75 is to 76 exactly.” He thinks, though Herodotus gave the base at 800 feet, that “the side of the pyramid was intended to be an even number of 500 cubits.” Jomard has the Egyptian foot to be 11 inches, 4 lines, 46 parts. A thousand Egyptian feet would make ten plethra. Wilson makes the Grecian foot 12.0875 inches. The stadium is calculated at 100 orgyia, one of which was supposed to be the space between outstretched hands, or 6 feet. Greaves rates the great stadium at 700 feet. The Egyptian stadium is said to be 327.27 feet. Herodotus calls the side 8 plethra; a plethron is a sixth of a stadium. There are measures evidently of 500 and 600 stadia to a degree, though Jomard regards the last as applicable to the oblique height of the pyramid.

Prof. Smyth, while highly extolling the pyramid cubit as of Divine inspiration, is very severe upon the French metric system. He condemns it on philosophical grounds, as it is based upon the pro-portion to a quadrant of the earth’s surface, which is not so true, as he supposes, as the pyramidal, on the semi-axis principle. But he more strongly condemns it as infidel, because it was established in 1796, when the French were said, most absurdly and erroneously, to have been a nation of atheists, inasmuch as they objected to the rule of priests and kings. The French metre is 39.37 inches. Mr. Petrie [26] compares the more simple pyramidal measure of one ten-millionth of the earth’s radius with the French standard of a ten-millionth of a curved terrestrial quadrant. The standard of weight is dependent on that of measure. Prof. Smyth found that a pyramid pint weighed a pound at 68°; and that 5 pyramid cubic inches weighed a pound.

Many thoughtful persons are ready to acknowledge that in the pyramid a standard of weights and measures can be identified, though a difference of opinion may exist as to the relative amount; but they are unable to see that the pyramid was constructed with the express view of maintaining and of exhibiting that standard.

Attention must now be drawn to the supposed direct astronomical teaching of the pyramid.

[1] Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) and Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827), a French mathematician and astronomer.

[2] Pascal Francis Joseph Gosselin (1751-1830), French revolutionary and author of Recherches sur la Géographic systématique et positive des Anciens (1798).

[3] Bonwick misquotes Greaves, who actually wrote: “The Standards of this Pyramid, so nearly agreeing with our present English Measures, and with those of the antient Persians, Greeks, and Romans, deserve the Consideration of the Learned, as being in all Likelihood introductory to the Discovery of all other Matters of greater Importance” (Preface, 2nd ed., 1745).

[4] A basin used for ablution. The decorated brazen lavers in Solomon’s temple were four cubits long, four cubits wide, and three cubits tall and set on wheels (1 Kings 7:27-30).

[5] Flavius Josephus (37-c.100 CE), Antiquities of the Jews 8.3.5: “Solomon also cast a brazen sea, the figure of which was that of a hemisphere” (trans. William Whiston).

[6] This is the actual title of the work, translated into English from Latin in the 1737 Miscellaneous Works of John Greaves.

[7] Alexis-Jean-Pierre Pancton, French author of Métrologie (1780), a book on ancient and modern measurement.

[8] Jean-Baptiste Rome de l’Isle (1736-1790), a French mineralogist.

[9] Edme François Jomard (1777-1862), a French archaeologist and engineer, who edited the famed Description de L’Égypte (1809-1829), the account of the Napoleonic scientific expedition of 1798-1801.

[10] Library 1.63-64

[11] Natural History 36.16-17

[12] Giovanni Battista Caviglia (1770-1845), an Italian Egyptologist who was the first to excavate at Giza. He believed the Great Pyramid held mystical religious secrets.

[13] John James Wild (1824-?), born Jean Jacques Wild in Zurich. He wrote many works on scientific and civil engineering themes. He travelled on the famous Challenger expedition of 1872, writing a book on the ocean for which he earned an honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich. In 1850 he published a Letter to Lord Brougham and Vaux, Containing Proposals for a Scientific Exploration of Egypt and Ethiopia, which contained much theorizing about the pyramids of Giza.

[14] John Taylor (1781-1864), English publisher and writer, whose The Great Pyramid (1859) argued that the numbers π and φ were encoded into the Great Pyramid.

[15] Richard Howard William Vyse (1784-1853), British soldier and Egyptologist, famous for using gunpowder to blast his way into Egyptian monuments. His book was Operations Carried on at the Pyramids of Gizeh (1837).

[16] Sir John Hershel (1792-1871), a British mathematician and astronomer.

[17] Sir Edmund Beckett (1816-1905), lawyer and architect. He designed the clockwork mechanism for Big Ben and was the author of A Book on Building, Civil and Ecclesiastical (1876), from which the following quotation comes.

[18] Sir Henry James (1803-1877), not to be confused with the famous American author, was a British soldier and director of the Ordnance Survey.

[19] Bonwick means Sir James Young Simpson (1811-1870), the Scottish doctor who discovered chloroform and dabbled in archaeology, sparring on occasion with Piazzi Smyth at the Royal Society. The quoted material comes from a paper entitled “Pyra-midal Structures in Egypt and Elsewhere; and the Objects of Their Erection,” read at the Royal Society of Edinburgh on January 20, 1868 and published in its Transactions (vol. 6).

[20] An occultist known only from Theosophist Emma Hardinge Britten’s Ghost-Land (1872) and her “edited” volume Art Magic (1876). The latter was allegedly dictated to her (so she told Helena Blavatsky) by the Chevalier de B——, more frequently called the Chevalier Louis, who is not named in the book. According to Britten, the Chevalier, who was never seen except by Britten, claimed to be an initiate in ancient mysteries and a member of several secret societies. Blavatsky, believing (as was almost certainly the case) that Britten was the true author, was inspired by the privately-printed Art Magic (which Britten refused to sell to any but the “worthy”) to write her own Isis Unveiled. Blavatsky felt she could equally well write a five-hundred page book of mystical nonsense (she would write more than one, in fact). The quotation comes from Art Magic.

[21] The nocta, which apparently was used only by pyramid enthusiasts such as Dufeu and Hekekyan Bey, represents the average annual silt build up of the Nile Delta. It is equal to approximately 0.057 inches (0.1 cm). Fifteen noctas formed, in this alternative measurement system, one digit, and 24 digits equaled one cubit. But this did not work out quite evenly, so special Sothic cubits of 365 noctas were also proposed.

[22] Sir John Gardner Wilkinson (1797-1875), the father of British Egyptology.

[23] Bernadino Drovetti (1776-1852), an Italian antiquarian who served as Napoleon’s consul in Egypt and was infamous for destroying artifacts to artificially inflate prices.

[24] Francis Roubiliac Conder (1815-1889), a British writer who also published a book on ancient sculpture and one on railways. Bonwick has mistakenly made into a book his 1875 paper “Ancient Metrology,” read June 1 at the Society of Biblical Archaeology and published in its Transactions (vol. 4).

[25] John Wilson.

[26] William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853-1942), the pioneering British Egyptologist, among the first to use modern archaeological excavation methods.

12. AN ASTRONOMICAL OBSERVATORY.

As the Tower of Babel was in olden times believed to have been erected for the purpose of observing the heavens, so have pyramids been thought to have been raised with a similar intention. The tops, it was said, would have been admirable platforms; while the long passages, pointing, as they all did, toward the pole, would have made admirable day-telescopes.

Norden, [1] the Dane, two centuries ago, saw one fatal objection to the theory. He remarks, “The top of the Second Pyramid, still covered with granite marble, cut so smoothly that no one can ascend it, decides absolutely that the pyramids were not built to serve as observatories.” Volney, [2] too, was shrewd enough to detect another objection; saying, “because it could not have been necessary to erect eleven observatories so near each other as the eleven pyramids of different sizes which may be seen from Djiza.”

Plato’s suggestion [3] must therefore be set aside. So clever a people as the Chaldean priests would be hardly likely to build a tower on the low plain, either for safety from another Deluge or for elevation towards the skies, when they had ranges of mountains bounding their valley promising so much better sites. As to the passages of the pyramids furnishing telescopic conveniences, that accommodation could not have lasted longer than the time necessary for the workmen to go in and out, when not only were the passages blocked up, but the very entrance was so well concealed that no tradition existed to point out the locality.

M. Jomard, when with Bonaparte in Egypt, could not help exclaiming, “It is very remarkable that the openings of pyramids are all to the north.” The passage seemed fitted for an observatory, as “it formed a true tube,” said he, “at the mouth of which it would be possible, I presume, to see the stars during the day.” He was satisfied that “one could at the lower point see the circumpolar stars pass the meridian, and observe exactly the instant of that passage.” But M. Dufeu remarked on the idea, “that could have been but a secondary destination.”

Prof. Piazzi Smyth fears “that astronomers must dismiss that favourite and frequently-published notion of their own shop, from the desires of their hearts; for,” adds he, “seeing that the passage was closed immediately after the building of it by a large stone portcullis, raisable only with immense difficulty, and on some few special occasions, its opportunities for observation would certainly have been far too rare to satisfy the practical needs of a working observatory.”

[1] Captain Frederick Lewis Norden (1708-1742), author of Voyage d’Egypte et de Nubie (1755).

[2] Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney (1757-1820), French philosopher and historian, and the author of Voyage en Égypte et Syrie (1787), covering his three years in Egypt and Syria. Napoleon’s army used his volume as a guide. He is buried in Paris beneath a grave marker in the shape of a pyramid.

[3] The suggestion that the pyramid served as an observatory is usually said to have been made by Proclus in his commentary on Plato’s Timaeus. I have not been able to find the reference in Proclus, who appears only to say that the Egyptians surveyed the celestial bodies and had very good memories. The earliest versions of the story I can find appears in Greaves’ Pyramidographia (pp. 99-100), where he paraphrases Proclus as stating that the pyramids had flat tops from which the Egyptians observed Sirius. Greaves’ version entered into the Encyclopedia Britannica (1st ed.) as a direct citation. Almost all modern references are derived from Richard Proctor, the Victorian astronomer, who reported Proclus’ theory (likely via Greaves) without proper citations.

13. ITS OWN LATITUDE.

Mr. Wild, C. E., of Zurich, said that the pyramid proclaimed the latitude of the place.

First, he found the entrance was 30 cubits above the base. His cubit is the ordinary one, about 20½ inches. This indicates the latitude 30° N. Then he takes the pyramidal isosceles triangular side, and sees in 30° half the angle of the apex of a true isosceles. After-wards, he gets another 30° from Euclid, as it is half the central angle of a regular hexagon. The six angles meeting at the centre are equal to four right angles, or 360°; one sixth of that would he 60°, and the half, 30°. Regarding the, hexagonal principle for the pyramid of Gizeh, he discovers the heptagonal for the temples of Thebes. The central angle of a heptagon is 51° 25′ 42″, and the half is 25° 42′ 51″. He places the latitude of Thebes at 25° 43′.

Prof. Smyth assures us that “the Great Pyramid is as happy in its unique situation as in its extraordinarily exact construction.” At the angle of 26° 18′ for the passage, he requires for the observation of the Polar star 2170 B.C. the latitude of 30°; or rather, 29° 59′ 59.2″. Then he approximately obtains the latitude another way. The angle of the north air-channel is, he says, 33° 42′, while that of the passage is 26° 18′; a mean between these numbers gives nearly 30°.

14. ITS OWN AGE.

In the astronomical argument, it is affirmed by Mr. Smyth and others that the fact that such a conjunction as the then Polar star and the Pleiades being seen, or to be seen, along the line of the passage, at the angle 26° 18′, 2170 B.C., proves the building or finishing of the pyramid to have been at that very date.

But other singular coincidences arise to support that era. The Rev. F. R. A. Glover, [1] M.A., thus comments on the subject: “There is a mark of special providence within the pyramid, made 2170 B.C., which is responded to by a corresponding mark in a series of chronological passages, at the distance of 2170 inches, on a scale of an inch of space measuring a year of time; which testifies, in a hard geometrical, irrefutable manner, in concurrence with an astronomical date, cosmically developed, to the fact, that at the time of the Advent in the year One of the Christian era, was meant to be there, and thereby indicated 2170 years before by the builder of the Great Pyramid, or whoever inspired the building of that work.”

Mr. Casey, [2] in Philitis, has a further description. After saying that the first Ascending Passage represents the Mosaic dispensation of 985 inches from the Dispersion to Moses, and 1542 thence to the Advent, he traces back 2170 inches to a little distance down inside of the slanting entrance passage, and shows the rectangular joints of the great stones forming the sloping walls are made nearly vertical in two successive instances only. “Then,” says he, “the two strikingly visible separations of continuity in the walls are followed by a thin, fine, but exquisitely true line, ruled at six inches behind the last of these separations, and in that line is contained the position answering to 2170 B.C.”

The mark was a line ruled on the stone from top to bottom of the passage wall at right angles to its floor. But what was wanted was “the distance from the nearest joint to the drawn line.” This was ascertained to be 2170½ one side, and 2170⅖ on the other, in pyramid inches. “This testimony,” adds Mr. Casey, “satisfies me, and fills me with thankfulness and joy.”

But M. Dufeu has another calculation, founded on a new set of historico-mathematical principles, connected with the lists of kings by Manetho, [3] by which he concludes that the pyramid was built at the beginning of the Sothic period. He finds the height of the hypogeum, he says, from the soil of the syringe to the roof to be 2920 noctas—two Sothic periods of 1460 years. As one Sothic age was 1322 B.C., the addition of 2920 would give 4242 B.C.

His analysis of Manetho’s list, and its identification with chronology, would be out of place here. But he draws thence a conclusion, to be read in his Quatre Pyramides de Gizch, that the 202 steps of the pyramid indicate the age of the building, as the number is referable to the so-called chronological height of the royal builder. The height of the pyramid he calls 262 cubits. From this he substracts 60 for the age of Menes, the first king, and gets 202.

The height of the King’s Chamber he discovers to be one-fifth of the chronological height of the builder in the lists:—“demonstrating that the pyramid had been erected 808 years after the rise of Menes, first king, founder of the Egyptian dynasties, and, consequently, by the Cheops of Herodotus, Kufu of the Monuments, Souphis of Manetho, whose elevation was precisely placed, after the royal lists of this chronographic priest, 808 years after that of Menes.” This would bring it to the time indicated by Rougé and Mariette Bey, over 4000 B.C.

Dufeu declares there is “perfect accord existing between the in-dications of the lists of Manetho and the length of the syringe of the hypogeum, the number of the steps, and the vertical height of the Great Pyramid, the height of its chambers, called the King’s or the sarcophagus, and the heights of the chambers called Sepulchral of the three other pyramids.”

The overwhelming difficulties in the way of the reception of 2170 B.C., and the historical agreements with 4242 B.C., will incline many readers to prefer M. Dufeu’s coincidences to the coincidences relied on by Mr. Smyth.

[1] A British writer who served as chaplain of the British consulate in Cologne. His work was dedicated to forging a connection between ancient Israel and modern Britain, a theory known as British Israelism, which held the British belonged to one of the lost tribes of Israel (modern Jews being only one tribe, Judah) and were therefore God’s chosen elect.

[2] Charles Casey, author of a brochure called Philitis (1872), which ran for many editions over the next decade. The book claimed the Great Pyramid was a numerical embodiment of ethical and philosophical truth and the monument at the border of Egypt that in the Christian interpretation of Isaiah (19:19) would herald the Apocalypse.

[3] An Egyptian historian of the third century BCE whose Aegyptiaca provided the basis for the chronology of Egyptian dynasties.

15. THE CIRCUMFERENCE OF THE EARTH.

“The Pyramid of Cheops,” writes the author [1] of The Solar System of the Ancients, “may be regarded as a teocalli, or terraced pyramid, having the contents equal one half the circumference of the earth.” By a reduction to units, he shows that five cubes of ten times the inclined side would produce the amount of the diameter of our orbit.

“The Pyramid of Cheops,” he says again, “might be called the Pyramid of the Sun, as it denotes the time of descent from the earth to the sun. The number of steps accord with the number of half diameters of the sun, which equal the half diameter of the earth’s orbit, and the pyramid itself equals the half circumference of the earth.” He adds, “Possibly the race that constructed the pyramid might have found a difficulty in agreeing as to the comparative diameters of the earth, sun, and orbit of the earth, and so left the pyramid truncated or incomplete.”

Of course, 360 times the length of a degree will give the circumference of the earth. “But,” says Dufeu, “the length of the side or base of the Great Pyramid represented the stadium of 500 to the degree, and, consequently, the degree of the great circle.” At 600 stadia to the degree he obtains the slant height of the pyramid. Thus, a degree, according to Jomard, is 110,827.68 metres. A six-hundredth part of that is 184.712 metres; but the slant height, being 184.722 metres, is very close to it.

Mr. Gliddon was no mystic in 1843, when he said, “Whether the Great Pyramid be 454 feet high, or 474, is to us a matter of indifference.” To us more modern readers it matters a good deal. M. Dufeu attached importance to the height. He once wrote how, by the reckoning of 500 to a degree, “we have been able to discover the geodesic marks of the monument, and determine even, in suspecting it, the height given to its apex, or imaginary geometrical summit, or to the half-column (cippe) placed upon the platform crowning the pyramid, in order to give to this the vertical and mathematical height necessary that it might he a precious geodesic standard.”

It is in this vertical height that he gets the standard of the measure of the earth.

Mr. John Taylor finds the height of the pyramid to be 1/270,000 of the earth’s circumference. Dividing 270,299 by 3.14157, and multiplying the result by the height of the pyramid in pyramid inches, 5825, he obtains 500,176,400 inches. Now, according to Piazzi Smyth, “the equatorial axis of the earth” is “somewhere between 502,000,000, and 503,000,000.” The Edinburgh astronomer gets a mean result of 500,490,700 from the pyramid’s measure; and he assumes the polar axis at 500,495,000 inches.

Mr. Taylor says that a band encircling the earth of the breadth of the base of the Great Pyramid will contain 100,000,000,000 square feet. Taking a twelfth of the length in pyramid inches, 762.5, and multiplying by 3.14159, he divides the result with 100,000,000,000, and realises 500,946,700 inches.

“It is probable,” he thinks, “that a deeply-incised line was carved at the commencement, representing, in the first instance, the length of five royal spans, or 51,840 English inches, as the standard for the measure of the diameter; and in the second, the length of 150 pyramid inches, or 163,635 English inches, as the standard for the measure of the circumference.”

Referring to 1600 talents for onions, &c., in Herodotus, the mystical Mr. Taylor says, “In the case of the circumference of the present earth, as also in the diameter of the former earth, the figures which Herodotus saw, and which the interpreter made vocal to him, were those which, when applied to a well-known measure of space with which the founders of the pyramid were familiar, will exactly express both of these numbers, amounting to the numerical power of the Arabian figures; amounting, in the former instance, to 48,000,000 royal spans, or 497,664,000 English inches; and the latter, to 1,440,000,000 pyramid inches, or 1,570,896,000 English inches.”

Believing in the universal and destructive Deluge, and an earth changed by that Deluge in size, he says, “The founders would naturally desire to preserve a memorial of that earth which had been destroyed, that it might be compared with the new earth, from which they perceived it to differ.”

On the other hand, we have Dufeu coming to a somewhat similar result on the assumption that the pyramid indicates 500 measures to the degree. Upon his system of tenths, he multiplies by 100 the length of the sarcophagus. This brings 730.27 feet. Multiplying by 500, he gets 365,134.5036 as the measure of a degree. That multiplied by 360 gives 131,448,421.2960 as the equatorial circumference of the globe; Laplace stating that as 131,456,276.4778 shows the pyramid correct within 7854 feet. Some, again, take 100 times the coffer—730.27 feet, and multiply by 180,000 stadia to realise 131,448,421.296.

A French writer remarks that “it is not by chance that the Egyptian foot equals 360,000 to a degree.” He considers that “it is thus certain that these measures have been drawn from the dimensions of the earth, and that they are derived from them, following the sexagesimal progression.” Dufeu sees “in the vertical height of the Great Pyramid the standard of two of the great itinerary measures of the earth.”

[1] John Wilson, author of The Lost Solar System of the Ancients Discovered (1856) from which the quotation is taken. The unimpressed London Examiner called the book “the curiosity of the week,” while the Athenaeum called it an “undigested mass of data.”

16. THE TRUE SHAPE OF THE EARTH.

We moderns are aware that this home of ours is not a regular globe, seeing that it is an oblate spheroid, with a bulging out at the equator, or flattening at the poles.

Hekekyan Bey, who is so full of the wonders of the pyramid as to say, “This Siriadic monument masonifies information which would fill volumes,” has seen how it can express this polarity difference.

“The square root,” he writes, “of the three-fifths of the difference between the length of the side of the rock platform, and twice the measure deducted from it to obtain the length of a side of the first course of masonry on the platform, gives the measure of the proportion of the polar compression to the equatorial diameter.”

These he finds to be 302.2 to 301.2. In this way he gets the equatorial axis 8,752,847,053.3 noctas, and the polar 8,723,890,885.9.

Dufeu, in his system of calculation, obtains for the imaginary height of the pyramid 692.0937. This, says he, is one-hundredth part of the flattening of the earth at the pole, or one two-hundredth of the difference of the diameter at the equator and the axis of rotation. Though Laplace declares for 68,671.123, yet the mean of modern measures for this flattening is 69,209.8708. But it will be seen that the pyramid measure very nearly approaches the last as 100 × 692.0987 produces 69,209.87.

This height is thus obtained. He does not believe the pyramid ever higher than the present platform of 202 steps, or 450 feet 10 inches. He supposes a cippe, pole, or column of 6.827 metres to represent the imaginary apex. Thus he concludes the elevation above the lowest level of the Red Sea to be 692.1785 feet. M. Jomard originally suggested the cippe top. The platform base is now about 150 feet above the level of the desert.

17. THE DENSITY OF THE EARTH.

Citing a passage in Isaiah, upon “weighing the mountains in scales,” [1] Mr. Piazzi Smyth thinks he detects the mean density of the earth “to have been introduced into the capacity and weight measures of the pyramid at a time when it was an utter impossibility to men;” that is, he supposes it pleased the Most High to reveal what astronomers have only recently discovered by science.

He finds the coffer contents to be 70,970.2 inches, and the coffer weight of water at 68° to be 17,905.500 gallons. Thence he gets by a division of these two quantities the approximate density of 5.672.

Mr. William Petrie has ascertained that the mass of the pyramid is to the earth as 1 to 105×3. He estimates the weight of the pyramid at 5,273,834 pyramid tons, and that of the earth 5,271,900,000,000,000,000,000. Beckoning the mean density of the earth at 5.7 times water, he regards the earth as exactly a thousand billions times the weight of the pyramid.

Mr. St. John Day, [2] after noting that the exterior dimensions of the sarcophagus or coffer are twice those of the interior, proceeds to demonstrate that, taking the internal cubical measurement at 71,250 inches, if we divide 71,250 by the recognised mean density of the earth, 5.7, we obtain in the result, 12,500, the weight of the coffer of water at the temperature of 68°. He realises the coffer contents, 71,250, by multiplying the cube of 50 pyramid inches by the density, 5 .7, and dividing the whole by 10. The weight of the pyramid is declared to be 1/165×3 of the weight of the globe.

Sir Edmund Beckett ridicules the attempt to make the pyramid tell this density tale, especially as its advocates have “the figures wrong, according to all the received measures, from Newton’s to the present day.”

[1] Isaiah 40:12; “Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, or with the breadth of his hand marked off the heavens? Who has held the dust of the earth in a basket, or weighed the mountains on the scales and the hills in a balance?” (NIV).

[2] St. John Vincent Day, a civil engineer whose pamphlet on iron in the pyramid was critiqued in appendix 2 of Piazzi Smyth’s Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid.

18. THE DISTANCE OF THE SUN.

A very simple law has been found for this calculation. It is to multiply the height of the pyramid by the ninth power of the number 10.

The steps of the building establish the relation of ten and nine; so much so, that it was thought two poles, of 10 and 9 feet respectively, were set up at right angles, for guidance to the workmen.

As the height bears a definite relation to the base, the one as radius, the other as circumference, the accurate measurement of the base will give the proper ideal height. Mr. Piazzi Smyth makes the latter 5819 inches of our own times. But Mr. Wm. Petrie estimates 5835 as nearer the truth.

The distance of the sun, by the ninth power of 10 multiplied by 5819, will be about 91,840,000 miles; but by 5835 inch-height, 92,093,000. Currently, the distance has been reckoned 95,000,000. More recent calculations have placed it some three millions less. [1] The pyramid measurement, therefore, is more correct according to modern data.

The sun’s distance is estimated at one thousand million times the height of the pyramid.

[1] The current mean distance is calculated as 92,955,820.5 miles (149,597,892 kilometers).

19. THE DAYS IN A YEAR.

Some curious calculations are brought out by Prof. Smyth, Captain Tracey,[1] Mr. Petrie, Mr. Yeates, and others, upon the number of days in the year.

Mr. Thomas Yeates, in 1833, started the view, “whether or not; the Great Pyramid of Ghizeeh was designed as a monument of the discovery of the Egyptian year.” Again, he says, “The measure of the pyramid will be found to agree with the number of days in the solar year. Moreover, admitting my exposition of the ark of Israel to be correct, then will its measures of length and breadth be found to correspond in cubits with the number of days in the lunar year, viz., 354.”

As mentioned elsewhere, Mr. Yeates identified the pyramid with Noah’s ark. “The form of the ark,” he said, “was quadrangular, and consisted of four equal sides, or parallelograms, of which the measure of one is given in three numbers—300, 50, and 30 cubits.” Again, “The four sides include four rectangular parts of one dimension in length and breadth; and the whole equal a square of 350 cubits, inside measure, and four more for the outside, making in all 354 cubits, or about 737½ feet (25 inches to a cubit). Compare this with the measure of the Great Pyramid.”

Mr. Wm. Petrie shows that the side of the pyramid will equal 3653 multiplied by the cubit of 25.025 British inches. Assuming the ancient vertical height as 5813 inches, he would multiply that sum by the ninth power of 10, to realise the radius vector. He finds the number of days to go a round number of times into the circumference of the earth’s orbit. The latter is taken at 36,525,430,000,000; and the former, 365.25636. But that circumference is associated with the perpendicular 5813; being thus produced—5813 × 109 × twice 3.1416 = 36,528,430,000,000.

Prof. Hamilton L. Smith [2] of New York, according to Mr. Piazzi Smyth, taking “one length and two breadths of the King’s Chamber for radius in a trigonometrical computation with the peculiar passage angle 26° 18′ 10″, the resulting sine, or length of the vertical side of the triangle, where the above radius is hypotheneuse, brings out exactly the year-day number, 365.242, &c.” He also shows that the height of the niche in the Queen’s Chamber, taken as 182.62, multiplied by 2 will give 365.24 solar days. He finds this height of the niche, if taken as 185 multiplied by 3.1416, and then by 10, will bring 5812, the height of the pyramid; but taken as 182.62, multiplied by 10 and divided by 2, the base, 9131, is obtained.

Capt. Tracey, [3] R. N., has some pretty mathematical results from the Antechamber to the King’s Chamber. The length of 116.26 inches he notes to be partly of granite, partly of limestone. The granite portion is 103.033 in pyramid inches, which are about a thousandth part larger than the British. Taking 103 for the side of a square, he gets the area of a circle whose diameter is 116.26. This amount multiplied by 3.14159, the proportion of circumference and diameter, brings out the days 365.24.

The King’s Chamber is 412.132 pyramid inches long. With that as a diameter, the circle would equal a square whose side was 365.242; and this, in sacred cubits, is the length of the socket side of the pyramid.

Professor Smyth takes the 26 holes in the ramps of the gallery for days, and the 14 roof overlappings for months, to get 364 days to the year. He then leads us to the Ante-chamber and the four grooves, one of which only holds the portcullis. Excepting, therefore, one year in four, we have to add but one day to 364; in leap year, two days must be added. He observes, too, that the groove filled by the portcullis is of less width than the other grooves; and so concludes that less than one day in four must be added, as the year is not quite 365¼ days in length.

Another curious coincidence is pointed out by him. There is a great step by the upper end of the gallery, which is 90½ inches. That, says he, “which increased for the ruling angle of the place, goes close to 366 times into the circumference of the pyramid, eminently reminding, therefore, of the days contained in a year.”

But Mr. Petrie discovered that the base of the pyramid divided by 365.242 would equal the ten-millionth part of the earth’s radius. Sir Henry James got the base 764 from 360 derahs, or cubits, of 25.488 inches for days. Mr. Wild, C. E., determines that the relation of the Second and Third Pyramids brings out similar results.

[1] Benjamin Wheatley Tracey, of the Royal Navy. He was the author of The Pillar of Witness: A Scriptural View of the Great Pyramid (1876). The only biographical information I can find for him was his 1853 claim to an Irish viscontancy, which he had not been awarded by the time his book appeared.

[2] Hamilton Lanphere Smith (1818-1903), a professor at Hobart College, specializing in mechanics and telescopes.

[3] British Royal Artillery (not Navy) officer U. A. Tracey, later Major Tracey, whose work Bonwick quotes from Piazzi Smyth’s discussion of it in Our Inheritance. The mix-up in titles is likely because Bonwick confused Smyth’s reference to U. A. Tracey, R. A., with his mention of naval Commander B. W. Tracey, R. N.

20. THE LAW OF GRAVITATION.

The author of the Solar System of the Ancients, informs us that “the pyramid, like the obelisk, still points to the heavens as an enduring record of the laws of gravitation, though it has ceased to be intelligible for countless ages.” He remarks, in, another place, “The Pyramid represents the variation of the time, and the pagoda the variation of the velocity.”

As the Great Pyramid is the present subject of enquiry, the obelisk teaching must be deferred for another publication. It will then be satisfactorily seen that the obelisk is one of the most perfect mathematical puzzles ever constructed. It stands the test of modern scale of descent by gravitating force, and elucidates the principle exactly. It is a masonified lecture on conic sections. It illustrates the fact that the most recondite theories of geometry and natural science were practically made use of in Egypt 5000 or 6000 years ago.

The pyramid, not less than the obelisk, which it resembles, can thus answer the enigma of gravitation, generally supposed to have been discovered by Sir Isaac Newton through the accident of an apple falling from a tree.

21. TIME OF DESCENT TO THE MOON AND SUN.

The number of steps to the pyramid, calculated at 219, has served Mr. Wilson with another curious astronomical coincidence, or teaching.

“The Pyramid of Cheops,” says he, “will represent the time of descent from the earth to the moon through 219 semi-diameters of the moon, as well as the time of descent from the earth to the sun, through 219 semi-diameters of the sun. The bases of the pyramids will in both cases be in the centre or orbit of the earth; but, in the descent to the sun, the apex of the external pyramid will be in the centre of the sun, and in the descent to the moon the apex of the external pyramid will be in the centre of the moon. The axis of the external pyramid is supposed to be divided into 219 equal parts, or 219 semi-diameters.”

Again, he writes,—“We suppose the Pyramid of Cheops might have been dedicated to the sun, because it represented the semi-diameter of the sun and the semi-diameter of the earth’s orbit, as well as the time of descent from the earth to the sun; but now it appears that this pyramid will also represent the semi-diameter of the moon, and the semi diameter of the earth’s orbit, as well as the time of descent from the earth to the moon. So the Pyramid of Cheops might have been dedicated to both the sun and moon.”

He also writes:—“The Pyramid of Cheops indicates the half-circumference of the earth and the half-diameter of the earth’s orbit. Its towering summit may be supposed to reach the heavens, and the pyramid itself to represent the law at the time of a body gravitating from the earth to the sun. The solid hyperbolic temple of Shoemadoo of Pegu [1] represents the law of velocity corresponding to this law of the time.”

[1] The 326-foot-high Shwedagon pagoda of Yangon (Rangoon), constructed in present form in 1769.

22. PLANETARY DISTANCES.

Mr. John Wilson also reads the distances of planets in the pyramids. His calculation is by what he calls units; thus, the side of the pyramid, 760 feet, he calls 648 units; and the height, 405 units. Each unit is about 14.074 inches.

The distance of the moon, he explains, will be thus obtained. Twenty times the cube of the side will be five times the distance of the moon. [1] Of course, the amounts must be reduced into units. The cube of the side of the base (6483) would give a quarter the moon’s distance. Four times the cube of the pyramid, or the cubes of the four sides, gives the distance of the moon. Ten times sixty cubes, or 600 cubes of the pyramid, gives the distance of Mercury; [2] that of Saturn will be twenty-five times as much, or 15,000 cubes. [3] The cube of twice the side (12963) will be the diameter of the moon’s orbit. [4] Twenty-five cubes of the perimeter yields the distance of the earth from the sun; which is as many cubes of the side of the base as the side contains Babylonian feet. This is 1600, the number of talents Herodotus says he saw recorded outside.

The sarcophagus is, according to Mr. Wilson, very suggestive. Ten times the breadth raised to the ninth power gives the distance of Neptune; and the depth raised to the ninth power, the distance of Jupiter. Half the square of the length to the ninth power gives that of Mars. Five cubes of 300 multiplied by the length is the diameter of Mercury’s orbit. Two cubes of 200 multiplied by the contents of the inside gives 280 times the distance of the moon, i.e. the distance of Venus.

The Grand Gallery he regards as of the hyperbolic order.

If these coincidences appear to be far-fetched, [5] others are open to the same charge.

[1] The average distance to the moon is 238,857 miles (384,403 km). As far as I can tell, Wilson’s calculation yields a lunar distance of a bit more than 241,000 miles.

[2] If I follow this correctly, this pyramid calculation yields a distance to Mercury of 36 million miles and change, while in reality the closest it approaches earth is 57 million miles. Its mean distance from the sun is 36 million miles.

[3] Saturn’s closest distance from earth is 746 million miles (1.2 billion km) and its mean distance from the sun is 890 million miles (1.4 billion km), while the pyramid calculation gives around 900 million miles.

[4] The diameter of the moon’s orbit is roughly 477,000 miles (768,000 km). The pyramid calculation yields a result of 484,000 miles.

[5] Yes, they do.

23. THE RISE OF A POLAR STAR.

Among the interesting discoveries in connection with the pyramid is that by looking through the passage to the northern heavens, 2170 B.C., an observer would there distinguish the then Polar star, Alpha Draconis, crossing the meridian below the Pole, and by Pleiades crossing it above.

Prof. Smyth thus puts the case:—“At that precise moment, when the Pole star, with the temporary distance of 3° 42′ from the pole, was crossing the meridian below the pole, at the same moment, or in that one year alone of all known years, the bright central star of the Pleiades cluster, separately symbolised in the Grand Gallery, was also on the meridian, but above the pole; and not only near the equator, but on the very same meridian as Precession [1] then assigned to the Equinox.” He adds,—“The combination of all these several events, or phenomena, could only have occurred, according to the precessional calculations of modern astronomy, at or close to the year 2170 B.C.”

All must admit this a singular coincidence, like that of the conjunction of planets at the birth of the Saviour. “But what of that?” the reader may ask. It is inferred that the Divine skill, which ordered the arrangements of the King’s Chamber, dictated the angle of that passage by which, at the epoch of construction, such a remarkable astronomical occurrence could be observed.

Our own Polar star was then, by the Precession of the Equinoxes, far distant from the North Pole of the heavens, as a Draconis now is. The latter was at its nearest station 2800 B.C. Mr. Smyth admits that “there was a former epoch, viz., 3400 B.C., when the Polar star was also at that foundation distance of 3° 42′ from the pole, but with totally opposite accompaniments.”

Sir John Herschel declared: “A passage may be said to have directly pointed at a Draconis, at its inferior culmination, at which moment its altitude above the horizon of Gizeh (lat. 30°) would have been 27° 9’.” But, as elsewhere named, a date was first given to the astronomer. The Rev. Dr. Nolan [2] says: “At the request of Col. Vyse, Sir J. Herschel calculated the place of the star which was Polar at the time when, according to the reduced chronology, [3] the pyramids were erected.”

Mr. Gliddon, the distinguished American Egyptologist, has a version of the matter. He relates that the tables prepared by Vyse and Perring [4] in 1838 were submitted to Sir John, who wrote as follows:—“No other astronomical relation can be drawn fom the tables containing the angles and dimensions of the passages; for, although they all point within five degrees of the Pole of the Heavens, they differ too much, and too irregularly, to admit of any conclusions.” Again: “The exterior angles of the building are remarkably uniform; but the angle 52° is not connected with any astronomical fact.”

The American was very decided upon the astronomical question. In 1842 he denied the fact of pyramid observations. “First,” says he, “by their extraordinary variety and number; and secondly, in Ethiopia, by their fronts facing all points of the compass, from N.E. to S.E. Thirdly, in Egypt, from the measurements made in 1839 by Mr. Perring, which demonstrate that the inclinations of the passages, as well as the relative position of each pyramid, vary so as to destroy all conformity to mathematical or astronomical purposes. These proofs against their astronomical utility are independent of the voluminous evidence to be gleaned from history, and from a glance at the monuments themselves, their localities and associations, which declare their sepulchral origin. If, as Sir John Herschel observes, the inclined passage into the largest pyramid of Gheezeh was made at an angle to correspond to a Draconis, this pyramid must have been built about the year 2123 B.C., which alone would suffice to upset Usher’s epoch of the Deluge, 2348 B.C.”

Some think the professor too dogmatic in his assertion about angles and dates. Why, it is asked, does he select 26° 18′ for the passage, which others state to be 26° 41’? Why should he light upon 2170 B.C. when others give no such precise date? When Col. Vyse, by actual measurement, made an angle 51° 50′ 51.52″, Mr. Taylor, to suit his theory, preferred to adopt 51° 51′ 14.3″, and Mr. Smyth another angle.

Mr. Agnew, [5] in 1838, gave mathematical reasons for the angle being different. “The real angle of the dip,” he writes, “or the angle intended to be given to it, was 26° 33’ 54”, being the inclination of a line from the middle of one side to the opposite corner, or the angle formed by the hypothenuse of a right-angled triangle with the greater of the two sides containing the right angle, these latter being to each other as 2 to 1.” He thinks that “other passages with the same inclination may probably exist, leading in a zigzag direction to upper rooms on the levels of the other inscribed squares of the figure.”

Sixty years ago Dr. Richardson [6] said, “The supposition that this passage was intended as an astronomical instrument for measuring sidereal time is scarcely tenable. Pyramids are prodigiously expensive and unmanageable machines; and the passage being so carefully sealed at the entrance precluded all possibility of using it as such. Besides, there being so many pyramids, all of them with passages looking to the north, and descending nearly with the same angle of inclination, they were probably intended to answer some other purpose than that of looking at the Polar star.”

Mr. Fergusson the architect lays it down that “all these theories have failed, for a variety of reasons it is needless now to discuss; but, among others, it may be mentioned that the angles are not the same in any two pyramids, though erected within a few years of one another, and in the twenty that were measured by Col. Vyse they vary from 22° 35′ to 34° 5′. The angle of the inclination of the pyramid to the horizon is more constant, varying only from 51° 10′ to 52° 32′, and in the Gizeh pyramids it would appear that the angle of the passage was intended to have been about one half of this.”

Our own Nestor of Egyptologists, Dr. Birch, has this statement: —“It has been supposed that they were built to record an arc of the meridian, the earth’s diameter, the revealed unit of measure, the exact rise of the old Polar star, a Draconis, and other points of cosmic or mathematical knowledge. These ideas do not appear to have entered into the minds of the constructors of the pyramids, who employed measures for their symmetrical construction.”

In a letter the writer received from a distinguished scientist and official astronomer are these words:—“Astronomers do not as a rule agree with Piazzi Smyth’s deductions and conclusions. His matters of fact are of course not disputed, and many of his discoveries are, I think, rather looked upon as curious and interesting coincidences, than as establishing his theories.” [7]

[1] Precession refers to the slow backward drift over time of the apparent position of the stars in the heavens due to the wobble of the earth’s axis. The movement occurs at approximately one degree every 71.6 years, for a total circuit of a bit less than 26,000 years before returning to the initial position.

[2] The Rev. Frederick Nolan, author of The Egyptian Chronology Analysed (1848).

[3] An effort popular in the nineteenth century to revise Egyptian chronology to bring it in line with Biblical chronology, cutting several centuries off of Egyptian history.

[4] J. Perring, a British surveyor who worked with Col. Vyse during his expedition in Egypt.

[5] H. C. Agnew, author of A Letter from Alexandria on the Evidence of the Practical Application of the Quadrature of the Circle, in the Configuration of the Great Pyramid of Gizeh (1838), from which the following quotation is taken.

[6] Robert Richardson, author of Travels along the Mediterranean and Parts Adjacent (1822), from which the following quotation is taken.

[7] Bonwick apparently never revealed who wrote this letter.

24. THE EQUINOXES.

It is an old classical notion [1] that the pyramid, at certain times, never throws a shadow. There was a pretty general impression that it was erected as a true chronometer by marking solar changes. Plato, in this sense, called it the dial. [2] Other contrivances were known that indicated these astronomical effects. The well at Syene reflected in its waters the image of the sun at the summer solstice. The equinoctial and solstitial points were in the very early times correctly observed.

The pyramid on the north side was in shadow from the autunnal to the vernal equinox, but light from the vernal to the autumnal at midday. It, therefore, followed that those who stood at the centre of the north base, at the equinox, would see the sun resting on the apex of the pyramid.

The orientation of the pyramid being so nearly perfect, having for its error, says Sir Edmund Beckett, but 5′, or one foot in its base line of 761, enables the structure to act as a gnomon. I may have been more exact once, there being some evidence of a twist, as from an earthquake. M. Defvignoles [3] remarks that this orientation “could have served for the Egyptians to determine the time of the equinoxes, when the sun begins to enlighten the northern face, or when he ceased to shine there.” This would only occur when the years of equinoxes suited the sun’s rising.

Mr. Stewart, [4] of America, has some observations:—“It follows from these dimensions, and the latitude under which this pyramid is erected, that fourteen days before the spring equinox, the precise period at which the Persians celebrated the revival of nature, the sun would cease to cast a shade at midday, and could not again cast it until fourteen days after the autumnal equinox. Then the day, or the sun, would be found in the parallel or circle of southern declension, which answers to 5° 15′; this would happen twice a year—once before the spring, and once after the fall, equinox. The sun would then appear exactly at midday upon the summit of this pyramid.”

[1] Cassiodorus in Variae Epistolae 7.15 writes of “the Pyramids of Egypt, the shadows of which do not extend beyond the space of their construction” (trans. Mrs. Edward Cresy). Bonwick is apparently referring to Vyse’s citation of Jomard’s quotation of Cassiodorus. A similar view is also expressed in Lucian’s Toxaris 27: “[Demetrius] had heard it said that the Pyramids in spite of their great height cast no shadow” (trans. F. W. Fowler and H. G. Fowler).

[2] I am not able to find the reference; it is possible Bonwick confuses Plato’s discussion of the geometric shape for the Egyptian building. It is also possible he means Thales’ use of shadows to measure the height of the pyramids (Diogenes Laertius 2.27).

[3] Bonwick has misread the eighteenth-century long “s” as an “f.” The person indicated is Alphonse Des Vignoles (1649-1744), a minister and chronologist, author of Chronologie de l’histoire sainte et des histoires étrangères qui la concernent, depuis la sortie d’Égypte jusqu'à la captivité de Babylone (1738), known in English as the Sacred Chronology.

[4] This appears to be a mistake on the part of Bonwick. The original author of the following quotation is John Fellows, from his An Exposition of the Mysteries (1835), a book on Egypt and Freemasonry. In Bonwick’s 1878 volume on Egyptian Belief and Modern Thought, he correctly cites Fellows as the quotation’s source.

25. PRECESSION OF THE EQUINOXES.

The ancient year of the gods, 25,920 years, is one of many signs that Sir Isaac Newton’s supposed discovery was known long before. Prof. Robinson [1] says, “It is now very certain that the precession of the equinoxes was known to the astronomers of India many ages before Hipparchus. The Egyptians, also, had a knowledge of something equivalent to this, for they had discovered that the Dog-star was no longer the faithful forewarner of the Nile, and they combined him with the star Fomalhaset in their mystical calendar.”

The very fact of their having both solar and sidereal time would show a consciousness of moveable equinoxes.

Hekekyan Bey gives 50.34″ as the record of the annual recession, showing the excess of time over 365 days in the tropical and sidereal years. He takes 29° 57′ 30″ for the latitude.

But Mr. Casey, in the Philitis, a really valuable little pamphlet, points out that the pyramid itself declares the cycle of the precession, and that nearer to the modern acceptation than even the Asiatic great circle of 25,920 years. He declares that the two diagonals of the base of the pyramid, estimated in pyramid inches, measure 25,827. That number in years will be about the time the stars take to recover their several positions in relation to our pole.

Mr. Wild, C. E., nearly thirty years ago, had a pretty calculation of his own to prove the Great Pyramid a true chronometer, or time-measurer, and a dial in a higher sense than Plato meant when he applied that title to it.

As is well known, the entrance passage is not in the centre of the north side of the pyramid. Mr. Wild, who makes use of a cubit—the Memphis one—quite different to that employed by Prof. Smyth, assumes the eastern side from the entrance to be 210 cubits, and the western 238. The difference, 28 cubits, he discovers to be the exact distance, 0.4758″, indicated by Maedler, [2] as the annual diminution of the obliquity of the ecliptic.

As the entrance is 14 cubits eastward of the middle of the north face, he finds that “during the half of the year in which the sun lights the northern side of the pyramid (intended as a chronometer) the tropic retrogrades 14 cubits; that is, exactly the same distance as the entrance of the Great Pyramid is removed eastward from the middle of the northern face.”

More singular,—“In 210 years the tropic retrogades 100″, exactly in the same number of years as the eastern portion of the base contains cubits.” That is, taking Maedler’s rate of 0.4758″ for the year. “Then,” says he, “in 500 years the tropic retrogrades 238″; that is, as many seconds as the western portion contains cubits.”

Again,—“According to the above-mentioned operations, the proportion between the base and height of the pyramid is as 16 to 10. The tropic retrogrades in sixteen years the full length of the base, and in ten years the full height of the Great Pyramid; for the length of the base is 16 × 28 = 448 cubits, and the height is 10 × 28 = 28 × cubits.”

It is an equally remarkable coincidence that 25,000 times the annual diminution of 0.4758″, or 3° 18′ 15″, if added to what he re-cognises as the inclination of the entrance passage, 26° 41′, would give the latitude of the pyramid, 29° 59′ 15″. The difference be-tween the inclination of 26° 41’ and that of the Ascending Passage, 26° 18′, is 23′. This amount represents 2900 years obliquity, or nearly one-ninth of the cycle of precession.

This very convenient pyramid gives astronomical results of as striking and as perfect a character for Mr. Wild with 20 inch cubits as for Prof. Smyth with 25 inch ones.

[1] John Robinson (1739-1805), a professor of natural philosophy in Edinburgh and the celebrated author of an anti-Masonic tome. The quotation comes from the first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1768-1771), to which he was a contributor. In 1877, this edition would have been a century out of date.

[2] Johann Heinrich von Mädler (1794-1874), a German astronomer.

26. CONNECTION WITH SIRIUS, THE DOG-STAR.

Several writers, including Arabian philosophers, have fancied some “mystic correlation,” to use the words of M. Dufeu, “between the design and age of the pyramid and the revolutions of Sirius, the judge-god of the dead.”

In the present work the religious question can but be glanced at. Sirius was known as Sothis by the Egyptians, whence the so-called Sothic year, or revolution of 1460 years. Hermes, god of wisdom, says Champollion, [1] was Sirius, or Sothis. Hermes is Thoth, or Anubis, the deity presiding over the dead, and yet being the originator of learning. Popular tradition among the Arabs, [2] revived among certain mystical Christian writers of our own day, indicates Seth as the builder of the pyramid. Seth, in this case, is probably Sothis, or Sirius.

No star was so venerated in Egypt as Sirius, associated, as it was, with the time of the annual overflow of the Nile, which the rising of the star foreshadowed. The hieroglyphic for Sirius is, oddly enough, the triangular face of a pyramid. Dufeu and others suppose that the pyramid may have been dedicated to this venerated star or period. Proclus relates the belief in Alexandria that the pyramid was used for observations of Sirius.[3]

Murtadi, [4] 1584, says that the magical priest Saiouph [5] made his abode, at the time of the Deluge, in the pyramid; “which,” says he, “was a temple of the stars, where there was a figure of the sun, and one of the moon, both of which spoke.” He mentions the great grandson of Noah, Bardesi, who, as priest, “applied himself to the worship of the stars.” He adds, “It is reported that he made the great laws, built the pyramids, and set up for idols the figures of the stars.”

M. Dufeu finds the total height from the soil of the syringe to the roof to be 2920 noctas, or twice the Sothic period of 1460 years. “We consider that,” says he, “a proof that the Great Pyramid had been dedicated to this memorable Sothic period, or rather to Sothis, the star justly venerated in Egypt. One sees by that that the hypogeum takes its point of departure from the beginning of the revolution of Sothis anterior to the sixty years before the coming of Menes, the same as Manetho takes his point of departure from the initial point of that same revolution of Sothis, in attributing to Cerpheres a Sothic height of 839 years, or chronological noctas, at the moment when he founded the subterranean construction of the Great Pyramid.”

Having come to the close of the interesting lessons of an astronomical kind, communicated by the Great Pyramid, we discover that the measurements are assumed to have some direct and important relation to religious subjects. Reference will therefore be made to some of these ideas.

[1] Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832), the French philologist who deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics.

[2] Bonwick here refers to a legend reported by Vyse and others in which the Sabaeans of Yemen call the Great Pyramid the tomb of Seth.

[3] As discussed above, I cannot find this reference prior to Greaves’ citation of it.

[4] Murthada ibn al Khalif, Latinized as Murtadi ibn Gaphiphus, author of The Egyptian History, translated into English in 1672.

[5] Saiouph was Murthada’s version of the legendary pyramid builder Saurid, credited by the Copts and ancient Arab historians with building the Great Pyramid and filling it with astronomical and scientific books and instruments three hundred years before the Flood, according to the medieval author writing as Al-Hakam. as quoted by Greaves.

27. THE UNITY OF GOD.

Prof. Smyth, in Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid, thus writes: “The Great Pyramid, a prehistoric and entirely pre-Mosaic monument, had remained sealed in all its more important divisions, from the date of its foundation up to an advanced period of the Christian dispensation; and was then found, on being opened and examined, entirely free from that accursed thing which formed the leprosy of the East in ancient days—idolatry.”

No hieroglyphics occur on the sarcophagus. This fact he declares to be “that astonishing isolation, not only from other pyramids, but from everything of Egyptian intentions, such as now appears to be, and to have been from the beginning, the attribute of the pyramids.”

He contrasts it thus with the Sphinx; “That monster, an idol in itself, with a wig and painted cheeks, and symptoms typifying the lowest mental organisation, positively reeks with idolatry throughout its substance; for, when the fragments, or component masses, of its colossal stone beard were discovered in the sand-excavation of 1817, it was perceived that all its internally joining surfaces of the blocks had been figured, full of the ‘impure’ Egyptian gods.”

It is unfortunate for the professor’s theory that “impure” hieroglyphics were found in the pyramid, even the quarry marks [1] of the two kings; and these, as in all cartouches of kings, are idolatrous emblems—the serpent and birds of Egyptian worship. In a subsequent work it will be shown that gods, and not the God, were the objects of adoration, even before the age of the pyramid. [2]

[1] Hieroglyphic quarry marks were found in the relieving chambers above the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid by Col. Vyse, whom “alternative” authors accused of faking them until the end of twentieth century, when the lack of evidence for fabrication became too overwhelming to ignore.

[2] The work in question was Bonwick’s Egyptian Belief and Modern Thought (1878).

28. DIVINE ORIGINATION OF MEASURE.

The assumption of some writers is, that a correct standard being of inestimable value, and it being faithfully exhibited by the pyramid, none could have originated such a scheme of weights and measures therein but Deity Himself.

There has been a time in the history of every race when nothing could occur beyond the comprehension of ignorance that was not attributed to the direct interposition of local divinities. In every language, perhaps, thunder is God’s voice. An aerolite, or a lightning flash, was sent direct from the hand of the thunderer.

It was natural for the rude peasant Egyptians in the days of the pyramid to believe that their god Thoth had revealed a system of measures, a mode of building, or a style of writing, to their priests, but it is hardly according to modern habits of thought to see a necessity for Divine inspiration in such matters. Can there be more occasion for the Edinburgh professor to bring down the Deity for the regulation of the size of the sarcophagus in the pyramid, than for the President of the Royal Academy to require special inspiration from Jehovah for the earliest known, and yet most beautifully chiselled, sculpture of a pre-pyramid age?

It is the architect Fergusson who says, “It has been even asserted that God revealed to Cheops a variety of interesting astronomical information, and commanded him to build these facts into the Great Pyramid in British inches.”

There is no mistake in the language of the advocates of inspiration. Prof. Piazzi Smyth says, “That metrology at large was a subject not beneath the dignity of Divine attention in the earlier ages of the world, appears sufficiently (?) from the following commands issued by Divine revelation, in subsequent times, to the particular people, in these words; viz., “Thou shalt have a perfect and just weight,” [1] &c.

Again he says, “Philitis, [2] in the Greek of Herodotus, but Melchisedek, as we believe, in Hebrew, controlled the Egyptian king of the time to use the organised but peaceful bands of his subjects in the erection of this prophetic building, whose inspired design they understood not.” He gives his reason, “touching the even earth immensurability of these measures having been a problem entirely beyond the power of men either of the pyramid day, or of any other day 4000 years therefrom--unless they had received the aid of Divine inspiration from on high.”

Elsewhere something may be said to show the high degree of civilisation attained in pre-pyramid times, and the extreme probability that not only was the masonified pyramid-learning, so admirably illustrated by Prof. Smyth, to a great degree lost very soon after the death of Cheops, owing to disturbing invasions, but that the knowledge of the arts suffered a most serious check. In those ante-printing, and even ante-writing, epochs, it was easy for certain kinds of intelligence to be absolutely and for ever extinguished. The higher secrets of wisdom were confided to but very few, and were never committed to letters.

Mr. John Taylor, the professor’s teacher upon this religious aspect of the pyramid, somewhat identifies Noah with the building. He being the preacher of righteousness, “nothing could more illustrate,” he says, “this character of a preacher of righteousness after the Flood than that he should be the first to publish a system of weights and measures for the use of all mankind, based upon the measure of the world.”

[1] Deuteronomy 25:15, quoted in the King James Version. The New International Version gives this as “accurate and honest weights.”

[2] Philitis is mentioned in Herodotus (2.128) as the shepherd who grazed his flocks beside the pyramids, which the Egyptians named for him. This figure is here conflated with Melchizedek, a king and priest mentioned in Genesis 14:18-20, because in the nineteenth century Greek references to shepherds were taken as signifying the nomadic Hebrew people before the Exodus.

29. INSPIRATION FOR CERTAIN TEACHING.

This, though a modern conception, is becoming a very popular one in certain circles of religious people. On that account it is to be treated with respectful attention. Pious convictions, and views supposed to be derived from, and sustained by, the Holy Scriptures, are not to be rejected with sneers, though judged ever so unreasonable. Some minds are more susceptible of the marvellous than others. Many believe they add to the glory of the Deity in the multiplication of instances of His direct interposition. There are those who style this anthropomorphism, and reject the pagan-like contrivance of bringing the Divinity too frequently and needlessly from the clouds.

Prof. Piazzi Smyth has been the most prominent advocate of the Divine origin and purpose of the Great Pyramid. In the present work only a glance can be given at his important theory. He finds, as he thinks, certain scientific truths of high interest, and some dearly-cherished religious dogmas, conveyed in the measurements and architecture of the building. He cannot conceive of this masonified intelligence otherwise than from God Himself. He calls it the “Temple of Inspiration;” and quotes 1 Chron. xxviii. 19, “The Lord made me understand in writing.” He lays it down as a fixed principle, “If intention did really preside on the occasion, it could only have been the result of Divine inspiration imparted to certain men.”

Mr. Fergusson, while admitting it as “the most perfect and gigantic specimen of masonry that the world has yet seen,” seems to doubt the necessity of inspiration, saying, “There is no reason what-ever to suppose that the progress of art in Egypt differed essentially from that elsewhere.” There are those who see more beauty, finish, and skill in the Third Pyramid than the first. The Great Pyramid was clearly constructed upon the model of previously existing ones, though with some peculiarities of its own. One system of teaching runs through all the pyramidal structures, whether of Egypt, India, or America, pointing to one thought.

Prof. Hamilton Smith—like many who regard the ancients as fools—is so amazed at the scientific revelations of the pyramid, and, it may be added, pyramids, as to feel himself on the horns of a dilemma. He must either, he says, admit that in those long-past ages men know as much as we do now, or that supernatural inspiration was granted to certain men, who were, whether they themselves understood the meaning of their own acts or not, to build an enormous edifice only to perpetuate this knowledge.

If it required the genius of some few men in the nineteenth century to reveal this thing—which is, however, doubted by the great mass of scientists now—of what practical use was the lesson at all? The pyramid was absolutely closed upon completion. The ignorant and the heathen were thus deprived of the benefit of this inspired teaching. And we, too, though believing in God, and understanding the astronomical lessons of the pyramid apart from its school, would have been still left in absolute ignorance of this mysterious and wonderful teaching upon religion and science had not a certain Mahometan ruler of Egypt, [1] some thousand years ago, actuated by avarice, employed hundreds of men to force a way into the building.

After all, we may say with Sir James Simpson, “In relation to the Great Pyramid, as to other matters, we may be sure that God does not teach by the medium of miracle anything that the unaided intellect of man can find out.” [2]

[1] Caliph Abū Ja‘far Abdullāh al-Mā’mūn ibn Harūn (786-833 CE), known as al-Ma’mun, but sometimes called Mamoun or Mamoon, who tunneled into the Great Pyramid in 832 looking for treasure and secret wisdom.

[2] The quotation comes from his posthumous Archaeological Essays (1872).

30. THE MEMORIAL OF THE DELUGE.

Prof. Smyth has pointed out that the passage, with its angle of 26° 18′, looked toward the North Pole 2170 B.C., when the then Polar star was crossing the meridian. But, he observes that when that body crossed below the pole, the mouth of the Waterpot of Aquarius was crossing the meridian above the pole.

The event called the Deluge, always associated with Aquarius, and necessarily so, as the mystics affirm, is thus strongly fixed upon the Egyptian mind by such a constructive memorial of the passage of the constellation. Mr. Smyth, who recognises no mere celestial Deluge, and no partial terrestrial one, but an absolute and universal drowning of the whole globe, says that it “destroyed all pre-existing monuments.” He evidently believes, like other mystics, that the Deluge had some mysterious connection with the ascendancy of Aquarius. He speaks of Aquarius being the “prominent constellation” at what he styles the “awful moment for man,” when Draco was in the ascendant.

He is perfectly satisfied, by pyramid measurement, that the time of the Deluge would “be as surely very near 2800 B.C. as the date of the Great Pyramid building is close to 2170 B.C.” In this estimate he adds 450 years to the commonly received Biblical chronology. He has as much right to give a date to the Deluge as the 300 known authorities had for their several 300 periods for that occurrence. If, too, his calculation for the pyramid building be 2170 B.C., he must needs get a great deal more time, between that date and the Deluge, than what Usher and others afford him, in which to have enough population, progress, and wealth for the construction of the pyramid in Egypt.

31. THE SABBATH.

Those who contend for the antediluvian, or ante-Mosaic, origin of the Divine institution of the Sabbath, suppose they have confirmation of their opinion from the imagined Sabbatical teaching of what some regard as a Divinely-inspired building.

The roof of the Gallery is seen to have seven overlappings—a suggestive lesson. The Queen’s Chamber has seven sides; that is, the four walls, the floor, and the double roof. Again, the height of the Great Gallery is pronounced seven times that of the ordinary passages. At the angle of 26° 18′ the latter’s transverse height of 44.8 inches becomes 50 vertical, and this is a seventh of 350, the vertical height of the Gallery.

“For what purpose,” asks Mr. Piazzi Smyth, “is the Grand Gallery holding up so notably to view seven of the said standards?”

The seven standards of length he would conclude to mean standards of time. The small passage represents the unit day, and the Gallery is the week. His conclusions are:—“That violent and apparently unmeaning contrast of heights has the noblest of reasons, viz., the typifying of the sacred division of time; and we see here, again, that in time, as well as in space, the Great Pyramid embodies an idea which was entirely unknown to, or totally disobeyed by, the Egyptians.”

The Sabbath idea of time was fully recognised, however, by Egyptians and Chaldeans. The name of Sunday points to the fact, recognised by ancient Peruvians as well as ancient Egyptians. The number seven was, in Egypt, especially dedicated to Sirius, and was regarded as a sacred number. In the chapter on the blocking of the Gallery, reasons are given by Mr. Agnew why the roof was lofty. It is needless to point out to readers that the seven planets—the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, objects of veneration in extreme antiquity—were associated with the division of time in weeks. The very word Sabbath is said by Mr. George Smith [1] to be of Assyrian origin. But it is well for man, apart from Biblical sanction, that in Nineveh, Babylon, Egypt, and Peru, the necessity of one day’s rest in seven was so distinctly laid down by the priesthood.

[1] George Smith (1840-1876), the British Assyriologist who first translated the Epic of Gilgamesh and its pre-Biblical Flood legend. Smith actually claimed the concept of the Sabbath, not the word, to be Assyrian in origin. In his Assyrian Discoveries (1875), he wrote, “In the year 1869, I discovered among other things a curious religious calendar of the Assyrians, in which every month is divided into four weeks, and the seventh days, or ‘Sabbaths,’ are marked out as days on which no work should be undertaken.”

32. MODEL FOR MOSAIC INSTITUTIONS.

Those who maintain, as one expresses it, that not “all the revelations of God to man have been transcribed into the Bible,” [1] and who declare that “the pyramid revelation is not a rival of the Bible but an impregnable out-work to defend the sacred citadel of Bible inspiration,” see no difficulty in making Moses go to the pyramid for many things he afterwards incorporated into the Mosaic institutions.

Mr. Piazzi Smyth, among his many bold statements, has the following:—“Moses, having once received into his care the sacred cubit, took additional precautions for multiplying its copies and derivations, so successfully preserved by his countrymen through fifty generations; that sacred cubit being, in fact of length, as already proved, the unique smaller lineal standard of the Great Pyramid.” But where did Mr. Smyth learn that Moses received the sacred cubit? and where is it taught that he multiplied its copies? Was not the pyramid closed long before his time, so that he could not get access to this standard?

Mr. Drach, [2] F.R.A.S., asks, “Were the Mosaic tabernacle measures connected with the pyramid coffer as a metric standard?” He concludes they were so. He shows that the ark, mercyseat, and burnt-offering altar were constructed after that scale.

But it is further assumed, that Aaron’s rod was laid up in the ark as the standard cubit; that Solomon’s laver was the same as the pyramid coffer; that the molten sea was a multiple of five; that the stone tablets of the ark were metric copies of the coffer, &c. One compares the two thus:—“The King’s stone standard of the universal metric system deposited in the ark chamber of a Suphis pyramid.” The ark itself was of that measure.

It is not wonderful that somebody else should still further mark the derivation of the Mosaic institutes from the Egyptians by saying, “The ark, also, contained an authentic copy of the hermetic books.” [3]

[1] The quotation is from William MacKenzie’s (1804-1882) The Pyramid and the Bible: The Rectitude of One in Accordance with the Truth of the Other (1868), originally published anonymously, and whose subject is obvious. The book featured a preface by Piazzi Smyth.

[2] S. M. Drach, who, if one may judge a man by his works, was an astronomer and antiquarian, as well as a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. The quotation that follows comes from his “Observations on Base-Length of Great Pyramid, and Royal Coffer’s Dimensions” in the Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archæology, vol. 1 (1872).

[3] Hekekyan Bey, in his Treatise on the Chronology of Siriadic Monuments.

33. A MESSIANIC MONUMENT.

Although Mr. Piazzi Smyth and others had developed to so extraordinary an extent the religious aspects of the pyramid, and had affirmed so strongly that it was built by direct inspiration from the Most High, yet Mr. Casey, of Carlow, author of Philitis, wrote five years ago thus to his leader, Mr. Smyth: “Unless the Great Pyramid can be shown to be Messianic, as well as fraught with super-human science and design, its sacred claim is a thing with no blood in it.” [1]

It is an old saying that the demand will provoke a supply. The desire for the Messianic procured from this very peculiar, and this every-theory-satisfying, pyramid some very conclusive Messianic token. Some writers assert that figures can be made to prove anything. But the lines of the pyramid are quite as accommodating. A miraculous origin being supposed, there were no difficulties in the multiplication of miracles. While the written Word was dark and obscure, the pyramid was light and clear. Isaiah, the glorious prophet, had but the dim sense of a coming One, though some commentators doubt whether he understood what he revealed. But the heathen builders of Egypt, ages before Moses and the Scriptures, knew all about it, and were able, by Divine counsel, to masonify even particulars of the life of Jesus in Palestine. (!!)

Coincidences are often remarkable, though not convincing. The story is told of the late Archbishop Whately, [2] that one of his clergymen came to him in great exercise of mind about some novel application of the mystical number, 666. In the course of his enthusiastic appeal he observed His Grace, apparently indifferent to the harangue, scribbling on some paper. The curate rose hastily to say “Good day!” offended at this inattention.

The old man quietly turned to him and said, “Mr. ——, I was listening to your remarks, and testing them by some calculations. You read such a person’s name by the dreaded title of 666. I have been looking at your own name, and discover the alarming fact that it bears the number of the beast.”

Captain Tracey [3] published his Pillar of Witness, a Scriptural View of the Great Pyramid, dedicated to Mr. George Casey, and entering upon this theme.

The mysterious line in the Grand Gallery, measured off in pyramid inches, is made to tell some extraordinary things. But Mr. Menzies [4] unfolds the Messianic mission of the pyramid in these words:--

“From the north beginning of the Great Gallery floor there, in southward procession, begin the years of the Saviour’s earthly life, expressed at the rate of a pyramid inch to a year. Three-and-thirty inch years, therefore, bring us right over against the mouth of the well, the type of His death and His glorious resurrection too; while the long, lofty Grand Gallery shows the dominating rule in the world of the blessed religion which He has established thereby, overspanned above by the thirty-six stones of His months of ministry on earth, and defined by the floor-length in inches as to its exact period.”

A writer in The Nation’s Glory Leader, [5] a periodical devoted to millennial subjects, carries out the Messianic character of the pyramid, perhaps, beyond others of the same school. Coincidences help him to come to such conclusions. Speaking in the 53rd of Isaiah style respecting the pyramid, he says:

“Its countenance is more marred than that of any other building, or remnant of a building, that, to my knowledge, is in existence. Assuming it to be true that the pyramid really is a Messianic structure, what a startling parallel is presented unto us!, ‘His visage was so marred more than any man.’ [6] The side (query left side) of the huge structure being perforated by force ere the secret of the interior could be ascertained. The spear thrust into the side of Jesus by the soldiers is apparently a strict parallel as to what was essential to be done, in order that the secrets of eternity might become visible unto man. The outpouring of blood and water, which was necessary to complete the supplying of the means of gaining the secrets of eternity, appear all to have its parallel in the perforation of the pyramid by that down-rush of rubble which had been left in the Ascending Passage.” (!)

With all due respect for the pious intentions of such Messianic interpreters, with their happy coincidences, some persons will suspect that the notion leans rather toward the fancies than the facts of the pyramid.

[1] This 1872 letter from Casey to Piazzi Smyth is quoted in Piazzi Smyth’s Our Inheritance.

[2] Richard Whately (1787-1863), Archbishop of Dublin, whose Protestantism was called into question due to his positions on several issues. The story of his name being the number of the beast is briefly alluded to in his daughter E. Jane Whately’s memoir of him in the Life and Correspondence of Richard Whately, D.D. (1866).

[3] This is Commander B. W. Tracey, R. N.; Bonwick has again confused him with Capt. U. A. Tracey, R. A.

[4] Robert Menzies (d. 1877), whose letter to Piazzi Smyth is given in the 1874 edition of Our Inheritance. The quotation Bonwick gives in Menzies’ name is actually the words of Piazzi Smyth.

[5] The journal was edited by Edward Hine (1825-1891), a proponent of the theory of British Israelism and that the British were divinely sanctioned to rule the world. I have been unable to find the exact source of the following quotation, though there is little doubt it derives from where Bonwick says it came from.

[6] Isaiah 52:14, in the King James Version: “As many were astonied at thee; his visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men.”

34. A TYPE OF CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH.

Among other fancies affording gratification to the pious mind of Mr. Piazzi Smyth is that the Great Pyramid typifies the union of the visible Church in the invisible Head.

He quotes Paul’s words, Eph. ii. 19, “in whom all the building fitly framed together,” as applicable to the case. All Christians were to be so united. But one thing was needed to complete the structure, and bind all in one indissoluble body. This was the corner-stone.

This five-sided, five-angled stone, for the top of the pyramid, he imagines must have been prepared a long while before the completion of the building; and, being often in the way of the workmen, who were then not more refined and scrupulous perhaps in their language than now, they abused it. In fact, it was the rock of offence. Yet this, which the builders despised, became the head stone of the corner, being thus a type of Christ, the rejected of men.

The prophetical character of the type is maintained in the rejoicings over the fixing of this stone, “while,” as the professor puts it, “the Hycsos [1] kings and royal brethren greeted the completion of this most peculiar and nobly-destined temple with the faultless cry of ‘Grace, grace unto it!’”

[1] The Hyksos kings were Near Eastern invaders who took control of the Nile Delta during the twelfth dynasty and remained until they were expelled at the end of the seventeenth dynasty. Fifteenth dynasty pharaohs are traditionally identified as Hyksos. Piazzi Smyth chose to identify these people with the Israelites and adopted a revised chronology to make them the builders of the pyramids under divine sanction.

35. THE SECOND COMING OF CHRIST AND THE MILLENNIUM.

To some persons it may seem strange that the pyramid should have been erected for such an object as to prophesy the millennium. The discovery is certainly a very modern one. The Rev. F. R. A. Glover declares it “a sign given 4040 years ago; first seen in A.D. 1865; first understood in the autumn of 1872-73.”

A clergyman [1] describes the pyramid as “a link between the dispensation of Noah and the close of the fifth dispensation.” [2] “The use of it,” says he, “is to be a sign and a witness unto the Lord of Hosts” of the cessation of the ages of oppression, of war, and injustice, in order to signalise and to aid the approach of the millennial dispensation.” He, with Prof. Smyth, sees in it the Hebrew prophet’s “altar in the midst of Egypt, even a pillar in the border there-of, which shall be for a sign and a witness unto the Lord of Hosts in the midst of Egypt.” [3]

Undoubtedly the prophetical character of the pyramid is the most distinguished claim yet assumed for it, even in this age of the revival of symbolism, the era of Ritualism. [4] It is the marked and remarkable evidence of that strange yearning of modern life—sick of its materialism and of old dogmas—for idealising objects. It is not mere sentimentalism, but something more profound and earnest in feeling. Some think it a part of the revolt against creed, and the sign of a weariness ‘of the authority of mere Scripture texts. Others deem it a dissatisfaction with the demands of the Church, and a desire to find elsewhere a foundation and a guide. Heaven and earth are being ransacked for something that will satisfy the soul.

As men have now become so clever as to acquire a knowledge of scientific facts, such as the size of the earth and its distance from the sun, facts revealed by God to the builders of the pyramid, and by them set to measure therein, Prof. Piazzi Smyth sees another of the signs of the approaching millennium. “May not these be symptoms,” he asks, “that the stormy beginning of the first end is nigh at hand, the present dispensation nearly concluded, and a new one with more exalted ends and of a wider significance not far from commencing?”

This approaching fate of the world was once only to be read in the Book of Daniel; it is now to be learnt more distinctly from that marvellous tell-tale, the Pyramid.

M. Maillet, nearly 200 years ago, noted a crack or line, as if from an earthquake, the whole length of the Gallery. It is there where the mysteries have been just revealed. Thus it is written:—“The Grand Gallery, the mightiest feature of the interior of the Great Pyramid, and the direct issue upwards and continuously of the Hebrew passage, i.e. of the separation of the Hebrews as a peculiar people to God, indicates the Christian dispensation and its history at the rate of, as before, a pyramid inch to a year, beginning at the north wall with the birth of Christ, and proceeding thence up the inclined floor of the Grand Gallery southward.”

The professor thus finds, in 1542 inches, the date of the Exodus, 630 inches from the mark to indicate the date of the erection of the pyramid, 2170 B.C. At 358 inches further he gets the Dispersion, and at 2790 B.C. the Deluge, though, the last is placed in our Bibles at 2348 B.C.

From the north end, starting at the Dispersion, 2527 B.C., one may reach, says Mr. Casey, “the symbol of the bottomless pit, a chamber deep in the rock.” But Mr. Smyth speaks of “where it begins on the north end with the date of the birth of the Saviour of mankind.” Starting at that point, and going up the Gallery, he traverses about 156 feet or 1872 inches. But he calculates by Herschel’s geometrical-cubit inch, which he styles the pyramid inch, which very slightly differs from our own, being one thousandth part longer, or 1.001 inch.

He gets to the upper or southern end of the Gallery, between the 1881 and 1882 inch marks. This he assumes to mark the date of the millennium!

“Here,” he exclaims, “in all its solidity and overhanging imminence, is the southern wall, or practical termination of the Grand Gallery. Whatever, therefore, that feature symbolises terminates there too; viz., in 1881-2 A.D.” He is writing to the periodical, Life from the Dead. [5]

In that date he gains the beginning of the end, the opening of the millennial age. But the full glories of that period are not to be experienced till fifty-three years after. The reason for that will appear. The reader is aware that a small, low passage leads from the Grand Gallery to the ante-chamber of King’s Chamber. Mr. Smyth thus proceeds:--

“That floor-line, so far from ceasing at the south wall of the Gallery, passes onward from thence through a narrow opening, but on the very same level, to further spaces and further times, entering first of all a very low passage-way leading directly south. Only 53 inches long is this passage, while it is at the same time lower in height than any pyramid passage yet passed through from the very beginning. Wherefore, if the oppressions of idolatry, and the primitive force of war, in the early history of man were symbolised by the cramped-up attitude of any human being in passing through the very first, or pre-Abrahamic passage, which is only 47 inches in transverse, and 53 in vertical height, what shall be represented by the 44 inches only of this small, and last, or post-grand gallery passage? Can it be anything else than the unexampled days of future trouble which the Saviour Himself announced should immediately precede this second, but which must as certainly succeed the dispensation of His first, coming?”

That is, though 1881-2 will be the date of the millennium, 1934-5 will be the year of the absolute descent of Christ upon earth again; but the last fifty-three years will be of great sorrow.

The saints are, however, to be saved these fifty-three years of dire calamity. A way for their escape is made. They are to be caught up to heaven first. And where is this to be symbolised in the pyramid? The key, as usual, fits the lock precisely. The reader has learned before that over the King’s Chamber is the rude Construction Chamber, known as Davison’s. [6] To this Caviglia found an approach from a curious hole in the Gallery, accessible only by a ladder. It is to this the professor alludes [7] below:--

“Where the Grand Gallery terminates at the 1881-2 southern end, and a distressingly low passage begins, testifying, probably, to times of difficulty and oppression to follow, there is a very peculiar mode of escape or exit from the upper (or near the ceiling) corner of that southern or 1881-2 end of the Grand Gallery. No less than a small concealed passage-way, far over the heads of all travellers below, and leading to a sort of sanctuary over the ceiling of the King’s Chamber, the final end of all the historical series of chambers and passages in the building.

“It (the sanctuary above the King’s Chamber) is not a place for living human beings, or any walking bodies, the floor being all up and down in huge knobs of granite, and the height too small; but the ceiling of it is exquisitely smooth and true, in polished red granite, and of the same length and breadth as the ceiling of the King’s Chamber below.

“There is nothing known in theories of the Great Pyramid that can pretend to explain that strange exit from the upper corner of the Grand Gallery, 28 feet above its floor, and that one sort of sanctuary which it leads to being left thus accessible to winged beings by the builder; but the sacred theory may point to it as typical of the carrying up to above the clouds of the saints, just before the troubles of Anti-Christ begin.”

All this may be a prophecy of Mr. Piazzi Smyth, and not come from the pyramid. It is a remarkable coincidence that the Gallery should be thus 1881-2 pyramid inches long, when some recent calculators of the millennium, dating Daniel’s supposed 1260 years from the Hegira of Mahomet in 621-2, [8] got that number.

But the date of the millennium is found to vary in each age. During the first century the event was daily and confidently expected, as we learn from the Epistles. The millennium was looked for subsequently whenever there were wars and rumours of wars. The year 1000, the year 1260, passed. People lost the millennial expectation. If Daniel's mystical language, time, time, and half-time, [9] be interpreted to mean 360 years, twice 360, and half of 360, 1260 years are obtained. The question of addition to that amount has long agitated controversialists. As each particular century has fancied its own near the time, the nineteenth century must needs add enough to bring up the 1260 to that epoch. For a time, 600 was the secret number, and many confidently thought 1860 would bring Napoleon [10] as the Anti-Christ. Then, as Mahomet, the supposed false prophet, fled from Mecca in 622, or, as some say, 632, those numbers furnished new data. When, then, Mr. Smyth gets the length of the Gallery, about 1881 inches, he has but to assume the one end for the birth of Christ to gain his required date.

It is true that no interpretation from Daniel had found the said fifty-three years of affliction, though there is a reference to seventy-five. [11] The worthy professor, apparently for the time losing sight of his own fifty-three years, has a happy way of arranging for the seventy-five. He turns thus to Daniel:--

“The difference between the two periods, 1260 and 1335, is sufficient not only to carry the explorer through that passage and into the far larger proportions of the ante-chamber beyond, but into that part of it where the construction, in exquisite red granite, begins both in floor, walls, and ceiling.”—“In a more precise and particular degree the difference of 1335 and 1260, or 75, will place humanity just so far within the ante-chamber as to come vertically under that chamber’s most remarkable “granite leaf” (the Portcullis), whose unique position there, lower than the ceiling, and yet far above the floor, would seem to be typical, if of anything known or proclaimed, of the “New Jerusalem descending from on high.” [12]

Assuredly, for the builders so to adapt their measurements, as to chronicle the exact time of the “New Jerusalem descending from on high”—always supposing such descent to become literally a fact—would with most persons definitively settle the question of the Divine inspiration of the pyramid.

But the measurements which are so agreeable to the theory of Mr. Smyth are equally favourable to the very dissimilar theories of Messrs. Dufeu, Hekekyan Bey, Agnew, Wild, and Wilson. Each claims the adaptability for himself, ignoring the smiles of the pyramid upon others. That each person should realise especial gratification from the realisation of his “fancies” is no certain argument for their truth.

It is not for us to pronounce any of these well-demonstrated theories doubtful, for it may be an illustration of the doctrine that there is “not one infallibility, but several infallibilities.” After all, too, this may be only an instance of what is recorded about truth being many-sided.

The millennial teaching of the pyramid is dwelt upon by Mr. Harrison Oxley, [13] who sees that “the fashion and the measurement were sacred and heavenly, and, therefore, Divine.” The prophetical character of the building is thus described:--

“It is the altar and the pillar foretold by the prophet (Isa. xix. 19, 20), but also ‘the temple of God’ to be measured as given to the beloved disciple in Revelation (Rev. xi. 1, 2). Moreover, it must be a temple that should be in existence long after several of the great events in the Christian dispensation had transpired. Where are we to look for this temple? It must not be an idolatrous or heathen temple; such temples belong to Satan, and not to God. They have no measure, according to the rule of God's Word. ‘The temple of God’ to be measured was not at Jerusalem, because it was doomed to fall.” The temple must be that set in the border of Egypt.

He proceeds:—“The Great Pyramid has been measured, and it comes forth as a witness and a sign. It is a witness to Moses and the prophets, to Christ and the apostles, therefore to the truth of Divine revelation, therefore to the Lord of Hosts.”—“It is found not to be a profane, but a sacred building; not of human origin, but Divine. By its locality it answers to the altar and pillar of the Lord of Hosts, spoken of by the prophet Isaiah, to appear in the latter days. By its measurement it corresponds to the temple of God and the altar recorded by the beloved disciple in Revelation.”

The pyramid is said to be a sacred edifice, because it was built by Divine inspiration, and it bears the record of piety in being, unlike temples, without idolatrous emblems.

That this may be an error of judgment is apparent from the fact that the Great Pyramid, like all other pyramids, is situated in the midst of a Necropolis, abounding with idolatrous emblems, containing tombs of officers belonging to the Court of Cheops, the very builder himself, and all such tombs having addresses to heathen deities. In the pyramid itself the quarry marks of the king’s name are distinctly idolatrous emblems. The same persons whose names are therein inscribed are elsewhere spoken of in tablets as being worshippers of false gods, and the constructors of idols of gold, &c., for the adornment of a temple. It is simply a delusion, therefore, to speak of the pyramid being a witness of religious truth, although coincidences favour a theory.

Mr. James Simpson [14] still further extends the millennial idea, dwelling upon the Jewish parallelism. “Counting in natural years,” he says, “Israel will hold her seventieth jubilee in A.D. 2000; but, counting in prophetic years, 1950. Or, according to the former, her great jubilee will extend from A.D. 1931 to 2000 inclusive; but, according to the latter, from 1882 to 1950 inclusive. Thus the Great Pyramid date, 1881-2, turns up again, and with a more distinctly defined meaning, by using the undoubtedly Scriptural number 360.” He adds, “And although the forty-nine years from 1881 to 1930 may thus partake of the character of a Great Sabbath to Israel, the period following, or from 1931 to 2000, will be the true jubilee.”

This will fit in with the Zoroastrian doctrine laid down in Persia hundreds of years before Daniel. According to the ancient Persians, the regeneration of the world would take place in 2000, when the serpent Azis-Dahaka [15] is to be chained a thousand years. The same was believed by the ancient Chaldeans, Egyptians, Odin-worshippers, and Druids. The chained serpent is found in the four divisions of the world. One may see it on the sarcophagus [16] of the Soane Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. But it may be assumed by some that these millennial myths, so widely found, originated from the Inspired Pyramid. Is it not strange that while the heathen nations cherished the hope of this millennium, the Jews were left in so much darkness about it by Moses, David, and the prophets?

A singular pyramid controversy has sprung up about the Millennial date of 1881-2. Those who had received the conjectured Divine indication of the Grand Gallery, and had been quietly looking forward to some four years of peace before the stirring catastrophe, have been somewhat disturbed by an announcement that chronology is at fault, and that this year is absolutely 1881, and not 1877.

But this is no novel discovery. Every book of chronology is seen, in a most curious way, to show that our Saviour was born in the year 4, though we reckon our year of the Lord four years before. Mystics have no difficulty about the matter. They can even comprehend how the year may have ten months and yet twelve. But to common-sense eyes there does seem a puzzle.

One Mr. Clark [17] anxiously asks “whether the mistake of four years announced really could have been made in astronomical time and still remain uncorrected?” Prof. Piazzi Smyth, appealed to, replies that “they do not, as astronomers, and by dint of accurate astronomical science, pretend to know anything of the date of Christ’s birth, they merely take the existing mode of reckoning of years among all the civilised nations.” Then, in his letter to the Life from the Dead, the Scotch astronomer cautiously writes, “It may be that it is a part of the Divine purposes that this particular point of chronology shall not be fully cleared up until the time of the end itself arises.”

The error is supposed to be owing to the monk Dionysius Exequus, [18] to whom we are indebted for the “year of the Lord.” In 527, he calculated according to 4713 of the Julian period, supposed to be four years out. It is difficult to correct the monk after 1350 years, especially when mysticism manufactured dates, without reference to real events. But Mr. Cockburn Muir [19] is positive the monk was correct, and he can prove it by the pyramid.

A Mr. Chapman [20] writes:—“Dr. Hales [21] (the chronologist) says the difference of opinion respecting the precise period of the birth of Christ arises from the fact that this era was not used until so many centuries had elapsed that it was almost impossible with any accuracy to fix the date.” Canon Farrar, [22] in his Life of Christ, considers this year 1881, and not 1877. If he and the pyramid are to be believed, the millennium may be expected within a few months. [23]

[1] William MacKenzie.

[2] In Christian theology, seven dispensations, or periods in which humans are tested in light of specific divine revelations, are recognized. Noah’s dispensation, the Third Dispensation, involved human government, in which God gives humans the power to govern themselves following the Flood. The Fifth Dispensation refers to the period of Mosaic Law, which Christians believe ended with the death of Christ on the Cross, thus inaugurating the Sixth Dispensation, the period of Grace following Christ’s sacrifice, which is to end with the Seventh Dispensation, the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth at the End of Days.

[3] Isaiah 19:19.

[4] A nineteenth-century movement to introduce Catholic liturgical practices into the Anglican Church.

[5] Another publication edited by Edward Hine. The quotation in question was widely reprinted in Christian millennial journals in articles about the Great Pyramid.

[6] These are today called the “relieving chambers” because they relieved the weight on the King’s Chamber roof, and there are four of them.

[7] The following quotation is from a letter Piazzi Smyth sent to B. W. Tracey, who reprints it in his book, The Pillar of Witness.

[8] In the nineteenth century (and before) Christian society viewed Muhammad as the Biblical False Prophet (Matthew 7:15-23; 24:5, 11; etc.) or even the Antichrist. In The Churchman for July 7, 1877, Javis Buxton set the date at 1882, after an earlier prediction by another, for 1866, failed. The same prediction for 1882 appeared in The Gospel Advocate, also in 1877. However, Bonwick is here referring to Piazzi Smyth’s Our Inheritance, wherein the author writes that the 1,260-year period “dating from the Hegira, or the universally acknowledged effective beginning of Mohammedanism, in the year 621—2 A.D., will close of itself, without the efforts of man, in the year 1881—2 A.D., or simultaneously with the closing of the first Christian Dispensation as marked in the Grand Gallery.”

[9] Daniel 7:25.

[10] Napoleon III, who declared himself Emperor of France after being elected president of the Republic. Michael Baxter wrote a book, Louis Napoleon (1861), on the emperor as the Antichrist (with Armageddon scheduled for 1870—ironically, the year of Napoleon III’s downfall), one of several books, pamphlets, and newspaper articles on the topic.

[11] I’m not sure which reference Bonwick refers to. In Daniel 9:24 he predicts seventy (not seventy-five) weeks of tribulation to make an end of sin, and in 9:25 there are sixty-seven weeks of troublesome rebuilding of Jerusalem.

[12] The number of quotation marks in this passage does not appear to make sense, though this is how they appear in the original. I believe the first set following the dash are in error, or else there is a missing closing set somewhere.

[13] Oxley was another believer in the Israelite origins of the English and a staff writer for Edward Hine’s Life from the Dead, from which these quotations are apparently derived. Oxley caused a brief stir when he identified Hine as the deliverer of Israel promised in Romans 11:26, earning a rebuke in print in 1882 from the Rev. Bourchier Wrey Seville.

[14] This James Simpson, a Scottish bank clerk, is not to be confused with Sir James Young Simpson. This Simpson, of no relation, flourished later (he was active in pyramid studies into the 1890s) and focused on mystical Pyramid numerology. Some of his numerical calculations found their way into the appendix of Piazzi Smyth’s Our Inheritance.

[15] Aži Dahāka was a three-headed demon of Persian mythology whose name derives from the word for snake. Middle Persian sources state that at the end of the world, he will be freed from his bonds; however, in the Persian sources he was not to be imprisoned in 2000 CE but instead had already been imprisoned beneath Mt. Damavand in mythic times.

[16] Seti I’s sarcophagus.

[17] I am not able to ascertain the identity of Mr. Clark or the origins of this quotation.

[18] Dionysus Exiguus (“Dennis the Small”) (c. 470-544 CE), a Scythian monk who invented the Anno Domini (“Year of Our Lord”) dating system, now typically rendered in terms of the “Common Era.” His method of calculation is unknown, but is usually thought to assign the first year of Christ’s life (year 1) some four to six years too late for the actual event.

[19] Architect W. J. Cockburn Muir. His article on pyramid measurements appeared in Life from the Dead and was discussed by Piazzi Smyth in Our Inheritance, from which it appears Bonwick derives his citation.

[20] Possibly the Freemason John Chapman, author of several works on the Great Pyramid later in the century. I cannot find the exact source of this quotation, which was likely from a magazine or journal. The quotation is very closely paraphrased (almost to the point of plagiarism) from William Hales’ Chronology (see note 150, below). It was also repeated almost word-for-word (with and without credit to Hales) in John Farrar’s A Biblical and Theological Dictionary (1872) and at least half a dozen other publications between 1809 and 1877.

[21] William Hales (1747-1831), author of A New Analysis of Chronology and Geo-graphy, History and Prophecy (1809-1812), a book on the chronology of the Bible.

[22] Frederic William Farrar (1831-1903), author of The Life of Christ (1874). He believed all souls could be saved, and he repudiated the widespread idea that the torments of the damned would serve as entertainment for those in heaven.

[23] Obviously, the pyramid is a liar.

Having discussed both the astronomical and religious teaching of the pyramid, other scientific and mystical instruction may now be indicated.

36. THE RISE AND FALL OF LAND IN EGYPT.

So dependent were the people upon the inundation of the Nile that everything connected therewith was invested with supreme importance. The heliacal rising of Sirius, the Dog-star, indicating the approaching elevation of the river, occasioned that star, or the deity it represented, to become an object of worship.

As may readily be imagined, the elevation or depression of the soil of the country, in relation to the surface of the Nile itself, or the level of the Mediterranean and Red Seas, would be most carefully and constantly observed. Upon that depended the spread of the water annually over the fields, filling canals and reservoirs. The excess of overflow may be as unwelcome as the diminution of supply. All parts of the world, as geologists now inform us, are in a more or less disturbed state, rising or falling. [1] The learned priests of Egypt were aware of this fact seven thousand or more years ago, when they constructed the first canals and reservoirs, and rescued the valley of the Nile from alternate drought and marshy desolation.

M. Hekekyan Bey, C. E., of Constantinople and Cairo, has paid much attention to this subject in his remarkable work of 1863 on The Chronology of the Siriadic Monuments. The chief of these monuments are pyramids and obelisks. Only a glance at the question can be spared, but intelligent readers are directed to the volume for complete information.

He considers that the constructors of all pyramids, obelisks, sphinxes, and temples regulated their elevation, at the epoch of erection, to the level of the adjoining seas. At any subsequent period the wise priests could, by means of instruments long lost to view, ascertain from the relation borne by the Red Sea, at a fixed spot, or by the Mediterranean, to the platform or ideal apex of the Great Pyramid, whether the country were in an ascendant or descendant condition. Upon the settlement of this question, adequate measures would be taken with canals and embankments to prevent any evil consequences from a change, or provide for any prospective difference of level. There is reason to believe that in the valley of the Indus and the valley of the Ganges, if not even that of the Oxus, similar measures were adopted by the professing priests, but real scientific professors, of the past.

“The hypogeum of the First Pyramid,” writes Hekekyan Bey, “was fixed 5′ to the west, and about 2′ to the south, of the Niloscope station (lat 30° 1′ 7″).[2] It was situated on the right bank of the river, and had the limestone rock of the Mokattam for its solid foundation. The reason why that spot was chosen is most important. “While the van of the annual torrents of the Nile habitually reached the Memphis and Heliopolis parallels in the period of the summer solstice, the secular amplitude of the torrents in the maximum state of development, or the difference between the lowest ebb and the highest flood-levels of the river, measured exactly fifteen standard Nile cubits in the parallel of the observatory, and the Osirtasic ordinate of the river in the same parallel, or the vertical supposed to connect the lowest secular ebb of the Erythræan Sea (the Red Sea) during the autumnal equinoxes at Clysma (port near Suez) and the secular maximum flood-level of the Nile in the Niloscopic parallel, measured forty-two cubits and a half of the Sothis scale.”

In another place he points out changes which have occurred.

“The summit of the First Pyramid was (in the design) elevated 118.140 noctas above the high Nile level, in B.C. 4863, the date of its hidrymatisation; it is now 111.588 noctas above the same hydraulic level, and will be submerged, with the subsidence of the crust of the earth on which it is solidly founded, in 111.41 noctas of time, or Nile years, before any of its geometrical records can have time to be destroyed by the action of the elements, and, remaining preserved in the bowels of the earth, will again emerge to light in a state as perfect as that of the diminutive sea-shell now found embedded in the summits of high mountain ranges, and will in proper time reveal to the human race the science of their constructors, and teach them, useful lessons fur their guidance, and, should they have forgotten it, teach them the existence of a Great Maker of the makers of these curious monuments.”

M. Dufeu, the author of that exhaustive book of learning the Quatre Pyramides de Gizeh, declares that “the most important among the principal and numerous distinctions of the Great Pyramid” is “to establish and preserve eternally the perfect knowledge of the hydraulic level of the Nile and the valley, in relation to the lowest level of the Red Sea.”

He divides the results obtained by “this precious monument” into two categories:— “1. Chronologiques, chronologico-astronomiques et historiques. 2. Hydraulico-geologiques, geodesiques et geographiques.” The present subject, affecting hydraulics, would come under the last head. He admits the suppositious enquiry, but wisely remarks, “It is often by hypothesis that we arrive at certainty.”

After referring to the very interesting and suggestive subject of Manetho’s anonymous dynasties, as contrasted with those in which the names of kings were given, he writes as follows:--

“The coincidence of these anonymous dynasties with the epochs of two movements of elevation, the most approved of which Egypt has been the theatre, had struck us, and made us think that perhaps they signified the epochs of geological rising, which in that case would authorise the non-anonymous dynasties as indicating the periods of depression, may be, of sinking of the soil; now, having applied this system to the movement, which appears simultaneous to us, the elevation which has raised at first the level of the Nile, at the second cataract, to seven metres above the highest actual waters, under the twelfth and thirteenth dynasties, and at the epoch of the Exodus divided the Red Sea from the Bitter Lakes, and taking for the base of our calculations the normal measure of sinking as of elevation of the soil of the Nile valley, represented by the length of the Nilometric cubit divided in 360 parts, or metric noctas, equivalent to those crises in 360 years, we have almost acquired the certainty that our idea was just and our opinion well founded. But this certainty becomes complete when, applying the same system in an inverse sense, that is to say, the measures of the depression of the soil indicated by the non-anonymous dynasties to the result of the survey made in 1837 by Perring, we have found the same measure as he between the base of the Great Pyramid and the Nile at its level.”

It should be understood that in geodesic formula the Nilometric cubit has the value of a degree; but, employed numerically, the value of a nocta.

In this he finds a confirmation of “the sinking of the soil, at least in the locality of the pyramids, and an approach between the base of the monument and the lowest level of the Bed Sea, since the time of the construction of the Great Pyramid down to our own day.” And thus does he put the matter simply:--

“The Egyptian wise men, to whom were confided the destinies of the country, had connected the hydraulic levels of the river with different plans or sections of the vertical height of the pyramid, giving to it, from the base to the summit, an elevation which, added to that of the ordinary level and the maximum of the increase of the current, above the level of the sea, might determine the constant height of these two hydraulic levels, by a connection with that of the maritime level taken as place of comparison, and made them serve thus as an eternal hydraulic and geological sign for the operations of surveying—operations indispensable for the regulation of the annual alluviums of the Nile in its bed and in its valley.”

[1] This idea predates the modern theory of plate tectonics. It was believed that land masses rose and sank over time as the earth churned beneath them. We now know that the rising and sinking of certain land masses is the result of crustal plates pushing together (causing uplift) or pulling apart.

[2] According to Hekekyan, the Egyptians measured the Nile at Memphis, prompting him to designate it the Niloscopic parallel. Though Hekekyan gives the latitude as a bit more than 30°, Memphis is located at 29.87°. The “Niloscope” he mentions is actually a Nilometer, a well on the river bank used to measure water levels. He appears to have derived his mistaken Nilometer (one of six used in ancient Egypt) from Diodorus Siculus (1.36.10), who stated that a Niloscope stood at Memphis.

37. TO ILLUSTRATE GEOMETRIC TRUTH.

The square and the triangle, with their several properties, together with the relation of diameter and circumference, as well as the correspondence of the radius of a circle and the side of a square, are all well brought before the intelligent eye in the pyramid.

Mr. H. C. Agnew, in a work published 1838, [1] says, “The pyramids of Egypt appear in general to have been emblems of the sacred sphere and its great circle exhibited in the most convenient architectural form. The chief objects of these buildings being to serve for sepulchral monuments, the Egyptians sought in the appropriate figure of the pyramid to perpetuate at the same time a portion of their geometrical science.”

This gentleman was, perhaps, the first to point out an interesting mathematical discovery. “The Third Pyramid,” said he, “was the spirit of this holy circle, since it defined the square equal to it in perimeter and in area by showing the difference between their sides and the diameter of the circle.”

[1] A Letter from Alexandria on the Evidence of the Practical Application of the Quadrature of the Circle, in the Configuration of the Great Pyramid of Gizeh (1838).

38. TO SHOW THE PROPORTION OF DIAMETER AND CIRCUMFERENCE.

Mr. John Taylor, in The Great Pyramid: why was it built? lays down the proposition that the vertical height is to the double of its base as the diameter is to the circumference of a circle. This question is dependent on the angle made by the face of the pyramid with its base.

The slope angle has been more accurately determined since the discovery of the casing-stones by Col. Vyse in 1837. Mr. Taylor speaks of 51° 49′ 46″, and Mr. Smyth of 51° 51′ 14″. That slope with a certain base establishes the so-called Rho theory (π), [1] the proportion of diameter to circumference, 3.14159.[2] Archimedes made it 3.14286. The Hindoos’ Vija Ganita, [3] of 3927 to 1250, brings out 3.1416. On this Mr. Taylor remarks, “The Hindoo proportion is identical with that, so far as its numbers go, which was expressed in English inches when the pyramids were founded.” While the real amount is 3.1415927, he obtains 3.141792 from the pyramid. He thinks no other pyramid has so true a relation.

The Queen’s Chamber has a niche. This, 185 inches, multiplied by 10 and then by 3.14159, yields 5812, the vertical height of the pyramid. The wall of the chamber, 182.62 pyramid inches, multiplied by 100 and divided by 2, will show 9131 for the side of the pyramid in pyramid inches.

Prof. Piazzi Smyth utilises the Rho theory in connection with the King’s Chamber, to get the length of a cubit, saying, “On being simply computed according to the modern determination of the value of π, and length of the year, and comes out from the local measure of 412.545 British inches to be 25.0250 + British inches.” [4]

Although an ingenious discovery, and admitted by Sir John Herschel, this latter distinguished man adds, “We are not entitled to conclude that they (the Egyptians) were aware of this coincidence (3.14159), and intended to embody both results in their building.”

Sir Edmund Beckett calls attention to the assumed 11 to 7 theory; that, with the slope of 51° 51’ 14”, the width is to the height as the length of a quadrant is to its radius. He does not think with Mr. Smyth and others that this was a primary motive of construction, “though,” says he, “they did use it for fixing the size, probably taking it approximately from the slopes.”

He shows that with the angle at 51° 50′ the height is a mean proportional between the length down the middle of each slope and half the width of the base. The 51° he esteems “about the slope at which mounds of earth will stand naturally.” He points out another singular coincidence. The diagonal angle at the top, 96°, or four times 24°, would equal that of the four sectors of a quindecagon. (Euclid, iv. 10, 11, 16.) [5]

The parallelism is exhibited in the coffer, whose height is to the two adjacent sides as the diameter is to the circumference.

Captain Tracey, taking for the radius of a circle the height of the pyramid, 232.52 cubits, pyramid measure, finds the diameter bear the same proportion to the periphery of a square whose side is 365.243, the length of the base in cubits, or days in a year, as 1 is to 3.1416. With 412.132, the length of the King’s Chamber in inches, as the diameter, the circle would equal a square whose side, 365.242, in cubits, measures the base of the pyramid.

“Never have any monuments,” says M. Dufeu, “exercised the sagacity of the learned as the pyramids of Gizeh.”

[1] I have no idea why Bonwick labels the letter pi as rho. None of the quoted authors appear to mention rho, and this seems to be Bonwick’s own misidentification of the Greek letter.

[2] This is the correct modern approximation of π to five decimal places.

[3] A book of algebra written by Bhāskara II (1114–c. 1185), the greatest medieval Indian mathematician.

[4] Slightly misquoted. The original gives the final figures as “25.0250 + &c. British inches.”

[5] The reference is to the proofs of Euclid’s Elements.

39. TO MASONIFY THE QUADRATURE OF THE CIRCLE.

Mr. H. C. Agnew conceives that one purpose of the erection was to masonify approximately the relation of square and circle.

“Here we find,” writes he, “the quadrature of the circle exemplified in a curious manner, with all practicable approach and correctness, by the Egyptians.” He, however, admits that “its arithmetical solution is known now to be impossible; the geometrical solution, in all probability, is so likewise; but whether the Egyptian priests were of this opinion I cannot venture to say.”

Only a few quotations can be given from his publication, just sufficient to indicate his object:--

“If a square described about a circle be conceived to be drawn up from the centre in the form of a pyramid, having the perpendicular equal to the radius of a circle, and the superficies of the square be supposed to adjust itself equally among the planes of the four isosceles triangles of the faces of the pyramid, each face of such pyramid will, of course, be equal in area to one quarter of the square, or equal to the square of the radius; and the new square formed by the four lines of the bases of the triangles of the faces of the pyramid will be equal in perimeter to the circumference of the circle, with an error in excess of about one part in fourteen hundred.”

“In the original diagram we find the proportion of five to four very dominant; the diameter of the circle is five, and that of the great square four, and thence, of course, the perpendicular of the pyramid is to half its base as five to four.”

“If the tangent be to the radius as five to four the angle is 51° 20′ 25″, and this being so very near the result of my observations, I am justified in concluding that the perpendicular of the Great Pyramid was to half its base as five to four, or to its base as five to eight.”

“Two perpendiculars, being radii of circles, are together equal to the sum of the perimeters of the bases.”

He was particularly emphatic in his observations forty years ago upon the superiority of the Third Pyramid. Its true angle is affirmed to be 51° 51′ 14″, and this, adds he, would be “a perfection which neither of the two great pyramids separately possessed; namely, that its perpendicular was the radius of a circle, the circumference of which was equal to the square of its base.”

He concludes with this statement:—‘The Third Pyramid appears to be an emanation (if I may so say) from the first great principle of the system, the circle of origin, of which it is the spirit or essence.”

Hekekyan Bey of Constantinople holds a similar high conception of the Third Pyramid, saying, “Of the Siriadic monuments erected in the land of Egypt, hers was considered to be the richest in scientific records, and the most perfect; it was, also, the most beautiful from its high ornamentation, being of a ruddy complexion, from its exterior casing of polished granite.”

Sir Henry James brings out a similar result to that shown by Mr. Taylor first. He speaks of a pyramid rising at the corners nine to ten as a π pyramid, and “its height being equal to the radius of a circle whose circumference is very approximately equal to the length of the four sides of the base.” [1] The height 486 × 2 × 3.1416 = 3053.6. But four times the length, 764, = 3056.

A curious thing is noted respecting the floor of the Ante-chamber. The granite part is, according to Mr. Casey, 103.03 pyramid inches, and the limestone 116.26 inches. Taking the first as the side of a square, and the last as the diameter of a circle, the areas of the two figures will be about equal. The side of the base, 9131 inches, is obtained by 11.626 × 3.1416 × 5 × 5. Also, 116.26 × 50 courses from the base to the Ante-chamber = 5813, the apex height of the pyramid; but, 103.03 × 50 = 5151.65. Taking this as the side of the square, the area will equal that of a triangle of the shape and size of the pyramid’s vertical meridian section, and to a circle having the height of the pyramid for its diameter.

Captain Tracey, taking the length of the coffer in pyramid inches, 412.132, as the diameter, finds the circle to equal a square whose side is the base of the pyramid in cubits; but 412.132 as the square side will bring an equal circle area with the radius of the height of the pyramid, 232.52 cubits. The pyramid inches inside the King’s Chamber equal, to the thousandth part, the sacred cubits outside. The diameter of a circle with 232.52 for a radius is to the periphery of a square whose side is 365.242 as 1 is to 3.1416.

[1] In the original publication, Bonwick omitted the first set of quotation marks, which I have restored after consultation of James’ original Athenaeum article on the subject as reprinted in St. John Vincent Day’s Papers on the Great Pyramid (1870). It was also reproduced in Piazzi Smyth’s On the Antiquity of Intellectual Man (1868) and in John Timbs’s Notable Things of Our Own Time (1868).

40. A PART OF A GREAT PYRAMIDAL SYSTEM.

Instead of being isolated in its grandeur and peculiarities, Mr. Agnew believes the three larger pyramids were associated by construction in one geometrical plan. Prof. Smyth and others have remarked upon the difference of angle made by the face with the plane of the base; and, noting certain mathematical data along with the angle of the Great Pyramid, have concluded that edifice to have a special distinction. But Mr. H. C. Agnew, after giving the angle of the first, 51° 20’ 1”, of the second 52° 25’ 51”, and of the third, 51° 51’, calls the last “the most perfect geometrical figure.”

“If,” says he, “the deductions of the following pages be admitted, we must arrive at the remarkable conclusion that the three great pyramids of Gizeh were component parts of one immense system.

He proceeds, “How must our wonder be increased when we find that all were planned at once! that before a stone of the great causeway was laid the precise proportions of the Second and Third Pyramids, as well as of the First, were unalterably determined by the necessary effect of the rule which fixed the length and breadth of the causeway itself!” He adds, “I believe the works of the Second Pyramid were begun long before the First Pyramid was completed, and the Third had probably risen high above the ground before the summit of the second was carried to a point.”

This is not the place to elaborate his principle, but there is much to draw us toward it. The Egyptians were a supremely geometrical people. In their national edifices the learned rulers were not governed by a simple idea of beauty, nor of ordinary practical utility with beauty. We, in our day, would raise a museum, a gallery of arts, a House of Parliament, or a cathedral, adapted for the specific object intended to be carried out, combining with that as much architectural elegance as particular tastes suggest, though mainly derived from the adoption of the style of some older building. We should contemplate nothing further. There would be no design of incorporating any symbolism, leave alone the introduction of mathematical and scientific truths.

But we are well assured, on the contrary, that philosophical minds presided at national constructions beside the Nile some five or six thousand years ago. These were not raised merely to excite the wonder of the ignorant, or please the imagination of the refined. They were not for the petty gratification of the builder, or the adornment of his own age. A purpose, distinct and important, was before the mind. There was something to be remembered, something to be taught. A truism was to be perpetuated in a form more enduring than letters, more faithful in its teaching than words. We are gradually arriving at the conviction that these wise master-masons worked upon a plan, philosophical and true, and in a way that emulated the eternity of the truth itself.

Apart from being an illustration of the learning of the Egyptians, there are reasons which make Mr. Agnew’s theory at least feasible.

It is in harmony with the building mind of the Egyptians, who had a system of thought, and were working toward it. The identity of construction seems apparent in the family likeness of the Gizeh group, not noticed elsewhere, in their relative positions, and in the formation of the one causeway described by Herodotus, the remains of which we behold. Though this theory injures the overruling supremacy of the Great Pyramid believed in by some others, it is a pleasing recognition of the far-seeing, truth-telling, science-following qualities of the ancient Egyptians.

But Mr. John James Wild, in his celebrated letter to Lord Brougham in 1850, was perhaps the first to recognise the scientific relation of one pyramid to the other, in the group at Gizeh. Whatever priority there be in the First Pyramid, he is of opinion that all are related in one harmonious whole. His conclusion is thus stated: “There exists a certain proportion between the elevations of the bases of the three great pyramids of Gizeh which proves anew that science has presided at the erection of these monuments.”

His calculations are based upon the cubit of Sir Isaac Newton and Mr. Greaves, or cubit of Memphis, and not that of Messrs. Taylor and Smyth.

He contends that the Second and the Third Pyramids exhibit the law of the retrogradation of the ascendant node of the equator in the ecliptic. [1]

The entrance of the Second Pyramid is 25½ cubits to the east of the centre. Taking the Memphis cubit, now in Paris,—found by Vyse and Perring to be, according to the French measurement, 522 millemetres, and divided in twenty-eight equal parts,—Mr. Wild ascertains that in twenty-five and a half days the ascendant node retrogrades 206 cubits on the equator; this 206 is exactly the length of the Third Pyramid. Dividing 206 by 28, and then multiplying by the annual diminution, as given by Maedler, 0.4758, the result is 3.5″ for the equator indication But 3.5″, or 206 cubits, would be the base of the Third Pyramid.

Now the base of the second is double that of the third. This, as is seen, was designed by the builders at one period. If the one is 206, the other is 412 cubits base. But the centre is 25½ from the entrance, therefore one side would be 180½ and the other 231½. The difference is 51. Mr. Wild then says, “In fifty-one days the ascendant node retrogrades 412 cubits.” But this will be twice 3.5″, the length of the Third Pyramid, or 7″, which is the exact base of the Second.

The yearly retrogradation will be 365¼ divided by 51, and that amount multiplied by 7″. The product is 50.13″. The ascendant node, therefore, completes its course of retrogression in 25,852 years, or 360° divided by 50.13″. Astronomers, who are not agreed as to the precession of the equinoxes, rate it between 50.1” and 50.2”, or from 25,817 to 25,888 years. The Egyptians, in the pyramids of Gizeh, struck between those dates, or not far from the Hindoo year of the gods, 25,920 years. [2]

Again, the Second and Third Pyramids conjointly perpetuate the duration of the tropical year. The base of the Third Pyramid is 41′ 7″ above the base of the Great Pyramid, while that of the second is 33′ 2″ above it. The difference is 8’ 5”, equal to 49 cubits. This added to the elevation of the second above the Nile, 100, equals 104.9. Add this result to the elevation of the Third, 128 cubits, and we have 232.9. The maximum of the tropical year is 365232.9/24×40. In forty years there are 14600 232.9/24 days. Upon this he writes, “In forty years there remain a number of intercalary days which is equal to the number of cubits contained in the elevation of the summit of the Third Pyramid above the level of the Nile (232.9), divided by the number of cubits contained in the elevation of the Second Pyramid above the level of the same (24), namely, 232.9/24 = 916.9/24, or 9169/24 intercalary days.”

Suppose the civil year equal to 365 days, twenty-four years present 8760 days. The same number (8760) in seconds is equal to 146′ or 2° 26′; and if this be taken from the latitude 30° we obtain 27° 24′. This, according to Perring, is the inclination of the interior passage of the Third Pyramid. It had previously been shown that in 500 years the tropics retrograded 238 seconds. But this is the number of cubits on the western side of the entrance of the Great Pyramid. If 238′, or 3° 58′, be taken from 30° the result is 26° 2′, the angle of inclination of the entrance passage of the Third Pyramid.

Mr. Wild has another remarkable parallel, or coincidence, as some may prefer to call it.

As before mentioned, the base of the Second Pyramid is 7″, and of the third 3.5″. The square of the Second Pyramid’s base is 49″. If the centre of the base of this pyramid be taken for the centre of a circle, and a regular polygon of forty-nine sides be inscribed therein, the central angle of the polygon will be 7° 20′ 48 48/49″. This doubled is 14° 41′ 37 47/49″, which equals 360°/3.5×7; this is, says he, “equal to the number of degrees of the circumference of a circle, divided by the product of the numbers of meridian seconds contained in the bases of the Second and Third Pyramids.”

Again, he goes on to say, “According to Colonel Howard Vyse, the base of the Third Pyramid is 8′ 5″ above the base of the Second, and that of the Second is 33′ 2″ above the base of the Great Pyramid. Now the proportion between the elevation of the base of the Second Pyramid above the base of the Great, and the elevation of the base of the Third Pyramid above the base of the Second, is equal to the proportion between the radius and the sinus of 14° 41′ 3747/49 = 33′ 2″ to 8′ 5″; that is, equal to the proportion between the radius and sinus of the double of the central angle of a polygon which has as many sides as the square of the base of the Second Pyramid contains square seconds, namely 49.”

The eighteen years’ lunar period is also obtained by relation of Gizeh pyramids.

The base of the Second is 7″, which squared and multiplied by 5, the pyramid number, yields 245”. Subtracting this from the latitude 30° we have 25° 55′—the inclination of the interior passage of the Second Pyramid. The inclination of the lower entrance of the Second is 22° 15′, which taken from 30°, leaves 7° 45′, or 465′. But 465 years will be 25 lunar cycles, of 18⅗ each. Again, the base of the most southern of the three pyramids to the east of the great one is 93 cubits; making, in years, 5 lunar cycles.

Once more. He says that “the base of the three pyramids south of the Third are lower than the base of the Third, 16′ 18″. Consequently, the bases of the three pyramids are lower than the base of the Second Pyramid as many feet as the base of the Third is above the base of the Second. The levels of the bases of the Third and the three pyramids, therefore, form two tangents of a circle of which the radius is equal to the sinus of the double central angle of the above-mentioned polygon. When each side of the heptagon contains twice 28 cubits, namely, twice the amount of cubits of the retrogradation of the tropic during one year, the circumference of the circle inscribed in the heptagon measures 36528/99 cubits, or as many cubits as one year contains days.”

Lastly:—The entrance of the Second Pyramid is 24 cubits above the base, and the top is 267. The entrance above the Nile is 100 + 24. “If we add,” says Mr. Wild, “the 100 cubits of elevation of the base of the Second Pyramid above the level of the Nile to the 412 cubits contained in this base, we obtain 100 + 412 = 512 = 29 cubits. Now 512 years contain as many intercalary days as there are cubits in the elevation of the entrance of the Second Pyramid above the level of the Nile, namely 124. Consequently, 512 years contain (512 × 365) + 124 = 187,004 days. As before mentioned, the summit of the Second Pyramid is 367, which equals 365 + 2, cubits above the level of the Nile. The civil year, taken at 365 days, leaves a surplus of two intercalary days after a lapse of 1024/124 = 1000/100 + 24/24 = 88/31 years.[3] But in 27, 128, years, or in as many years as the vertical height of the Third Pyramid contains cubits, there remains as many intercalary days as the fourth part of the elevation of the entrance of the Second Pyramid above the level of the Nile contains cubits, namely, 124/4 or 31 intercalary days.” He thus obtains, in 128 years, (128 × 365) + 31 = 46,751 days. The average length of a tropical year is ascertained by these two pyramids, and by the Memphis cubit, to be 365 31/128 days.

By another calculation, founded upon the three pyramids south of the Third Pyramid, he obtains the result of 365 28/99.

The author of the Solar System of the Ancients, as well as M. Dufeu, and other writers, confirm the opinion of Mr. Wild, that the pyramids of Gizeh were constructed upon one plan, and that they form a truly family group.

[1] This appears to have something to do with an astrological view of the heavens, referring to the place where the celestial equator crosses the ecliptic, or the sun’s annual path across the sky.

[2] I cannot find this number in standard Hindu cosmology, though it can be derived from Hindu cosmic numbers, which are based on multiples of 432. 25,920 = 60 × 432. Bonwick appears to have confused the precessional year of 25,920 solar years with the vast sums used in Hindu cosmology. The current Kali Yuga, for example, is said to last 432,000 years.

[3] It does not. Fractions cannot be added that way. 1024/124 = 8.26, while 1000/10 + 24/24 = 100 + 1 = 101.

41. AGREEMENT WITH THE CAUSEWAY.

According to Mr. Agnew’s mathematical plan, “the Great Causeway was in length equal to the circumference of the chief circle, or parent of the whole scheme, that of which the First Pyramid was radius, and of which the square of the base of the Second Pyramid was the inscriptible square. The Causeway was the circumference rolled out, as it were.”

If the perpendicular of the pyramid be 480 feet, the circumference of the circle would be 3016. Estimating a stadium at 603 feet, he obtains 3015 for the length of the five stadia of Herodotus, given as the extent of the Causeway.

“I believe,” says Mr. Agnew, “this Great Causeway led up to the eastern side of the Great Pyramid, and terminated in front at 159 feet from the base, or at the eastern verge of the circle descriptible about the base.”

The width of the Causeway was 62 Greek feet. Upon this he remarks that if the radius of the inner circle, 1000, be subtracted from that of the outer, 113.3698, half the difference between the two rings would be about 62½; this nearly corresponds with the width of the Causeway.

42. TO TYPIFY THE GENERATIVE PRINCIPLE.

There has been a time in the history of the world when a Babel confusion existed through the contention of two parties: one holding the masculine origin of being, and the other the feminine. Certain nations, as the Phoenicians, Greeks, &c., favoured the latter in their forms of worship; in Peru, Britain, &c., it was the former. India has for ages been the scene of this religious strife. The enormous popularity of Siva proclaims the triumph at last of the masculine principle there.

The pyramid is said to typify the same thing as the conical stone worshipped in so many lands, and from the remotest period. The revolution of a pyramid describes a cone. The cone represents the Phallic theory of creation.

A mystic, the Chevalier de B——, thus connects the astronomical and Phallic ideas:—“Its apex represents the Phallus, the sign ever deemed throughout the East the symbol of Deity, or the creative principle. The descent of the sun upon its apex at the two solemn epochs of the year (equinoxes), which signify life eternal, and death through the ever-constant adverse principle of evil, completes the series of allegorical ideas which this building was designed to celebrate.” [1]

But he suggestively reminds us that while the number one shows the masculine principle, and three the feminine, four illustrates the harmony of both. “Its base,” says he, “is the perfect square, which symbolises in its four corners the sacred number four, the union of the masculine and feminine principles.” The scholar is reminded of the speaking numbers of Pythagoras and of the Cabbala. [2]

In the above sense it is held that the pyramid is the most simple and suggestive type of creative force, and the conjunction of both active and passive agencies in the operations of Divine mind on matter. This is a large question, but must be abruptly closed.

[1] The passage appears in Britten’s Art Magic.

[2] Pythagoras believed that numbers had mystical properties, and inherent in numbers was mystical knowledge of the sciences. Similarly, the Kabbalah, a mystical interpretation of Judaism, holds that numbers and letters (which are interchangeable in Hebrew, which uses letters as numbers) contain divinely-encoded mystical secrets.

43. EMBLEM OF THE SUN OR SACRED FIRE.

The shape of the pyramids has suggested that of tongues of fire. [1] To Jablonski [2] it appeared as sunbeams streaming down from a point. Mr. Wild, of Zurich, calls attention to the tradition that they were erected to the sun. Mr. Yeates truly remarks that they are a just imitation of fire. Syncellus [3] informs us that Venephres built the pyramids of Co-chone. Bryant [4] finds Co-chone to mean the house of Chon, the sun; “which,” says he, “seems to betray the purpose for which the chief pyramid was erected; for it was undoubtedly nothing else but a monument to the deity whose name it bore.” As it had been called Domus Opis Serpentis, [5] the learned man remarks, “It was the name of the pyramid erected to the sun, the Ophite [6] deity of Egypt, worshipped under the symbol of a serpent.”

Arab writers are of this opinion. Soyuti, [7] who died 911 A.H., says that the Sabaeans, or fire-worshippers, “in performing pilgrimmages to the pyramids sacrificed hens and black calves.” He quotes Menardi to prove that Hermes, the son of Seth, introduced Sabaeanism, inculcating the necessity of such pilgrimages. Makrizi, [8] 845 A.H., quotes Ibrahim Alwatwati and others upon the sun subject. Al Akbari [9] confirms the tradition. Col. Chesney [10] declares that there are pyramids in Syria to which pilgrimages are still made. Sprenger [11]quotes the story of the model of a pyramid being the object of adoration among the Calmuks. [12]

The religious significance of the pyramid is alluded to by the old English astronomer, Greaves. He thinks the Egyptians may have “intended to represent some of their gods.” “For,” he adds, “anciently both theye and some others of the Gentiles by columnes and obeliskes did so. Whereas a pyramid is but a greater kinde of obeliske.”

An extract from Pierius [13] is given by Mr. Greaves:--

“By a pyramid the ancient Egyptians expressed the nature of things, and that informed substance receiving all forms. Because, as a pyramid, having its beginning from a point on the top, is by degrees dilated on all parts, so the nature of all things proceeding from one fountain and beginning, which is indivisible, namely, from God, the chief workmaster, afterwards receives several forms, and is diffused into various kinds and species, all which it conjoins to that beginning and point, from whence everything issues and flows. There may be also given another reason for this, taken from astronomy, for the Egyptians were excellent astronomers, even the inventors of it. These will have each sign of the zodiac to be a kind of pyramid, the base of which shall be in the heaven, and the point of it shall be in the centre of the earth. Seeing, therefore, in these pyramids all things were made, and that the coming of the sun, which is, as it were, a point in respect of these signs, is the cause of the production of natural things, and its departure the cause of their corruption, it seems very fitly that by a pyramid, Nature, the parent of all things, may be expressed. Also, the same Egyptians, under the form of a pyramid, shadowed forth the soul of man, making huge pyramids the magnificent sepulchres of their kings and heroes, to testify that the soul was still existent, notwithstanding the body was dissolved and corrupted, the which shall generate and produce another body for itself, when it should seem good to the First Agent (that is, the circle of 36,000 years being transacted). Like as a pyramid, as is well known to geometricians, the top of it standing fixed, and the base being moved about, describes a circle, and the whole body of it a cone, so that the circle expresses that space of years, and the cone that body which in that space is produced. For it was the opinion of the Egyptians that in the revolution of 36,000 years all things should be restored to their former estate. Plato witnesses that he received it from them; who seems, also, in his Timæus to attest this thing, that is, that our soul has the form of a pyramid, which (soul), according to the same Plato, is of a fiery nature, and adheres to the body as a pyramid does to its base, as a fire does to the fuel.”

M. Rougé, last year, said, “The Great Pyramids were the tombs of kings, but their exact orientation leads us to suppose that they were put in relation with the worship of the sun. Our Votive Pyramids confirm these characters. The principal personage is usually figured in adoration, the face turned, toward the south; at his left were the formulas of invocation to the rising sun, and at the right were analogous formulas of invocation to the setting sun.”

From Mr. Stewart, [14] of America, we have further remarks. He notes the appearance of the sun about the time of the equinoxes. Twice a year the pyramid would have no shadow. “The sun,” says he, “would then appear exactly at midday upon the summit of this pyramid; there his majestic disk would appear, for some moments, placed upon this immense pedestal, and seem to rest upon it, while his worshippers, on their knees at its base, extending their view along the inclined plane of the northern front, would contemplate the great Osiris, as well when he descended into the darkness of the tomb as when he arose triumphant. The same might be said of the full moon of the equinoxes, when it takes place in this parallel. It would seem that the Egyptians, always grand in their conceptions, had executed a project (the boldest that was ever imagined) of giving a pedestal to the sun and moon, or to Osiris and Isis. The tomb of Osiris was covered with shade nearly six months, after which light surrounded it entirely at midday, as soon as he, returning from hell, regained his empire in passing into the luminous atmosphere. Then he had returned to Isis, and to the god of spring, Orus, who had at length conquered the genius of darkness and of winter. “What a sublime idea!”

Mr. Fellows, [15] author of Mysteries of Freemasonry, takes a masonic view of the pyramid, giving it a solar worship origin; or, rather, demonstrating it to have reference to apparent solar movements as well as to solar myths. He calls the pyramid “a pedestal to the sun and moon, or to Osiris and Isis, at midday for the one, and at midnight for the other, when they arrived at that part of the heavens near to which passes the line which separates the northern from the southern hemisphere, the empire of good from that of evil. They wished that the shade should disappear from all the fronts of the pyramid at midday, during the whole time that the sun sojourned in the luminous atmosphere, and that the northern front should be again covered with shade when Osiris (the sun) descended into the tomb, or hell. The tomb of Osiris was covered with shade nearly six months.” As to the fourteen days before one equinox, and after another, Mr. Fellows cites the tradition of masonic Jews, that Hiram’s body lay fourteen days in the grave before it was found by Solomon.

The orientation of the pyramid has been held to be a strong confirmation of the solar idea. Mr. Piazzi Smyth puts it at only 4′ 35″ of error from true east and west. Sir Edmund Beckett quotes it 5′, or one foot in 761 feet. But he adds, “It is not quite certain that the ground has not received some slight subsequent twist from below, for the Second Pyramid has exactly the same direction, and, what is more, the whole of the King’s Chamber has received a tilt towards one corner, so that the axis of the room is no longer quite vertical.”

Even Rollin, [16] in the unenquiring age in which he lived, is so struck with this orientation as to say, “This seems to prove, also, that these immense buildings were never intended exclusively for burial-places, but conjointly for experiment and historical record.” [17]

[1] This is probably a corruption of the Platonic idea that a pyramid (the geometric shape) symbolizes fire, since the word pyramid derives from the Greek for “fire.” The specific phrase “tongues of fire” derives from Acts 2:3.

[2] Paul Ernst Jablonski (1693-1757), a German theologian and Orientalist, who wrote several treatises on ancient history, including the three-volume Pantheon Aegyptiorum (1750-1752), which appears to be the work referenced here.

[3] George Syncellus (died after 810), a Byzantine chronicler. The passage referred to here is from chapter 61 of his Chronography, quoting Eusebius’ Chronicon following Julius Africanus, as well as Africanus himself. Eusebius states that “Ouenephes was a prince in whose time a famine happened in the land of Egypt. He was the same one who erected pyramids around Kochome” (my trans.). Modern scholars interpret Kochome as a Greek rendering of the “Place of the Black Bull,” a reference to the sacred Egyptian Apis bulls, housed at Memphis, near Sakkara.

[4] Jacob Bryant (1715-1804), a British mythographer, whose eccentric A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology (1774-1776) attempted to prove all pagan mythologies were derivative of Genesis.

[5] Literally, the “house of the serpent of power.”

[6] The Ophites were a Gnostic sect who focused on the serpent of Genesis and the brazen serpent of Moses, but here Bryant seems to be referring to serpent worship in a more general sense. Ophite comes from the Greek word for snake.

[7] Jalaluddin Al-Suyuti (c. 1445-1505), an Egyptian writer and scholar. The passage given here is not an actual quotation but is the paraphrase given by Vyse in the appendix to his Operations. The remainder of the references to Islamic scholars are all derived from Vyse’s paraphrases in the appendix.

[8] Taqi al-Din Ahmad ibn ’Ali ibn ’Abd al-Qadir ibn Muhammad al-Maqrizi (1364-1442), an Islamic scholar who wrote on Egyptian history.

[9] This seems to be the Sufi mystic Abū ’Abdillāh Muḥammad ibn ’Alī ibn Muḥammad ibn ’Arabī (1165-1240), known as al-Shaykh al-Akbar. Again, the passage in question is in Vyse’s appendix.

[10] This reference to Col. Chesney and his Syrian pyramids derives from Col. Vyse’s appendix, which mentions them in a footnote to a paraphrase of Al Akbari.

[11] Alois Sprenger (1813-1893), an Austrian-born British subject whose summaries and notes on Arabic sources Vyse used for his appendix.

[12] The Kalmyks (or Oriats), a Caspian people.

[13] Ioannes Petrus Bolzanius (1477-1558), known in Latin as Ioannes Pierius Valerianus, was a writer on signs and symbols. His Hieroglyphica (1556), which attempted to explain Egyptian mythology through symbols, was once considered a standard work on the subject until Champollion’s decipherment proved his conclusions incorrect.

[14] Actually John Fellows, as noted above in sec. 24.

[15] This is the correct name of the author misidentified as Stewart, though the title should more properly be An Exposition of the Mysteries, as given in note 104 (p. 66); Mysteries of Freemasonry was the title applied to the 1877 edition of the work.

[16] Charles Rollin (1661-1741), a French historian and the author of The Ancient History (1730-1738), an uncritical compilation of the testimonies of ancient sources, but one which was exceedingly popular in the eighteenth century.

[17] Bonwick must be translating from the French edition, for the standard English translation does not include this disclaimer but instead states without qualification, “These pyramids were Tombs.”

44. FOR EGYPTIAN RELIGIOUS RITES.

Two opposite views have been entertained on the pyramid. While some have imagined its devotion to secret ceremonies in connection with the old faith, others behold in it the negation of belief. Dr. Richardson, the traveller, once exclaimed, “If the temples and tombs are to be considered as remnants of Egyptian idolatry, the pyramids may be regarded as remnants of infidelity.” Bishop Russell, [1] the author of an instructive work on Egypt, thought that “it seems reasonable to suppose that all these turnings, apartments, and secrets in architecture were intended for some nobler purpose, and that the Deity rather, which was typified in the outward form of this pile, was to be worshipped within.” Norden, in 1737, wrote, “The Egyptian religion was the principal cause of the production of the pyramids.”

An older visitor by a century, John Greaves, left this record: “The true reason depends upon higher and more waighty considerations, though I acknowledge those alleaged by Pliny might be secondary motives. And this sprang from the theology of the Ægyptians, who, as Servius [2] shewes in his comment, beleeved that as long as the body endured so long the soule continued with it.” A still older English rambler, Sandys, [3] had these reflections when there: “For as a pyramis, beginning at a point, by little and little delateth into all parts, so nature, proceeding from one individual portion (even God, the Sovereign Essence), received diversity of forms, uniting all in the Supreme Head, from “whence all excellencies issue.” Even Mariette Bey, while opposing the theory of some, affirming that “the pyramids were not monuments of the vain ostentation of kings,” sees a religious aspect in the erection; concluding, “they are the impossible obstacles to overturn, and the gigantic proofs of a consoling dogma.” He refers to immortality.

Mr. Yeates is another viewing the edifice associated with religion, regarding it as an altar. “The summit of the Great Pyramid,” says he, “which is by report about sixteen feet square, admits the supposition that here was the high altar, either for sacrifice on any great occasions; or for their chief idol, thereupon placed in former ages.” Elsewhere he has it, “Thus does the outward form and appearances of these edifices, duly considered, present to us some idea of the altars and temples of the first ages after the Flood.” The tops of Mexican pyramids were certainly used for worship and sacrifices. Bryant, in his great work on mythology, has a similar conception, saying, “They were designed for high altars and temples, and they were constructed in honour of the Deity.” He combats the assertion of Herodotus that they were tombs, adding this mean opinion of ancient writers; “they spoke by guess, and I have shown by many instances how usual it was for the Grecians to mistake temples for tombs. If not so,” he exclaims, “what occasion was there for a well?”

All this bears upon the Arab tradition, recorded by several writers, that their ancestors used to make pilgrimages to the pyramids, and offer incense to them, sacrificing a black calf. But the religious aspect of the pyramid question cannot be further entered into here.

[1] Michael Russell (1781-1848), from 1837 the first bishop of the combined diocese of Glasgow and Galloway. He was the author of View of Ancient and Modern Egypt (1831), from which the following quotation is taken.

[2] Maurus Servius Honoratus, a fourth century grammarian, in his commentary on Vergil’s Aeneid at 3.67: “the wise Egyptians took care to embalm their bodies, and deposit them in catacombs, in order that the soul might be preserved for a long time in connection with the body, and might not soon be alienated; while the Romans, with an opposite design, committed the remains of their dead to the funeral pile, intending that the vital spark might immediately be restored to the general element, or return to its pristine nature” (trans. James Crowles Prichard).

[3] George Sandys (1577-1644), an English traveler and poet. He visited Egypt in 1610 and published a memoir describing his travels, The Relation of a Journey begun Anno Domini 1610, in 1615.

45. TO CELEBRATE THE MYSTERIES OF LIFE.

All the ancient Pagan mysteries are connected with a sacred vase, a holy bath, a baptismal font, in which the initiated, in a nude state, were completely immersed, and from which they were raised to newness of life. This idea of the regenerating influence of that holy water prevailed alike in the further east and the further west, from the Himalayas across the old continents to Mexico and Peru, or over the Pacific islands. It has literally girdled the earth. We observe it alike in the most ancient as well as most modern forms of heathenism.

According to Prof. Piazzi Smyth the pyramid was erected to preserve the coffer or sarcophagus. According to mystics of various orders a similar opinion has been entertained. Some contend it was to keep inviolate this symbol of generative life. It was the cauldron of Ceridwen [1] of the British druids, whence secrets were learned by special and Divine inspiration. It was at once the tomb and the portal to immortality. In a country where, and in an epoch when, certainly, eternity and eternal life occupied more of the popular thought than in any other clime or time, this precious sign of death and life would be watched over with most jealous care.

Recently, a remarkable American work, Art Magic, has given a pyramid interpretation. The author [2] speaks of the marvellous box as “a sarcophagus for living men, for those initiates who were there taught the solemn problems of life and death, and through the instrumentality of that very coffer attained to that glorious birth of the spirit—that second birth so significantly described.” He adds these words, understood in various senses;—“Slain by violence and laid in the coffer, with him is destroyed the Master’s Word, on which the building of the Great Temple depends.”

It is no wonder that he regards it as “the key-stone of the lost art, which interprets the grand science of living as a Masonic Lodge.”

“For ages,” says he, “the Great Pyramid has been this rejected stone. The world has not known it, and the builders of science have thrown it away amidst the rubbish of speculative possibilities.” Such a man may well term it “a veritable lodge of ancient freemasonry.” For this freemasonry Mr. Piazzi Smyth has unnecessarily spoken in terms of contemptuous pity, saying, “Freemasonry, notwithstanding all its boasting, seemed to lead no nearer to a knowledge of the objects and ideas of the coffer than anything connected with the idolatrous religion of the ancient Egyptians.”

It was with profound meaning that the anonymous mystic said that “the huge problem of scientific discoveries, the mystic, lidless, wholly unornamented, uninscribed coffer, in the midst of the vast unornamented, uninscribed chamber, was not intended as a model for all generations of succeeding corn and seedsmen, but as a sarcophagus for living men.”

Some few thoughtful readers will ponder over these words. There is honey to be got from the lion’s mouth, and more than Samson have found it there.

[1] A sorceress or goddess of Celtic mythology who possessed a magical cauldron that bestowed poetic inspiration.

[2] Bonwick believed the author to be Chevalier Louis (de B——).

46. A MASONIC HALL.

This view has had many supporters, because the Egyptians were supposed the fathers of freemasonry—the teachings of Phre, [1] the solar deity, mason, or raiser of living temples. The pyramid, and prominently the great one, might reasonably have been, with its secret passages, its dark solitudes, its mysterious chambers, regarded as a fitting place for initiation into those sacred mysteries, which were the forerunners of the Eleusinian, &c. All the symbols of the craft are there, and were there, and in the land of Egypt, thousands of years before the masonic temple of Jerusalem was reared by Solomon. It is not wonderful, therefore, that masonic writers, particularly continental and American ones, should have been more drawn to the pyramid than to the Jachin and Boaz of the King of Israel, [2] associated, on Biblical authority, with the two great centres of ancient mysticism, Phoenicia and Egypt.

The Rev. George Oliver, [3] the chief of modern English masonic authors, and a clergyman of the Church of England, must have startled the timid with his idea of the pyramids. “They were, doubtless, erected soon after the Dispersion,” he says, “as copies of the great Phallic tower, built by Nimrod; and as the latter was designed for initiation, so, also, were the former.” Surely some Christian masons would object to a Phallic origin of their craft. But this distinguished masonic authority goes further into the pyramid meaning. He distinctly affirms: “They were intended to contain the apparatus of initiation into the mysteries, and it is highly probable that they were exclusively devoted to this important purpose.”

As it is intended, hereafter, to treat on Egyptian freemasonry and religion, it is sufficient here to state that one practical difficulty opposes Mr. Oliver’s notion of a pyramid being a masonic hall. It is this:—we have clear proofs that immediately upon the finishing of the building every apartment was closed, every passage filled with massive blocks of stone, and the outer entrance effectually concealed. No such pyramid, therefore, could have been an ark of initiation. Neither could it have been, as Bishop Russell and others have thought, a temple for service. There is a sense, however, wherein it may be said that the pyramid was a masonic edifice, constructed for masonic purposes. But these purposes were higher and nobler than those at present occupying the attention of the Order.

[1] This is the god Ra, who in the nineteenth century was wrongly transliterated as Phre, giving rise to the occult idea that Freemasonry derived from “Phre’s” masonry.

[2] The two brass pillars of the Temple of Solomon (1 Kings 7:15; 7:21; 2 Kings 11:14; 23:3).

[3] George Oliver (1782-1867), who produced many books on the history of masonry, which even Freemasons admitted were full of speculation and error. The following quotation is the somewhat misquoted text of a footnote in Oliver’s “History of Initiation” from the Freemason’s Monthly Magazine (Nov. 1844): “The pyramids were doubtless erected very soon after the dispersion, as copies of the great phallic tower on the plain of Shinar; and as the latter were designed for initiation, so were the former. […] [T]hey were intended to contain the apparatus of initiation into the Mysteries, and were exclusively devoted to this important purpose.”

47. SPECIAL REVELATIONS TO MYSTICS.

In a general way it may be said that the pyramid has special revelations of a mysterious character. The ordinary man of fair education and common sense would, as a rule, see nothing more mysterious in it than in the Royal Exchange. It would for him have nothing special to tell of an outside character. He might, perhaps, marvel at the stupidity of wasting so much time and money on so practically useless a building. In the whole he would recognise a tomb, and nothing more. It would suggest as much to him as “the primrose by the river’s brink” to Wordsworth’s countryman.

It may be further said that such a man, if looking into this little volume, might possibly have a pitying sneer or smile for the reader of what would appear to him such baseless mathematical and scientific calculations, as connected with the pyramid. He would naturally look upon Dufeu, Hekekyan Bey, Agnew, Piazzi Smyth, John Taylor, Wild, John Wilson, and the like, as sheer dreamers.

One must rejoice, nevertheless, that there are those who look beneath the surface of things, and dig for hidden treasure. In spite of the pooh-poohings of men who are ever preaching about “Facts—plain facts, sir,” there really are strange revelations from the pyramid which are recognised by thoughtful, sober citizens of the world. An increasing number are beginning to ask, with the Rosicrucian [1]:--

“Is it reasonable to conclude, at a period when knowledge was at the highest, and when human powers were, in comparison with ours at the present time, prodigious, that all these indescribable physical efforts, such gigantic achievements as those of the Egyptians, were devoted to a mistake? that the myriads of the Nile were fools, labouring in the dark?”

But there is another class, more truly mystic than any we have mentioned, whose notions, if revealed privately to the expounders of millennial markings in the pyramid, would extort derision and contumely, but who are nevertheless worthy of a word in a book on the “Why?” of the pyramid.

Still, as these mystics write not for the public, have no mission to fulfil for the public, and care not one straw for the public, it seems hardly worth while to say anything about them to the public.

It has been the writer’s good fortune to come across the path of one or two such persons. Perhaps other men, in a pilgrimage of sixty years, who have good faith in their fellow-creatures’ intelligence, and sympathy with honest, earnest aspirations, encounter some who seem but to live on the confines of this everyday world of ours. The dreamers are seen to have some method in their supposed madness, and some reason in their wild imaginings. In these cases, an incoherent speech testifies to the dread of ridicule, the consciousness of being misunderstood, or the conviction that the truth is too sacred for utterance.

M. Caviglia, born in Malta, dying in Paris at the age of seventy-four, in 1845, buried with his Bible beside him, was one of these mystics, and so passionately devoted to pyramid study that for some time he lived in an apartment—Mr. Piazzi Smyth’s symbol of heaven—over the King’s Chamber.

Lord Lindsay [2] met him at Gizeh, admired and honoured him. He was, as he himself expressed it, “tout à fait pyramidale.” His lordship wrote, “We are told that in Ceylon there are insects that take the shape and colour of the branch or leaf they feed upon; Caviglia seems to partake of their nature, he is really assimilating to a pyramid.” This was not said in ridicule. He described him as “happy with his pyramid, his mysticism, and his Bible.” Even then, at sixty-six years of age, he had, we are told, “reared a pyramid of the most extraordinary mysticism—astrology, magnetism, magic (his favourite studies), its corner-stones; while on each face of the airy vision he sees inscribed, in letters of light, invisible to all but himself, elucidatory texts of Scripture.”

Mr. Ramsay [3] has this account:—“He has strange, unearthly ideas, which seem to open up to you, as he says them, whole vistas of unheard-of ground, which close up again as suddenly, so that one can hardly know what his theories are. He says, it would be highly dangerous to communicate them, and looks mystical.”

One [4] who knew something about Lost Secrets wrote thus of him:—“By studying the remains of Pagan antiquity in the only way they can be profitably studied, namely, through the medium of the occult sciences, Caviglia had discovered the long-lost secret of the pyramids. And with the discovery of the central mystery of Egyptian paganism the great central truth of Christianity, historically considered, had revealed itself to him.”

One [5] who studied such questions for half a century, and who lately left this Babel of ours for the “dimly-shadowed shore,” told the writer that there were untold secrets of value in the Great Pyramid, and that the pyramid builders possessed the secret of all philosophical mysticism on the basis of astronomical fact.

There is something in the pyramid; and men who see what others cannot, would not, see, if derided for their second sight, may yet be proved to have a vision true and clear.

The enthusiastic French savant, M. Dufeu, proudly affirms that “not a stone has been set, not a dimension has been determined, which may not have its reason why, and concurred to establish scientific formulæ to represent, and eternally to preserve, the previous knowledge acquired by the immortal architects who erected these colossal masses.”

He, like some others, while maintaining that “only a part of the veil has been raised which hid the high destination of pyramids,” can indulge glowing expectations of new revelations. “Who knows,” cries he, “what treasure may yet burst forth from the secular flanks of these great constructions, whose incontestable utility and importance will be no more denied by any one. New discoveries, encircling with a fresh aureola the head of the eminent learned of a prehistoric epoch, will impose on us an addition to our admiration of their vast genius.”

[1] Hargrave Jennings (1817-1890), occultist, Freemason, and Rosicrucian. He believed all religion originated in phallic worship of the sun and of fire. Jennings was the author of The Rosicrucians: Their Rites and Mysteries (1870), from which the quotation originates. However, it appears from differences in punctuation that Bonwick copied the text from Art Magic, where it is presented only as the words of an anonymous Rosicrucian.

[2] Alexander William Crawford Lindsay, twenty-fifth earl of Crawford (1812-1880), a Scottish peer who traveled widely and wrote Letters on Egypt, Edom, and the Holy Land (1838). The following quotation comes from this book, but was also published in the Dublin University Magazine in November 1838.

[3] William Wardlaw Ramsay, Lindsay’s travelling companion, whose journal Lindsay excerpts at several points.

[4] I cannot identify this individual, but then neither could The Spectator when reviewing Bonwick’s work in 1878.

[5] Bonwick has provided far too little information to identify this person.

Source: James Bonwick, Pyramid Facts and Fancies (London: C. Keegan Paul & Co., 1877), 110-224.

James Bonwick1877