CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY STATEMENT:

Of the General Question of the Great Pyramid.

The ancient pyramids of Egypt form somewhat of a long clustering group of gigantic monuments, extending chiefly over about a degree of latitude. They begin in the north, at the apex, or southern head of the triangular-shaped “Delta” land of “Lower Egypt,” and stretch thence further southward along almost seventy miles of the western side of the Nile.

Within that nearly meridian distance, one traveller claims to have noted thirty-five, another rashly says sixty-seven; and another still, but in his case going beyond what is strictly Egypt, and ascending its colossal river as far as Meroe, Noori, and Barkal in Ethiopia, mentions one hundred and thirty as existing there. But they are mediæval rather than ancient, small instead of large, and with very little about them either in form or material to remind of the more typical early examples entirely in stone; or those really mathematically shaped old pyramids, which, though few in number, are what have made the world-wide fame of their land's architecture from before the beginning of history.

Now it is precisely with those grander specimens only, or the oldest examples of the country (not more, even including some that are positively ruinous, than 4thirty-eight in number), that we have to do in this book; and selecting even further amongst them, we find, that of all the more important instances that have yet attracted the attention of mankind as being really typical, there are none to equal the combined fame and antiquity, the purity of shape and excellence of both preservation and construction, of the several stone pyramids near Jeezeh;¹ a hill in view of the ancient Memphis, and not far, though separated by the river, from the present city of Cairo.

The Jeezeh pyramidal group is situated, like all the others, on the western, or more thoroughly African, lone, and desert, side of the river; but close to the southern apex, and as it were the very point of origin of the sector-shaped plain of Lower Egypt. The group, in its strangely massive, yet crystalline shaped, architecture, is conspicuously planted there on the utmost north-eastern edge of an elevated rocky steppe; so that while it overlooks on one side the sand-strewn wastes extending back to the great Sahara, it beholds on the other the green and fertile plains of Nile, about 130 feet in level below. But amongst these Jeezeh Pyramids, again, there is one that transcends in intellectual value all the rest; one that has been involuntarily by all the world named for ages past the “Great Pyramid”; and which stands out, the more it is examined into, distinct and distinguished from all its fellows by its not only giant, but particular, size, its wondrous internal structure, its superior age, more frequent historical notice by men of various nations, 5and yet, the hitherto inscrutable destiny of its purpose; the greatest of the seven old wonders of the world in the days of the Greeks, and the only one of them all, which is still in existence on the surface of the earth.

With many of the smaller and later pyramids there is little doubt about their objects; for, built by the Egyptians as sepulchres for the great Egyptian dead, such dead, both Pharaohs and their relatives, were buried in them, and with all the written particulars, pictorial accompaniments, and idolatrous adornments of that too graphic religion, which the fictile nation on the Nile ever delighted in. But as we approach, ascending the stream of ancient time, in any careful chronological survey of pyramidal structures, to the “Great Pyramid,” Egyptian emblems are gradually left behind; and in, and throughout, that mighty builded mass, which all history and all tradition, both ancient and modern, agree in representing as the first in point of date of the whole Jeezeh, and even the whole Egyptian,³ group, the earliest stone building also positively known to have been erected in any country,—we find in all its finished parts not a vestige of heathenism, nor the smallest indulgence in anything approaching to idolatry; no Egyptology of the kind denounced by Moses and the prophets of Israel; nor even the most distant allusion to Sabaism, and its elemental worship of sun, or moon, or any of the starry host of heaven.

6I have specified “finished parts,” because in certain unfinished, internal portions of the constructive masonry of the Great Pyramid broken into by Colonel Howard-Vyse in 1837, there are some rude Egyptian markings, in a few daubs of red paint only, and for a mere temporary mechanical purpose to be presently explained; and I also except, as a matter of course, any inscriptions inflicted on the same pyramid by modern travellers, even though they have attempted, like the Prussian savants of 1843 A.D., to cut their names in their own happily shallow ideas of the ancient hieroglyphics of the old, thorough-paced, Egyptian idolaters elsewhere. But with these simple exceptions we can most positively say, that both exterior and interior are absolutely free from all engraved or sculptured work, as well as from everything relating to any known form of idolatry or erring man’s theotechnic devices. From all those hieratic emblems, therefore, which from first to last have utterly overlaid every Egyptian temple proper, as well as all Egypt’s obelisks, sphinxes, statues, tombs, and whatever other monuments they, the Egyptians, did build up at any certain historical and Pharaonic epoch in connection with their peculiar, and, alas! degrading religion.

Was the Great Pyramid, then, erected before the invention of hieroglyphics, and previous to the birth of the false Egyptian religion?

No! for there, both history, tradition, and recent exploratory discoveries elsewhere, testified to by many travellers and antiquaries, are perfectly in accord; and assure us that the Egyptian nation was established, was powerful, and its spiritually vile hieratic system largely developed, though not arrived at its full proportions, at the time of the erection of the Great Pyramid; that that structure was even raised by the labour of the Egyptian population ruled over at the time by an 7Egyptian king;⁴ but under some remarkable compulsion and constraint which positively forbade them from putting their unmistakable decorations and elsewhere accustomed inscriptions on the finished building; more especially too from identifying it in any manner, direct or indirect, with their impure and even bestial form of worship.

Still further that these marks were not meant as ornaments in the structure, or put on after the stones were built into it, is abundantly evidenced by some of them being upside down, and some having been partly pared away in adjusting the block into its position (see Colonel Howard-Vyse’s plates of them); and, finally, by the learned Dr. Birch’s interpretation of a number of the marks, which seem from thence to be mostly short dates, and directions to the workmen as to which stones were for the south, and which for the north, wall.

These markings, moreover, have only been discovered in those dark holes or hollows, the so-called “chambers,” but much rather “hollows of construction,” broken into by Colonel Howard-Vyse above the “King’s Chamber” of the Great Pyramid. There, also, you see other traces of the steps of mere practcial work, such as the “bat-holes” in the stones, by which the heavy blocks were doubtless lifted to their places, and everything is left perfectly rough. Nor was there the least occasion for finishing it up, rubbing out the marks, or polishing off the holes, for these void spaces were sealed up, or had been built up outside in solid masonry (excepting only the lowest one, known for a century as “Davison’s Chamber,” and having its own small passage of approach from the south-east corner of the Grand Gallery), and were never intended to be used as chambers for human visitation or living purposes. In all the other chambers and passages, on the contrary, intended to be visited, and approached by admirably constructed white-stone passages, the masonry was finished off with the skill and polish almost of a jeweller; and in them neither quarry marks nor “bat holes,” nor painted marks, nor hieroglyphics of any sort or kind, are to be seen: excepting always those modern hieroglyphics which Dr. Lepsius put up over the entrance into the Great Pyramid, “on a space five feet in breadth by four feet in height,” in praise of the then sovereign of Prussia; and which have recently misled a learned Chinese envoy, by name Pin-ch’-un, into most absurdly claiming a connection between the Great Pyramid and the early monuments of his own country. (See Athenæum, May 21, 1870 p. 677.)

8According to Herodotus, Manetho, and other ancient authorities, the Egyptians hated, and yet implicitly obeyed, the mysterious, and coercive though non-military, power that made them work on the Great Pyramid; and when that power was again relaxed or removed, though they still hated its name to such a degree as to forbear from even mentioning it except by a peculiar circumlocution,—yet with involuntary bending to the sway of a really superior intelligence once amongst them, they took to imitating in other buildings, as well as they could, though without understanding, a few of the more ordinary mechanical features of that great work on which they had been so long employed; and they even rejoiced for a time to adapt them, so far as they could be adapted, to their own more favourite ends, egotistic glorifications, and other such congenial ideas.

Hence the numerous quasi-copies, for sepulchral purposes, of the Great Pyramid, which are now, in the shape of other pyramids, to be observed further south, along that western side of Egypt; always betraying, though, on close examination, the most profound ignorance of their noble model's chiefest internal features, as well as of all its niceties of angle and cosmic harmonies of linear measurement. And such mere failures, as those later tombic pyramids, are never found, even then, at any very great number of miles away from the site, nor any great number of years behind the date, of the colossal parent work on the Jeezeh hill.

The ostensible architectural idea, indeed, of that one grand primeval monument, though expensively copied during a few centuries, yet never wholly or permanently took the fancy of the ancient Egyptians. It had, or rather simulated before them to have, some one or two suitabilities to their favourite employment of lasting sepulture, and its accompanying rites; so they tried 9what they knew of it, for such purpose. But they soon found that it did not admit of their troops of priests, nor the easy introduction of their unwieldy “sacred” animals. Nor bulls, nor crocodiles, nor the requisite multitudes of abject worshippers, could enter a pyramid with the facility of their own temples; and so, on the whole, mature Egypt preferred them. Those accordingly more open and columned, as well as symbolically sculptured and multitudinously inscribed structures, of their own entire elaboration, are the only ones which we now find to have held, from their first invention, an uninterrupted reign through all the course of ancient and mediæval Egyptian history, or that period when Egypt was most rich, most powerful, most wicked; and to reflect themselves continuously in the placid, natural Nile, from one end of the long-drawn Hamitic land to the other. They, therefore, those Karnac and Philœ temples, with all their sins of idolatry on their heads, are, architecturally, Egypt. Thebes, too, with its hundred adorned Pylon temple-gates, and statues, and basso-relievos, and incised outlines of false gods, must be confessed to be intensely Egypt. But the Great Pyramid is, in its origin and nature, something pure and perfectly different.

Under whose direction, then, and for what purpose, was the Great Pyramid built; whence did so foreign, and really untasteful, an idea to Egypt come; who was the mysterious carrier of it to that land; and under what sort of special compulsion was it that, in his day, to his command though he was not their king, the Egyptians, King and people all alike, laboured for years in a cause which they appreciated not; and gave, in that primeval age of generally sparse, and pastoral, population only, their unrivalled mechanical skill and compacted numerical strength for an end which they did not at the time understand; and which they never even came to 10understand, much less to like, in all their subsequent national ages?

This has been indeed a mystery of mysteries, but may yet prove fruitful in the present advancing age of knowledge of all kinds to inquire into further: for though theories without number have been tried and failed in, by ancient Greeks and mediæval Arabians, by French, English, Germans, and Americans, their failures partly pave, and render so much the safer, for us the road by which we must set out. Pave it poorly, perhaps, or not very far; for their whole result has, up to the present time, been little more than this, that the authors of those attempts are either found to be repeating idle tales, told them by those who knew no more about the subject than themselves; or skipping all the really crucial points of application for their theories which they should have attended to; or, finally, like some of the best and ablest men who have given themselves to the question, fairly admitting that they were entirely beaten.

Hence the exclusive notion of temples to the sun and moon, or for sacred fire, or holy water, or burial-places, and nothing but burial-places, of kings, or granaries for Joseph, or astronomical observatories, or defences to Egypt against being invaded by the sands of the African desert, or places of resort for mankind in a second deluge, or of safety when the heavens should fall, have been for a long time past proved untenable; and the Great Pyramid stands out now, far more clearly than it did in the time of Herodotus (no less than 2,400 years ago), as both a prehistoric monument, and yet rivalling some of the best things of modern times, not only in practical execution and workmanship, but in its eminently grand design and pure conception; or in forming a testimony which, though in Egypt, is yet not at all of, or according to, historical Egypt, and whose true and full explanation must be still to come.

11Under these circumstances it is, that a new idea, based not on ancient hieroglyphics, profane learning, old Egyptian sculpture, or modern Egyptology springing therefrom, but on new scientific measures of the still remaining actual facts of ancient masonic construction in number, weight, and measure, was recently given to the world by the late Mr. John Taylor, of London, in a book published in 1859.⁵ He had not visited the Pyramid himself, but had been for thirty years previously collecting and comparing all the published accounts, and specially all the better-certified mensurations (for some were certainly poor indeed) of those who had been there; and while so engaged, gradually and quite spontaneously (as he described to me by letter), the new theory opened out before him.

Though mainly a rigid induction from tangible facts of scientific bearing and character, Mr. Taylor's result was undoubtedly assisted by means of the mental and spiritual point of view from whence he commenced his researches, and which is, in the main, simply this:—

That whereas other writers have generally esteemed that the unknown existency who directed the building of the Great Pyramid (and to whom the Egyptians, in their traditions and for ages afterwards, gave an immoral and even abominable character) must, therefore, have been very bad indeed,—so that the world at large, from that time to this, has ever been fond of standing on, kicking, and insulting that dead lion whom they really knew nothing of,—he, Mr. John Taylor, seeing how religiously bad the idol-serving Egyptians themselves were, was led to conclude that he, whom they hated (and could never sufficiently abuse) might perhaps have been pre-eminently good; or was, at all events, of a different and very much purer religious faith 12from that of the land of Ham. Then, remembering, with mutatis mutandis, what Christ himself says respecting the suspicion to be attached when all the world speaks well of any one, Mr. Taylor followed up this idea by what the Old Testament does record touching the most vital and distinguishing part of the Israelitish religion; and which is therein described, some centuries after the building of the Great Pyramid, as notoriously an “abomination to the Egyptians”: and combining this with certain unmistakable and undisputed by any one, historical facts, he successfully deduced sound and Christian reasons for believing that the directors of the building, or rather the author of its design and those who under his more immediate guidance controlled the actual builders of the Great Pyramid, were by no means Egyptians, but of the chosen race, descendants of Shem, and in the line of, though preceding, Abraham; so early indeed as to be closer to Noah than to Abraham. Men, at all events, who had been enabled by Divine favour to appreciate the appointed idea, as to the absolute necessity of a sacrifice and atonement for the sins of man by the blood and the act of a Divine Mediator, as in the most modern and Evangelical form of Christianity. This very crucial idea was nevertheless of an antiquity coeval with the contest between Abel and Cain, and had descended through the Flood to certain predestined families of mankind; but yet was an idea or principle in religion which no one of Egyptian born would ever contemplate with a moment's patience. For every ancient Egyptian, from first to last, and every Pharaoh of them more especially, just as with the Ninevites and Babylonians generally, was an unmitigated Cainite in thought, act, and feeling to the very backbone; confident of and professing nothing so much, or so constantly, as his own perfect 13righteousness, and absolute freedom by his own innate purity, and by his own invariable, complete, and unswerving rectitude throughout his whole life, from every kind of sin, large or small, against God or man.

On this ground it was that Mr. Taylor took his stand; and, after disobeying the world’s long-formed public opinion of too passively obedient accord with profane Egyptian tradition, and after thereby also setting at nought some of the most time-honoured prejudices of modern Egyptological scholars, so far as to give a full, fair, and impartial examination to the whole case from the beginning, announced that he had discovered in some of the arrangements and measures of the Great Pyramid—when corrected for injuries of intervening time—certain scientific results, which speak of neither Egyptian nor Babylonian, nor Roman nor Greek, but of something much more than, as well as quite different from, any ordinary human ways. For, besides coming forth suddenly in the primeval history of its own times without any preliminary period of childhood, or known ages of evolution and preparation, the actual facts at the Great Pyramid, in the shape of builded proofs of an exact numerical knowledge of the grander cosmical phenomena of both earth and heavens, not only rise above, and far above, the extremely limited and almost infantine knowledge of science humanly attained to by any of the Gentile nations of 4,000, 3,000, 2,000, nay, 1,000 years ago; but they are also, in whatever of the physical secrets of Nature they chiefly apply to, essentially above the best knowledge of man in our own time as well.

This is indeed a startling assertion, if true; but, from its subject, admits of the completest and most positive refutation, if untrue. For the exact science of the present day, compared with that of only a few hundred years ago, is a marvel of development; and is capable 14of giving out no uncertain sound, both in asserting itself, and stating not only the fact, but the order and time of, the invention of all the practical means humanly necessary, to the minutest steps of all separate discoveries yet made. Much more then can this modern science of the mathematical kind speak with positiveness, when comparing its own presently extended knowledge against the little that was known to man, by his own efforts and by his then school methods, in those early epochs before accurate and numerical physical science had begun, or could have begun, to be seriously cultivated at all; that is, in the truly primeval day when men were few on the earth, and the Great Pyramid was built, finished, sealed up, and left as we see it now, dilapidations only excepted, awaiting its intended purpose, whatever that was to be, in a long subsequent day.

Let us proceed then to exactly such a scientific examination of all known Pyramid facts. Rather a dull proceeding perhaps at the beginning, to some, but necessary to all who would understand; and not too difficult for any, if taken step by step, and in order, more or less as follows.