CHAPTER VII.

RESEARCH CONTINUED:

From Moslem to our Own Days.

Resumption of Egyptian History.

FROM Caliph Al Mamoun’s, to our own time, is more than 1,000 years; in itself no inconsiderable portion of all intellectual human history on this globe. And if the Arabo-Egyptians had continued through all that immense interval, just as practically curious and wilfully destructive as in and about 820 A.D. in the service of their then ruler, what would have been left to these times of the primeval monument in spite of its grandeur. And especially what would have remained of its one, small, contained coffer, i.e. the so-described empty stone chest without a lid?

But utter, complete destruction was by no means to be. The few golden days of the son of Haroun Al Raschid soon passed away; the untoward findings of that monarch were not a little sedative in Pyramid research to his subjects; and before the year A.D. 868 had come and gone, all Egyptians had far different matters to attend to and suffer under, than to push on with more archæological explorations. And yet it was out of ancient times that their newly commencing troubles came: for the day of the Lord’s controversy with the giant idols of the land of Ham, with those idols and idol customs still perverting more or less the minds of the inhabitants, and causing them, 123Mohammedans though they were, to keep old Egyptian customs, was not ended. And that day was to be one, in its terrors of Divine vengeance,

> “When the heart of Egypt shall melt in the midst of it; > When the Egyptians shall fight, every one against his brother, > And every one against his neighbour; > City against city, and kingdom against kingdom, > And the spirit of Egypt shall fail in the midst thereof. > And I will destroy the covenant thereof, > And the Egyptians will I give over into the hand of a cruel Lord, > And a fierce king shall rule over them, > Saith the Lord of Hosts.” (Isaiah xix.)

> “And it shall be the basest of the kingdoms, > Neither shall it exalt itself any more above the nations.” > (Ezekiel xxix. 15.)

These prophecies had been uttered from 1,400 to 1,500 years previously, or in 650 and 750 B.C.; and this is how they were eventually fulfilled.

Egypt has to accomplish its Destinies.

In 868 A.D. the son of a slave, named Tooloon, was appointed by the Caliph of Bagdad viceroy over Egypt; but presently rebelling against his master, he made himself ruler over the land. Continued wars and troubles ensued to the inhabitants up to his death in the midst of them. Meanwhile the solitude and silence of the desert had once more surrounded the Great Pyramid; and lent it that protection, which man would not, and then could not give, to enable it to go on preserving its message for the distant posterity it had been appointed to.

Tooloon’s son, who succeeded him, had similar wars through his short reign, until he was put to death by the women of his own household. The next successor came to a similar violent end, and the next, and the next, by name Haroon; but with the addition of seeing before he died, in the year 900 A.D., according to the chroniclers, “a great tempest and earthquake” desolate the country.

124Haroon reigned, say these authorities, upwards of eight years, but gave himself up to pleasure, and was put to death by his uncles; one of whom, Sheyban, then usurped the government. The Bagdad caliph thereupon invaded the country; Sheyban went forth to meet him, but his troops deserted; the city of El Fostat, in sight of the Great Pyramid, was taken and burnt, and the women reduced to slavery, A.D. 905.

From this time to 970 A.D., when El Kahireh, or Cairo, was founded by Gohar, close to the north of the former city El Fostat,—anarchy, bloodshed, rival and short-lived rulers, invasions, desolations, slaughters and battles, form the record of almost every year; culminating in 1010 A.D., in the also short-lived but ultra-violent time of El Hakim, who, in addition to all the mere cruelties of his predecessors, made the people pay him divine honours, and altered his name from signifying "Governing by command of God" into "Governing by his own command." But ten slaves, bribed by 500 denars each, finished the wretch's career, one midnight, when he, who had thrown off allegiance to God, was engaged on the hills to the south-east of Cairo in making strange cabalistic sacrifices; to Saturn, say some; to Satan, however, say others; and they further claim him as still the special prophet of the devil-worshippers of Mount Lebanon, the Druses; who moreover expect him to come supernaturally amongst them once again, and soon, a sort of doubly miraculous incarnation of the evil one.

Desolating wars then followed between the Negroes and the Saracens, both of them in turn overrunning Egypt, and butchering after their own fashion; also between Egypt and Bagdad: battles almost every year, and in 1070 A.D., in the time of the Cairo ruler El Mustansir, came the dreadful famine still called by his name. For seven successive years the inundations of 125the Nile failed; the country produced no corn, and foreign armies prevented its importation from abroad. The wretched people resorted to cannibalism; and, as related by the Arab historian El Makreezee, organized bands kidnapped unwary passengers in the almost deserted streets, catching their prey principally by means of ropes armed with hooks, and let down from the overhanging lattice windows so common still in Cairo. A pestilence followed the famine, and an invading army the pestilence.

So continues the Arab-age history of Egypt up to the one brighter and better reign of Saladin of the Crusades, from 1117 A.D. to 1193 A.D.; and then the country is plunged into a night of internecine wars and misfortunes again.

In 1301 A.D., during the reign of En Nasir, as great a persecutor of Christians as El Hakim himself, comes the record of another earthquake, so severe, that it is said to have “nearly ruined Cairo, giving it the appearance of a city demolished by a siege,” and under this visitation it most probably was, that the final and complete shaking down of the remaining fragments of the already half-plundered casing stones of the Great Pyramid took place, and formed the chief mass of those hills of rubbish which we now find on each of the four base-sides of the monument. There they cover up and preserve to future ages, perhaps on every flank of the building, important proofs of the ancient, exterior, structural architecture, such as Colonel Vyse did discover a portion of, when he cut into the covering of the northern side, the only one which has been penetrated yet.

But we are anticipating. From 1320 to 1398 A.D. things grew rather worse than better; and then began the line of Slave-Sultans, their whole families nothing but slaves, and recruited by continual importation of slaves through two hundred years. History presents, 126it is said, no other example of a sovereignty so ignoble and so lasting in its features of pessimist disgrace ; and when it presents us also, on one side with a picture of a sultan burned by his own guards, in “a pleasure-tower” he had built for himself on the banks of the Nile, he, on the roof promising all sorts of concessions to them if only they would not burn him, and they insisting on burning him then and there; and on another side with the picture of a sultana beaten to death by her female slaves with their wooden clogs, and her disfigured body thrown out and exposed for three days on the dustheaps outside the city—the imagination itself can hardly realize the degradation and baseness to which the ancient kingdom of the Pharaohs had arrived.

The Acme of the Burden of Egypt.

One woe is past, and there come two more woes hereafter, says St. John (Rev. ix.); for this was the time when the four angels of the Euphrates were to be loosed at last, with their army of horsemen two hundred thousand thousand, long since prepared for an hour, and a day, and a month, and a year (nearly four hundred years actual) to kill the third part of men. And the third part of men were killed by them, “by the fire, and by the smoke, and by the brimstone, which issued out of their mouths.”

In 1453 the Turks, first employing enormous siege guns, were, by taking Constantinople, and destroying the long-existent Greek or Lower Roman empire there, loosed for new and unrestrained destruction, on all sides. Against Europe first, but next against Egypt, which fell under their withering rule in 1517 A.D., when the last Slave-Sultan of Cairo was crucified over the gate of the common malefactors by Selim I., the Emperor of the Turks.

127But was that the end of the disgraces and base sufferings of Egypt? Far from it. In place of one slave-monarch, the Turks established in Egypt what amounted to a republic of petty, but innumerable slave-monarchs, to oppress the peaceable population, and fight with each other as much as they liked, so long only as certain tribute, ground by most pitiless tyranny from the peasant cultivators of the land, was sent to Constantinople.

Each Bey, says an acknowledged historian, was a tyrant in his own district, and they were all as tyrannical as their moral character was depraved. Frequently fighting with each other, often with their masters the Turks, against whom they were continually rebelling, Egypt suffered more under the Memlook Beys than through any period of its history. And this state of things continued up to the invasion of Egypt by Napoleon Bonaparte, with 70,000 burning red-republican soldiers from Paris, in 1798; when, at the battle of the Pyramids, the Memlook forces were first notably thinned. But they rose again to a head in one part of the country or another; until finally they were almost entirely extirpated by Mohammed Ali in 1811; leaving the residual and useful population of this once powerful, industrious and most densely inhabited, land of the early world to be summed up, in 1834, as no more than this:—

The European Mind enters into the Great Pyramid Question.

After the terrific ordeal that Egypt had passed through in Mohammedan times, it was more surprising perhaps 128that the population had not been entirely destroyed, than that the ancient Pyramids escaped almost unscathed. But the population of Egypt has still, by Divine command and prophecy, to exist and see far other events than any that have yet occurred in that wondrous land of old; while the Jeezeh Pyramids, though they were close at hand during all that murdering time past, were not attractive either to sabre or scimitar, being built of stone only, and planted in an actual desert land; in a rocky, sandy wilderness of a barren yellow-ochre colour, far and near, without a blade of grass or a drop of water, but with graves all around them; an entire region where no man was particularly called on to venture in at any time; and least of all in troublous, lawless periods.

Yet it was during that barbaric Turkish rule, of the almost republican Memlook Beys, that modern Europe began to move, modern science to grow, modern travel to be undertaken; and Professor Greaves's visit to the Great Pyramid in 1637 A.D. was an example which soon had imitators, increasing in numbers as the centuries passed by.

Again, too, we find the natural instinct of nations singles out the Great Pyramid as being far more interesting than any other monument of the general Pyramid kind; while in that one building again, the same empty stone chest, which had so affronted the Caliph Al Mamoun, still offered itself there in the interior, and the very farthest and crowning part of the interior too, as the chief object for explanation. Why was it in such a place of honour? Why was the whole Pyramid arranged in subservience to it? Why was it, this mere coffer-box, so unpretending and plain? Why was it empty, lidless, and utterly without inscription, continually demanded modern Europe?

Gradually the notion grew that it might be a 129sarcophagus; that it was a sarcophagus; and that it had been intended for “that Pharaoh who (in 1542 B.C.) drove the Israelites out of Egypt; and who, in the end, leaving his carcass in the Red Sea, never had the opportunity of being deposited in his own tomb.”

But this idea was effectually quashed, for, amongst other reasons, this cogent one,—that the Great Pyramid was not only built, but had been sealed up too in all its more special portions, long before the birth even of that Pharaoh. Nay, before the birth of Isaac and Jacob as well; which disposes likewise of the attempt to call the Great Pyramid “the tomb of Joseph,” whose mortal remains being carried away by the Israelites in their exodus, left the vacancy we now see in the coffer or stone box.

Then wrote some literati of 1650 A.D., “Here was buried King Cheops, or Chemmis, the Royal, and Fourth Dynasty, builder of the Great Pyramid according to the Greeks; but his body hath been removed hence.” Whereupon Professor Greaves pointed out “that Diodorus hath left, above 1,600 years since, a memorable passage concerning Chemmis (Cheops), the builder of the Great Pyramid, and Cephren (Shafre), the equally royal founder of the work adjoining. “Although,” saith he, “those kings intended these for their sepulchres, yet it happened that neither of them were buried there. For the people being exasperated against them by reason of the toilsomeness of these works, and for their cruelty and oppression, threatened to tear in pieces their dead bodies, and with ignominy to throw them out of their sepulchres. Whereupon both of them, dying, commanded their friends to bury them in an obscure place.”

And again, both Professor Greaves and other scholars salutarily brought up, to check the then public mania for calling the coffer Cheops’ coffin, the very clear 130The page shows "south-" at the end of a line and "east" at the start of the next, so the word is split by a line-end hyphen. A real compound would keep the hyphen. Compounds like this one ("south-east") were normally hyphenated in 1880 printing, so I read it as "south-east".

account of Herodotus, that King Cheops could not possibly have been buried in the Great Pyramid building above, simply because he was buried low down, in a totally different place; viz. “in a subterranean region, on an island there surrounded by the waters of the Nile.” And as that both necessarily and hydraulically means a level into which the Nile water could naturally flow, it must have been at a depth of more than fifty feet beneath the very bottom of even the unfinished subterranean chamber, the deepest work found yet underneath, or connected in any way with, the Great Pyramid. Exactly such a locality, too, both sepulchral, and with precisely the required hydraulic conditions, has since then been discovered about 1,000 feet south-east of the Pyramid building. (See Plate XIX.)

The structure there found, and still to be seen, descended into, and measured, though much defiled by the 26th and later Dynasties of ancient Egypt in its decline,—is a colossally large and deep burial pit, on the square and level bottom of which rests an antique, rude sarcophagus of very gigantic proportions. But deep as is the pit containing it, it is surrounded by a grand rectangular trench which goes down deeper still, cut cleanly in solid lime-stone rock the whole of the way down; and to such a depth does it reach at last as to descend below the level of the adjacent waters of the Nile at inundation time. Then, as the waters of that river necessarily percolate the hygroscopic rock of the hill up to their own level, the lower depths of the trench are filled with Nile water, and the grand old sarcophagus of the interior pit does then rest in a manner “on an island surrounded by the waters of the Nile,” exactly as Herodotus described;—and it is the only known tomb on the Jeezeh hill which is gifted with that peculiarity or privilege.

The Tombic Theory.

So in later years than Greaves', all the single sarcophagus propositions for the benefit of that most remakable stone chest in the red-granite chamber of the Great Pyramid having failed, their remains have been merged into a sort of general sarcophagus theory, that some one must have been buried in it. And this notion finds much favour with the Egyptologists, as a school; though facts are numerously against them, even to their own knowledge. They allow, for instance, that in no other Pyramid is the sarcophagus—as they boldly call the empty stone chest, or granite box, of other authors—contained high up in the body of the Pyramid, far above the surface of the ground outside; that in no other case¹ is it perfectly devoid of adornment or inscription; that in no other case, not even in the exception just alluded to in the note on the Second Pyramid, has the lid so strangely vanished; in no other case are the neighbouring walls and passages so devoid of hieratic and every other profane mythological emblem; in fact, they confess that the red granite coffer, with all that part of the Great Pyramid's chambers and ascending passages where it is found, is entirely unique, was unknown before Caliph Al Mamoun's day, and is strictly peculiar to the Great Pyramid.

Observe also with the alleged "sarcophagus," in the King's Chamber (for so is that apartment now most generally termed), that there was no ancient attempt to build the vessel up and about in solid masonry, in the most usual and truly effective manner for securing a dead body inviolate. On the contrary, there were magnificently built white-stone passages of a most lasting 132description, ready to lead a stranger right up to such far interior sarcophagus from the very entrance itself; while, more notably still, the shapely King’s Chamber was intended to be ventilated in the most admirable manner by the “air channels” discovered by Colonel Howard-Vyse, in 1837 A.D.; evidently (as the actual fact almost enables us to say with security) in order that men might come there in the latter day, and look on, and deal with, that open granite chest, and live and not die.

The Exclusively Tombic Theory receives a Shake.

Meanwhile, some few good men and true in scientific researches—witness M. Jomard in the celebrated “Description de l’Égypte,” and Sir Gardner Wilkinson in his own most deservedly popular works—had begun to express occasional doubts as to whether any dead body either of a king or of any other mortal man ever was deposited in the open vessel of the King’s Chamber.

The actual words of that most philosophic of all the Egyptologists, Sir G. Wilkinson (several years before Colonel Howard-Vyse’s unknowing discovery of the grand outside hydraulic tomb; which though he called it after a mere modern Consul, “Campbell’s tomb,” may now be more appropriately called by the name of him who was first connected with it, viz. King Cheops), Sir Gardner’s gentle words, we repeat, are: “The authority of Arab writers” (alluding to those who had described something like the dead body of a knight with a long sword and coat of mail being found in the coffer) “is not always to be relied on; and it may be doubted whether the body of the king was really deposited in the sarcophagus” (coffer) of the Great Pyramid.

Something of a metrological kind, again, was suggested by M. Jomard, to be signified by that hollow 133box; and had also been speculated on by Sir Isaac Newton more than a century earlier, but not followed up. While finally, Dr. Lepsius, as not only an Egyptologist of the perverse Pharaonic order, but one whom Gliddon states, with similar rationalistic pride, ‘‘has been justly termed, by the great Letronne, the hope of Egyptian study,” showed the usual Egyptological want of power for appreciating any higher or purer views, by temporarily planting a young palm-tree in the hollow of the ancient coffer. It was to act, he explained in his subsequent book, as a German Christmas-tree, when decorated with some baubles which he had bought in Cairo, as presents for himself and his Prussian friends; all of them copying ordinary hieroglyphics and pictures of social life from trifling neighbouring tombs.

John Taylor's Theory.

In the midst of such scenes, illustrating, unfortunately, what is actually going on, and chiefly applauded still, among the Egyptologists of the nineteenth century, comes out the late John Taylor with the result of his long and respectful researches; and suggests more or less that, ‘‘The coffer in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid was intended to be a standard measure of capacity and weight; primarily in a special, exclusive, or selective manner, but ultimately for all nations; and certain nations, he considered, did thence originally receive their weights and measures; so that those of them who still preserve, to some degree, with their language and history, their hereditary, aboriginal weights and measures, may yet trace their prehistoric connection substantially with that one primeval, standard, metrological centre for all the future world, the Great Pyramid.”

Take, for instance, our own case. When the British 134farmer measures the wheat which the bounty of Providence has afforded him as the increase of his land, in what terms does he measure it? In quarters.

Quarters! Quarters of what?

The existing British farmer does not know; for there is no capacity measure now on the Statute-book above the quarter; but, from old custom, he calls his largest corn measure a quarter.

Whereupon John Taylor adds in effect: “The quarter corn measures of the British farmer are fourth parts or quarters of the contents of the coffer in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid; and the true value, in size, of its particular corn measure, has not sensibly deteriorated during all the varied revolutions of mankind in the last 4,040 years!”

Practical Examination of John Taylor's Coffer Theory.

The above is a statement not to be implicitly accepted without a very full examination; and something in that way can fortunately be instituted very easily; as thus—

The first part of the problem is merely to determine the cubical contents of the vessel known successively, from Caliph Al Mamoun's day to our own, as the “sarcophagus,” “the empty box,” “the lidless stone chest,” or more philosophically and safely, so as not to entangle ourselves with any theory, “the coffer,” in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid.

From Colonel Howard-Vyse's important work are drawn forth and arranged, in the following table, all the chief mensurations taken between 1550 A.D. and 1840 A.D., some of the principal authors being consulted in their original writings. Their measures, generally given in feet, or feet and inches,* or mètres, are all

* The feet of all authors, when not otherwise particularised, have been here assumed as English feet, and in some cases may require a correction on that account, but not to any extent sufficient to explain the chief anomalies observed. 135here set down in British inches, to give a clearer view of the progress of knowledge in this particular matter. And now, our only bounds to exactness will be, the capability of these educated men of Europe to apply accurate instrumentation to a regularly formed and exquisitely prepared specimen of ancient mechanical art.

MODERN MEASURES OF THE GREAT PYRAMID COFFER UP TO A.D. 1864.

N.B.—A note of interrogation after any of the interior measures indicates that they have been obtained by applying to the exterior measures the “thickness” as given by the observer; such thickness being supposed to apply to the sides, and not to the bottom, which may be different.

Reflections on the Numbers as given above.

Look at them, then. Surely the list is not a little appalling. An ordinary carpenter amongst us uses sixteenths of an inch quite fluently, and sometimes undertakes to make a special piece of cabinet work “fit to half a sixteenth”: but our learned travellers 136commit errors of many whole inches; and this when they are voluntarily, and of their own prompting only, measuring the one and only internal object which they found to measure, or thought should be described by measure, in the whole interior of the Great Pyramid.

My own part here must be very gently performed; for I have my measures to produce by-and-by, none of them perfectly exact; and yet even I feel compelled to say, that out of the twenty-five quoted authors no less than twenty-two must be discharged summarily as quite incompetent, whatever their mental attainments otherwise, to talk before the world about either size or proportion in any important practical matter.

Professor Greaves in 1638, the French Academicians in 1799, and Colonel Howard-Vyse in 1837, are therefore the only three names that deserve to live as coffer measurers, in the course of 250 years of legions of educated European visitors. Of these three parties thus provisionally accepted, the foremost position might have been expected for the Academicians of Paris. Professor Greaves lived before the day of European science proper. While Colonel Howard-Vyse did not lay himself out for very refined measurements; but rather went through what he felt himself obliged to undertake in that direction, in the same fearless, thorough-going, artless but most honest manner in which the Duke of Wellington was accustomed to review a picture exhibition in London; beginning with No. 1 in the catalogue, and going through with the whole of them conscientiously to the very last number on the list.

The Colonel’s measures, therefore, are respectable and solidly trustworthy with regard to large quantities, but not much more.

With the French Academicians it is quite another thing; they were the men, and the successors of the men, who had been for generations measuring arcs of 137the meridian, and exhausting all the refinements of microscopic bisections and levers of contact in determining the precise length of standard scales. Their measures, therefore, ought to be true to the thousandth, and even the ten-thousandth part of an inch: and perhaps they are so, in giving the length and breadth of the coffer; but, alas! in their statements of the depth inside and the height outside, there seems to have been some incomprehensible mistake committed, amounting to nearly three whole inches.

Under such circumstances, and after having failed to obtain any satisfactory explanation from the Perpetual Secretary of the Academy in Paris, I have been compelled to discharge the French Academy, also, from the list of fully trustworthy competitors for usefulness and fame in Pyramid-coffer metrology. Only two names, therefore, are left—Howard-Vyse, who has been already characterized, and Greaves, in whom we have most fortunately a host indeed.

Of Professor Greaves, the Eastern-travelling Oxford Astronomer in 1637.

Living as he did before the full birth of European science, but on the edge of an horizon which is eventful in scientific history; with an unusual knowledge too of Oriental languages, and a taste for travelling in the then turbulent regions of the East, Professor Greaves belongs almost to the heroic time. Immediately behind him were, if not the dark ages, the scholastic periods of profitless verbal disquisitions; and in front, to be revealed after his death, were the germs of the mechanical and physical natural philosophy which have since then changed the face of the world. There is no better a life-point that can be taken than Greaves's, whereby to judge what Europe has gained by the exercise of civil 138and religious liberty, coupled with the study of nature direct, through two and a half centuries of unrestricted opportunity. When as much more time has passed over the world as now separates us from Greaves's age, then, if not rather much sooner than then—say all the safest interpreters of the sacred prophecies—a further Divine, and hitherto unexampled, step in the development of the Christian dispensation will have commenced.

Now almost every other visitor to the Great Pyramid, both before and since Greaves, paid vastly more attention to the exterior, than the interior, of the coffer; but Professor Greaves, fortunately for our present inquiry, attended chiefly to its interior, and wrote thereon most particularly, thus:—‘‘It is in length on the west side, six feet, and four hundred and eighty-eight parts of the English foot, divided into a thousand parts” (that is, 6 feet, and 488 of 1,000 parts of a foot); ‘‘in breadth at the north end, two feet, and two hundred and eighteen parts of the foot divided into a thousand parts” (that is, 2 feet, and 218 of 1,000 parts of the English foot). ‘‘The depth is 2 feet and 860 of 1,000 parts of the English foot.”

And he defends his rather round-about method of statement in this instance by adding, so characteristically for his pre-Newtonian day in science: ‘‘In the reiteration of these numbers, if any shall be offended either with the novelty or tediousness of expressing them so often, I may justify myself by the example of Ulug Beg, nephew of Timurlane the Great (for so is his name, and not Tamerlane), and Emperor of the Moguls, or Tatars (whom we term amiss Tartars). For I find in his astronomical tables (the most accurate of any in the East), made about two hundred years since, the same course observed by him when he writes of the Grecian, Arabian, and Persian epochas, as also those of Cataia 139and Turkistan. He expresseth the numbers at large, as I have done; then in figures, such as we call Arabian, ————, which manner I judge worthy of imitation, in all such numbers as are radical, and of more than ordinary use.”

Greaves's and Vyse's Coffer Capacity Determinations.

Hence we have for the cubical contents of the coffer in even English inches, deduced from Greaves's original full measures, in 1838—

And by Howard-Vyse's measures, just as taken in 1837—

Several small corrections may possibly be applicable to these mere numbers as simply read off; but for the present we may provisionally accept for a first approximation the simple mean of the above statements, or 71,214 cubic inches, as the apparent capacity contents of the coffer of the King's Chamber.

Wherefore now, what proportion does that number bear to the capacity of four modern English corn quarters, in terms of which British wheat is measured and sold at this very hour?

Referring to the almanac for the Act of Parliament on the subject, we find that one gallon is declared to be equal to 277.274 cubic inches; which quantity being multiplied for bushels, quarters, and four quarters, yields 70,982.144 English cubic inches. Whence the degree of agreement between a quarter modern British, and a fourth part of the ancient coffer, or granite box, and possible type of a both primeval and prophetic corn-measure in the Great Pyramid, is at this present time as $17,746 : 17,804$.

Qualities of the Coffer’s “Quarter” Measure.

A sufficiently fair amount of agreement is this, between the things compared (viz. the Pyramid coffer on one side divided into four from the first decently good measures of any modern savants; and on the other, the old Anglo-Saxon corn-measure, after being too often “adjusted” by Acts of Parliament, since those halcyon days of rest when Edgar “the peaceable” reigned over England at Winchester, 958—975 A.D.),—sufficiently near, I repeat, to allow friends of worthy old John Taylor to say that so far the Great Pyramid, with its coffer of four British corn-quarter capacity, if originally intended for it, is still capable of fulfilling the purpose of one of the Greek interpretations of its now world-famous name, in meting out, πυρὸς, corn.

To nations in a primitive condition, the first application of capacity measures would, with little doubt, be in the exchange of corn; and through whatever subsequent stage of power, luxury, or refinement they may pass, the measuring of the staff of life will probably still keep up a permanent importance over every other object of measuring or weighing, even though it be of drugs, or silver, or gold,—in perfect accordance so far with our Lord’s Prayer, where the only material supplication is, “Give us day by day our daily bread.”

Yet is it to be also remarked, that if any given means for measuring corn were devised by a very superior intelligence, they should eventually be found applicable also, so far as principles of, and capacity for, accuracy go, to many of the more precise purposes to which the after progress of mankind may introduce them.

Thus, the moon, with its frequently recurring variations and phases, serves man in the savage, and did serve him in the primitive and patriarchal, state, as a 141coarse method of chronicling time month by month. In a more developed and civilized condition, some of the larger cycles of lunations enable him to speak exactly of many years at a time, and approximate to some eclipses. In a still further advanced condition, the moon's subsidiary features of movement enable the educated mariner in the midst of the broad surface of ocean, assisted by data from the astronomer and mathematician on shore, to measure his precise longitude. Next, amongst the ablest minds of the present day, the theory of those movements and the computation of their nature, form an arena where every chief mathematician of his country may measure off his own intellectual height at the base of an infinite cliff which he may never hope to stand on the summit of. And finally, some of the most remarkable of the inspired predictions of both Daniel and St. John, as well as the Scriptural history of men in the past, are found to have been arranged by the Creator, from the beginning of all things, to be, in some almost inscrutable manner, coincident with certain combinations of Lunar with Solar-Lunar cycles, of still more lengthened period.²

In exact proportion, therefore, as man has become able to profit by God's moon, which he, man, originally believed was merely intended to slightly moderate for him the darkness of night, so has the divinely appointed luminary been found capable of more and more applications; and whenever any difficulty has occurred, it has never been any want of perfect accuracy in the lunar machinery itself, but merely in the power of man to interpret the working of it. And when at last, as in the present day, his powers in that line have become considerable, he then begins to find symptoms in the Book of Inspiration, that there was an Intelligence 142there, which knew it long ago; and that man cannot break out of the limits appointed him by God, either in time or space or harmony of surroundings.

Is there, then, anything approaching to the same suggestive principle connected with the coffer “ corn-measure” of the Great Pyramid?

That may probably come out as we proceed with our grand research; but wherein we may first have to descend to some of the minutest of details, if we are to arrive at satisfactory certainty at last.