CHAPTER XXII.

THE SHEPHERD KINGS,

The Architect of the Great Pyramid; and the Deluge Date.

Of certain Human Remains found at the Third Pyramid of Jeezeh.

In the Third Pyramid of Jeezeh—admired by the sadly Egyptological Baron Bunsen, on account of its expensive red-granite casing, and because its hieroglyphic name amongst the old Egyptian idolaters was HIR, “the Superior,” far above the Great Pyramid and all its intellectual excellencies—Colonel Howard-Vyse found, not only the genuine sepulchral, dark grey stone, sarcophagus, rich in carvings and adornments, like a miniature Egyptian temple in itself (afterwards lost at sea off the coast of Spain) together with parts of the carved, painted and inscribed coffin-board, but—a portion of a mummy as well.

In that case, of what, or of whom, was such mummified fragment, the very remain?

“Of King Mencheres,” instantly insisted every Egyptologist, “for he, Men-kau-ra, Mencheres, or Mycerinus, it was, who built the Third Pyramid some 60 years after the Great one had been erected.” Whereupon the remains were transmitted with honour to the British Museum; and the learned Baron, in his “Egypt’s Place in History,” has an eloquent eulogium on the “pious” king whose ancient remains, if removed at 514last out of their old mausoleum, are now vastly safer in the distant isle of the Queen-ruled empire whose free institutions continually preserve her liberty and renew her prosperity, than ever they were before, in the Egyptian central land and his own strong Pyramid therein.

But here William Osburn (whom Bunsen never liked) steps in with the wholesome reminder, that none of the mummies really of the Old Empire have come down to our age; their bodies, fragrant for awhile with spices and myrrh, sooner or later returned, dust to dust; and a little of such powdery matter, dark in colour, at the bottom of sarcophagi, is all that has yet been discovered in any of the tombs of the earliest period. It was reserved, says he, to the over-clever Egyptians of the New Empire, when Thebes rose above Memphis, to discover the too efficacious method of embalming with natron—a method which has enabled the bodies of that later period to last down to our times; and has thereby put it into the power of fanatic Mohammedans to treat visibly and palpably Pharaonic corpses with every contumely; so that male and female, old and young, rich and poor, are dragged out of all their decent cerements, to be exposed in these latter days on the dunghill, to be utterly cursed as “Kaffirs,” infidels, and dogs, or finally broken up for fuel.

Wherefore the parts of a particular body, anomalously found in pretty tough preservation, without either spices or natron, but dried only, by Colonel Vyse in the Third Pyramid, could not have belonged to either King Mencheres or any of his subjects: or to any genuine Egyptian so early as the fourth dynasty. But presently this further discovery was made, that the cloth in which the remains were wrapped up, and loosely, rather than genuinely bandaged, was not composed of the proverbial linen of ancient Egypt, but of sheep’s wool,—a 515textile material which was a religious abomination to all Pharaonic Egyptians.

Then wrote certain scholars, quickly framing up a theory to suit the occasion, “Both King Mencheres and all the other Jeezeh Pyramid builders must have been, not Egyptians, but of that ancient and most mysterious class of invaders of, or immigrants into, ancient Egypt, the Hyksos, or Shepherd Kings.”

How little is positively known of them, may appear from one modern author, who writes,—

“When investigating the early history of the world, the Hyksos cross our path like a mighty shadow; advancing from native seats to which it baffled the geography of antiquity to assign a position, covering for a season the shores of the Mediterranean and the banks of the Nile with the terror of their arms and the renown of their conquests, and at length vanishing with a mystery equal to that of their first appearance.”

While the learned Dr. Hincks writes, “Later investigations have rather increased than removed my difficulties; and, as a matter of argument, it would be indifferent to me to sustain, that the Hyksos once occupied Lower Egypt; or that they were never there at all.”

A sad example this of primeval history as prepared for the world by purely literary men; but Dr. Hincks was perhaps more of an Assyrian, than an Egyptian, scholar; and the better Egyptologists, especially those who have travelled, and studied the larger Egyptian monuments in situ, have no doubt whatever about a period of Hyksos’ rule in Egypt just before the time of the Israelites’ captivity, and perhaps including a part of it. They consider, indeed, that there is still monumentally visible the most decided separation between the Old and New Empires of Ancient Egypt, caused altogether by the temporary domination just then of those whom they call the “Shepherds”; for 516they drop the aggrandising word of “Kings,” as needless, when talking of those who, if there at all, ruled on the banks of the Nile with a rod of iron through at least two successive dynasties, viz. the 15th and 16th; and caused an almost total blank or perversion for that period in the architectural history, as well as much modification in the religion, of all the Lower and Middle country.

Of the precise nature of that change and the origin of the party bringing it about, William Osburn has some special ideas, which, with more space at command, we might do well to inquire into; though now, as the limits of this book are drawing to a close, and as he agrees with nearly all the other Egyptologists as to what dynasties such party occupied, viz. the 15th, 16th, and perhaps part of the 17th,—we may rest assured that all men of those dynasties, whether they were native or foreign Shepherds, lived far too late in the world’s history (viz. 300 to 400 years) to have had any hand in building the Jeezeh Pyramids under the much earlier fourth dynasty.

Hence the Shepherds whom Colonel Vyse alludes to (on the strength of the woollen-wrapped body from the Third Pyramid), if ever really existing, must have been, in order to have helped to build the Pyramids, of a period belonging to the said very early fourth dynasty; and were therefore earlier than, and totally different, in time and fact, from, all the later Shepherds so well known to Egyptologists.

That these later, or 15th, 16th, and 17th dynasty Shepherds did not build the Jeezeh, or indeed any of the Egyptian, Pyramids, does not by itself overthrow the whole theory, or possibility of there having been a much earlier, and quite distinct, Shepherd invasion, or temporary rule of Hyksos in Lower Egypt, and perhaps even during the 4th, or chief Pyramid-building, 517dynasty; for pastoral tribes existed in the East from the remotest times, and were much endued with tendencies to western emigration. But whether they really did enter Egypt in force during the 4th dynasty, must be settled on direct evidence of its own. Such evidence, indeed, the worthy Colonel thought he had obtained; though now we may see clearly that his reasoning was founded too much on the piece of flannel, and too little on the whole of the grand masonried facts of the Great Pyramid and their purity from all idolatry, no matter whether of Egyptians or any other of the then existing peoples of the world; whereupon he soon loses himself in illogical conclusions; arguing in a preconceived circle, thus:—

“It has been assumed (in my, Howard-Vyse’s, opinion satisfactorily) by Bryant, that these mighty Shepherds (his supposed Pyramid builders in the 4th dynasty) were the descendants of Ham, expelled, on account of apostasy and rebellion, from Babel, from Egypt, and from Palestine; and who afterwards, under the name of Cyclopes, Pelasgi, Phœnices, &c., were pursued by Divine vengeance, and successively driven from every settled habitation—from Greece, from Tyre, and from Carthage, even to the distant regions of America, where traces of their buildings, and, it has been supposed, of their costume, as represented in Egyptian sculpture, have been discovered. These tribes seem formerly to have been living instances of Divine retribution, as the dispersed Jews are at present. They appear to have been at last entirely destroyed; but their wanderings and misfortunes have been recorded by the ever-living genius of the two greatest poets in the Greek and Latin languages; and the Pyramids remain, enduring yet silent monuments of the matchless grandeur of this extraordinary people, of the certainty of Divine justice, and of the truth of Revelation.”

518But while it is perfectly impossible that such sinful men could have been the genuine and original authors of all the pure and holy features we have found in the one, almost if not quite Israelitic, Great Pyramid,—or that Hamitic Cainites would have found any difficulty in amalgamating with the Mizraite, and also Hamitic Egyptians,—it is most satisfactory to know that the mere piece of woollen cloth found in the Third Pyramid can be explained in a much easier manner than by going up in the teeth of ancient masonried, and other physical facts, to the primeval antiquity of the world; or thus:—

“The remains found by Colonel Vyse were those of a mediæval Arab, who, having died at Caliph Al Mamoun’s breaking into the Third Pyramid, was straightway wrapped up in his own burnouse, and thrust down the entrance-passage for his burial, when the Mohammedan workmen came away and closed the place up, as it turned out, for 1,000 years. And if the poor man’s bones are so well preserved as to have allowed of their safe transport to London, it is on account of the short time they have been sepultured, compared with anything belonging to the real fourth dynasty and the building of its Pyramids.”

Of Primeval Shemite Shepherds.

That simple explanation, therefore, completely settles the value of the mistaken Egyptological lumber on the shelves at the British Museum; but leaves us still with an historical question on our hands, as to whether there were, after all, any Hyksos, or Shepherd Kings, from the East, descendants, too, of Shem, rather than Ham (for of Hamites there were always enough and to spare, keepers of their own sheep too, in the persons of the Egyptians themselves), in Egypt during the fourth dynasty?

519Some strangers from the eastern direction were, indeed, continually filtering into Lower Egypt through the Isthmus of Suez, the natural channel of immigration in all ages from Asia, and the path by which the Egyptians themselves had originally come. But it is our more particular business now to ascertain, if possible, whether during the period of that particular fourth dynasty, say from 2300 to 2100 B.C. (or an age, distinctly and certainly, long previous to the calling of Abraham), there were any remarkable Eastern men in position of lordly rule or trusted power, or any notoriety in the Egyptian land. Were there, for instance, any notable Shemites ever there, before Abraham and before Joseph? and if so, let us inquire whether they either had, in the general estimation of all men, anything to do with the building of the Great Pyramid; or were likely to have been able to furnish any part of its design, as now being manifested by modern science? And especially, had they any direct interest in preserving that Pyramid’s religiously pure character, in the midst of an age and a nation given up to the worst forms of idolatry?

What, then, does history say to the point?

History is scanty enough, every one will allow, for all times before Abraham; and though something may be occasionally made out for even those dates in such a land as Egypt, it is to be gained, even there, only by a conflict with difficulties. There is actually a dispute, for instance, between the Egyptologists on one side, and Alexandrian-Greek classics on the other, whether there was ever a fourth dynasty at all; or whether the Kings, whose names the former party puts into that early dynasty, and supposed exclusive Memphian locality, did not live at Thebes, as Theban kings, and after other known members of the certainly very late 18th dynasty. We must, therefore, when everything is disputed or disputable, interrogate either party very closely.

Egyptologic Details of Early Kings.

To begin with the Egyptologists: the literary foundations for what they assert of such far earlier days as those of the building of the Great Pyramid, are confined to Manetho (270 B.C.), or to what has come down to us of his own writings, in remnants of other authors 300 or 400 years later still; and whose words may be conveniently examined in the valuable, though terse (and terse because there was nothing else quotable for very early times) volume of “Fragments,” by Isaac Preston Cory, of Caius College, Cambridge (1832 A.D.).

There then, most undoubtedly, a fourth dynasty is mentioned; but it begins with a puzzling statement; for while the third dynasty is simply said to be composed of so many Memphite kings, and the fifth dynasty of so many Elephantine kings, this fourth dynasty is stated to be composed of “eight Memphite kings of a different race.”

This is a curious statement, and I do not know what it precisely means; but the list proceeds as follows for the kings concerned:—

(1) Soris reigned 29 years.

(2) Suphis reigned 63 years. He built the largest Pyramid; which Herodotus says was constructed by Cheops. He was arrogant towards the gods, and wrote the sacred book; which is regarded by the Egyptians as a work of great importance.

(3) Suphis II. reigned 66 years.

(4) Mencheres 63 years.

(5) Rhatoeses 25 years.

(6) Bicheres 22 years.

(7) Sebercheres 7 years.

(8) Thampthis 9 years.

Altogether 284 years.

This literary foundation the Egyptologists further contend that they can confirm in all its main particulars from the monuments; by finding, even in the Great Pyramid itself, evidently alluded to by Manetho, 521rude original quarry-marks with two royal names, which they interpret Shofo and Noumshofo, and declare to be the two Suphises mentioned above; while they find the further royal name of Mencheres in the Third Pyramid, notoriously a later construction than both the Great and Second Pyramids; which Second Pyramid is elsewhere attributed to Suphis II., as the Great one is here to Suphis I.

But the rest of the sentence attached to the name of the first Suphis is a difficulty which the Egyptologists cannot altogether master. They can understand, for instance, easily enough, that he either built the Great Pyramid, or reigned while it was being built; but what was his “arrogance towards the gods”? and what were the contents of “his sacred book”?

Of all these things the Egyptologists know nothing from contemporary monuments; although they can adduce abundant proof therefrom, that Mencheres of the Third Pyramid was an out-and-out idolater of the most confirmed Egyptian type. This was the “piety” which Baron Bunsen praised; while Osburn, though he very seriously condemned, rather than praised, so far allowed what the other Egyptologists founded upon,—that he shows, at much length, King Mencheres to have been,—not indeed the original inventor and theotechnist of animal and other gods for his countrymen,—but the greatest codifier in all history, and the chief organizer into systems, of those idolatrous things. He, Mencheres, was the establisher, too, of a state priesthood for those things’ continual service; and was an immense extender of the Egyptian mythological arrangements into new and mysterious ramifications; the very man, in fact, who put Mizraite idolatry into that ensnaring form and artistical condition with the woman Isis, the man Osiris, the child Horus, the monster Typhon, Nephthys, and all the rest of his human-mind inventions, in addition to the 522older Apis and Mnevis, bulls, and the Mendesian goat, that it became the grand national and lasting system of his country,—monopolizing the souls of all Egyptians for two thousand years, and even then dying hard; besides making the Pharaohs the anti-Israel’s-God-contending kings they ever after proved to be.

Mencheres was, in point of fact, in and for the land of the Nile, just what the too eloquent author of that most misleadingly named book, “Juventus Mundi,” with such longing admiration amounting almost to ill-concealed envy, describes Homer, in a far later age, to have been for the Greeks in similar “theotechny”; or in making up, out of his own mind, with some assistance from old traditions, such an enticing set of gods and goddesses, demigods and nymphs of all degrees, that his countrymen took to them at once with enthusiasm, and their descendants have not even yet, though claiming to be Christians, freed themselves from some of their trammels. Wherefore, worldly success in that theotechnic line, ethereal art, or elevated occupation, as it is according to him, but much more probably an abomination before God,—the late English Prime Minister (unhappily not seeing it in that light) declares to be a far more noble, more satisfying pinnacle for human ambition, than any amount of excellence or proficiency whatever, either in poetry or prose, civil administration, or even military glory.

But let us steadily pursue our own far more ancient path of inquiry into primeval Eastern, as well as early Egyptian, life.

Of King Mencheres, of the Third Pyramid of Jeezeh, we know, as already indicated, far too much for his credit among any real believers in the Divine origin of the Christian religion, and the preparations Divinely made for it “from the beginning of the world.” But of Shofo the hieroglyphists can pick up but little, if 523anything, positively of that debasing kind of information. The worship, indeed, of bulls and goats had been already set up in Egypt during the previous (the third) dynasty, so that he found it in force on succeeding to the throne. Wherefore the practice perhaps went on during his reign also, until at least such time as he is reported, amongst the idolaters and the sons of idolaters, —on one hand to have become “arrogant towards the gods”; and on the other, to have shamefully closed their temples and stopped their public worship; as we shall presently see detailed on turning to the Classic authorities.

Classic Names for Early Egyptian Kings.

Amongst all these classic authors, indeed—i.e. men who either were Greeks or followed the Greeks, and did not know Egyptian—whether with Herodotus in 445 B.C., Eratosthenes 236 B.C., Diodorus Siculus 60 B.C., and Strabo o B.C., there is no fourth dynasty at all: nor, for that matter, any allusion to any dynasty or arrangement by dynasties whatever. While the chronological order of the kings by name, is at one point altogether dislocated from its sequence in the Manethoan dynasties. The kings’ names of the very early fourth dynasty of the Egyptologists, and with Pyramid building accompanying them, being, with the classicists, placed after those which are found in the comparatively late nineteenth dynasty of the same Egyptologists.

Sir Gardner Wilkinson¹ explains this terrible anachronism for Herodotus (and if for him, for all his copying fellow-countrymen and successors at the same time), by suggesting that he (Herodotus) was furnished by the Egyptian priests with two separate lists of kings’ names; 524and as they read out to him (through his interpreter, he not understanding Egyptian) the later one first, why he, putting them all down in faith as he heard them in one long row, of course, got the old Memphite sovereigns coming in after the more modern Thebans. The priests began with those recent Theban kings of the 19th dynasty, because they were fresh in their memory; and they remembered well the glorious times of their priestly order under those reigns; whereof, too, they told the innocent Halicarnassian a variety of pleasant, gossiping tales; and only when that stock of stories was ended did they touch, very unwillingly, on the early Memphite kings, chiefly of the fourth dynasty, and described the hard times the priests had had under them.

Some such explanation, too, of the dislocated chronology of the Greek-related history of old Egypt, must apparently be the true one; for the whole philosophy of architecture, as elaborated on ten thousand examples by James Fergusson, architect, makes it as impossible historically and mechanically for the Pyramids of Lower Egypt to have followed the palace-temples and sculpture of Upper Egypt,—as historically, politically, and socially it is utterly impossible, that after Thebes had once risen to supreme power in Egypt, the rulers there would have allowed by far the chief work of their age to be executed on the borders of their kingdom, in the “ provinces,” or near the then ancient, decaying, and conquered city of Memphis. As well might we expect the British Parliament to give its largest grants for the year to Edinburgh, instead of London; and men will most assuredly have to wait until the whole river of history passes by, and runs itself absolutely dry, before we see such a phenomenon as that; although, too, Scotland was never fairly conquered; and deserves far better of London, than ever Memphis did of Thebes.

Setting aside, then, agreeably with Sir Gardner 525Wilkinson and all the Egyptologists this one large fault, or mistaken order of a group of the Egyptian kings in Greek and classic authors,—from Herodotus in 445 B.C., down to the Rev. Mr. Galloway and Mr. Samuel Sharpe, in 1869 A.D.,—as simply and altogether a book-mistake of theirs, we shall find in the smaller details, subsequently to the dislocation date, much agreement. As, for instance, in the names of the three successive kings of the three chief and successive Pyramids of Jeezeh; which kings' names are always given in their proper, or both monumental, hieroglyphic, and Manethoan sequence to each other; though the scholars have certainly agreed to accept a remarkable variety of names as meaning the same word or man; as thus:—

NAMES OF THE BUILDERS OF THE THREE LARGEST PYRAMIDS OF JEEZEH, ACCORDING TO VARIOUS AUTHORITIES.

The Lives of the Kings.

But what, after all, is there in a name? It is the character of each individual king, no matter of how many names, which we require; and especially if there be any further indications thereby accessible, which may 526betoken whether that royal personage could have both designed, and built, the Great Pyramid.

There the conversational style of Herodotus, dipping deep into the feelings of men, will serve us better than the bald rigidity of hieroglyphic inscriptions; though, as Herodotus gathered up everything without sifting it, and as between the purposed falsities of what the idolatrous Egyptian priests often related to him, in a language which he did not understand, and his cunning interpreter did not faithfully translate to him,—it is little more than the involuntary evidence, under cross-examination, that can be trusted. Here, however, as a beginning, are his own simple statements:—

(124) “‘Cheops,” according to the Egyptian priests,* “on ascending the throne, plunged into all manner of wickedness. He closed the temples, and forbade the Egyptians to offer sacrifice, compelling them instead to labour one and all in his service; viz. in building the Great Pyramid.”²

(128) “‘Cheops reigned fifty years; and was succeeded by his brother Chephren, who imitated the conduct of his predecessor, built a pyramid —but smaller than his brother’s—and reigned fifty-six years. Thus, during 106 years the temples were shut and never opened.”

(129) “‘After Chephren, Mycerinus, son of Cheops, ascended the throne. He reopened the temples, and allowed the people to resume the practice of sacrifice. He, too, left a pyramid, but much inferior in size to his father’s. It is built, for half of its height, of the stone of Ethiopia;” i.e. expensive red granite.

(136) “‘After Mycerinus, Asychis ascended the throne. He built the eastern gateway of the Temple of Vulcan (Phtha); and being desirous of eclipsing all his predecessors on the throne, left, as a monument of his reign, a pyramid of brick.”

Now here we have four successive kings, each of whom erected a Pyramid; and the last of them entered into the work no less enthusiastically than the first. Therefore it could not have been Pyramid-building in itself, or as known to, and understood by, the natives, which had the discriminating effect of causing the last two kings to be approved, and the first two to be hated, 527by all Egyptians; and to that terrible and intense degree described by successive classic authors. This difference of estimation must have risen from some striking and radical difference of proceeding in either pair of kings. Now such an opposite manner is most religiously found in this circumstance, so clearly though succinctly alluded to by Herodotus; viz. that the first two kings closed the temples, and stopped the worship of the bulls, cats, goats, beetles, and other detestable Egyptian gods; while the last two kings reopened those temples, enlarged them, expensively beautified them, and re-established the soul-degrading theotechnic inventions of Egypt in greater splendour than ever. This too, those later kings did, with effrontery, for all those Egyptian animal gods: though it was their statues, of gold, and silver, of wood incrusted with pearls, of granite and basalt, porphyry, sandstone, and limestone, which were the very idols which the Lord declares in prophecy for the latter day “He will destroy, and cause their images to cease out of Noph.”

The Right Man at last.

But there is more than this to be gathered from the classic records; for next comes up among them a something most suggestive, to the extent of a ray of positive light, upon that very question which, even to the intelligent, though Pagan, Diodorus Siculus, was so much more important than who were the kings who ordered, viz. who were the architects who designed, or built, or superintended the building of, the Pyramids; as he says in the plural; the Great Pyramid, we are content alone to name. For Herodotus further states:—

(128) “The Egyptians so detest the memory of those (the first two) kings (Cheops and Chephren), that they do not much like even to mention their names. Hence, they commonly call the Pyramids (the Great and the Second) after Philition (or Philitis), a shepherd who at that time fed his flocks about the place.”

528Seldom has a more important piece of truth, than this touching Philitis, been issued in a few words. Sir G. Wilkinson, in his note to that passage,³ allows at once the Hyksosian, or Shepherd-royal, character of a stranger who could be so distinguished in connection with the greatest of the monuments of Egypt; and is only anxious to guard his readers as to the particular personage alluded to, having really lived in the early fourth dynasty; and not having been one of those later, better known, but totally different individuals who figured as the Shepherd Kings in the 15th, 16th, and 17th dynasties. While Mr. Rawlinson, in another note on the same page, seems equally ready to allow,—not only that Philitis was a Shepherd-Prince from Palestine, and perhaps of Philistine descent,—but so powerful and domineering, that it may be traditions of his oppressions in that earlier age, which mixed up afterwards in the minds of Theban Egyptians with the evils inflicted on their country by the subsequent Shepherds of the later, better-known dynasties; and lent so much of actual fear to aliment their religious hate of “Shepherd” times and the Hyksos name.

If this theory of Mr. Rawlinson’s be correct, we may learn something further of the Great Pyramid’s fourth dynasty, Shepherd-Prince, Philitis—by attending to certain of the things which Manetho has written of the subsequent Shepherds; and especially by eliminating therefrom certain features which cannot by any possibility be true of those men such as they were in that later day. For thus wrote the Sebennyte priest:²

“We had formerly a king whose name was Timeus. In his time it came to pass, I know not how, that God was displeased with us: and there came up from the 529East, in a strange manner, men of an ignoble race, who had the confidence to invade our country, and easily subdued it by their power without a battle."

This, it will be observed, is a very peculiar phrase; and lends much colour to the suggestion that Philitis was enabled to exert a certain amount of mental control over King Shofo and his Egyptian people; not by the vulgar method of military conquest, but by some supernatural influence in connection with the service of the one and only true God.

"All this invading nation," Manetho goes on to say, "was styled Hycsos, that is, Shepherd Kings; for the first syllable, Hyc, in the sacred dialect denotes a king: and Sos signifies a shepherd, but this only according to the vulgar tongue; and of these is compounded the term Hycsos: some say they were Arabians."

Yet if they were Arabians, why did they not return to Arabia, when they afterwards, "to the number of not less than 240,000, quitted Egypt by capitulation, with all their families and effects"? And went—where to? "To Judæa, and built there," says Manetho, "a city of sufficient size to contain this multitude of men, and named it Jerusalem." ⁴

Now here is surely a most important tale, if anything written in books by ancient authors is worthy of modern attention. For, making all due allowance for some of the references, and much of the expressed hate and abuse being due to the more modern and largely native ² Egyptian Shepherds of the 15th to the 17th dynasties (and who, according to W. Osburn, were in the end chiefly conquered and oppressed within the bounds of Lower Egypt by invasions of Thebans and fanatic Ethiopians), we have as much as testifies to the earlier and truer Shepherd-Prince Philitis, after having long 530mentally and physically controlled King Shofo during the very time that the Great Pyramid was building,—to that Prince, or King, Philitis, I say, then leaving the country with a high hand, or by special agreement, with all his people and flocks,—proceeding to Judæa, and building there a city which he named Jerusalem ; and which must have at once taken a high standing among the primeval cities of the earth, if he made it large enough to contain not less than 240,000 persons.

Of some of the Earlier Divinely assisted Departures out of Egypt, before the Mosaic.

Now the man who executed such a work as that just described, after assisting at the foundation of the Great Pyramid in 2170 B.C., must have been a very remarkable contemporary nearly of, but rather older than, the Patriarch Abraham, according to the best Biblical chronology. And the Bible does contain some slight allusions to certain persons having been brought out of, or assisted to escape from, Egypt at that very early time by the special favour of the God of Israel.

In Deuteronomy, chap. ii., for instance, there appears something possibly of this kind; when Moses (in 1542 B.C., or rather later), encouraging the Israelites to be of good heart in their march, under Divine favour, out of Egypt into Palestine,—mentions two other and long-preceding occasions on which God had shown similar favour to other peoples, and they were established successfully in consequence.

First "the children of Esau"; and afterwards, "the Caphtorims, which came forth out of Caphtor." Or, as alluded to again, long after the times of the Exodus (in Amos ix. 7), "Have not I (the Lord) brought up Israel out of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor?"

This Caphtor alluded to on both occasions, is generally 531considered to mean Egypt, the Pyramid region, too, of Lower Egypt; and although, in the one instance, the people are spoken of as Caphtorim, that may imply, not necessarily native Egyptians, but men who had been sojourning in their country for a long season; even as the testimony of Herodotus infers that Philitis (a name looked on by some as implying a Philistian descent or country), with his flocks and herdsmen (appropriately then called Philistines in Caphtor), had been doing, during all the thirty years occupied so Prometheanly, first in the preparations for, and then the building up of, the Great Pyramid as a Prophetical Monument: a lasting record in stone which was only to be understood in the latter days of the world; but was then to bear signal witness to every fact of the Christian Dispensation having been ordained, established, and prepared for in primeval times, before the beginning of history.

In short, the Biblical evidence, possibly touching on the architectship of this mighty monument of sacred and prophetic purport, is deserving of more intimate and peculiar study than we have yet bestowed upon it. As a preliminary part of it too, we may at once take up a point connected with the earliest chronological date possible for any of the remains of religious man upon this earth, wherein the Great Pyramid seems to furnish forth most useful and salutary guidance.

The World’s Chronology previous to the Great Pyramid’s date.

Up to the present chapter, and except for the purpose of disproving the enormous dates asserted by the Egyptologists for the Great Pyramid itself (see p. 491), we have not ascended higher in real time than the Pyramid’s own simple, and true, date, 2170 B.C.—a date entirely agreeable with Biblical chronology.

532But the Bible dates begin at a far earlier epoch than that. As both learnedly interpreted and philosophically explained by Archdeacon Pratt, in his “Religion and Science Not at Variance,” the Bible dates commence with an allusion to an indefinitely great antiquity for the creation of matter; then give a vastly more modern date for the appearance of Adam; assign a not very great interval from Adam to the Deluge of Noah; another still less interval to the Dispersion; and another similar one from thence up to the appearance of Patriarchs, whose Biblical epoch is conformable to the Great Pyramid's own statement for itself; viz. the 2170 B.C. before alluded to.

But the Great Pyramid's record of time, as shown by our Plate X. (and at p. 477, where the 2170 B.C. date is far down the entrance-passage), extends up to considerably earlier times than itself. Not, indeed, to the sublime beginnings of the Bible, but first to the Dispersion, supposed to be marked by the top of that entrance-passage floor as occurring in 2528 B.C.; and second to the Deluge.

The latter reference, which might almost have been anticipated in a chronological building, wherein had already been recognized a harmonious commensurability between its Ark-box, or Coffer, and the Ark of Noah (see pp. 403 to 406) was first approached through the astronomy of the Great Pyramid, in Vol. III. of my “Life and Work at the Great Pyramid,” published in 1867; and at p. 493 thereof it will be found approximately stated at 2800 B.C., more or less; and at 2790 B.C. at p. 383 here. But a far exacter number seems to have been lately ascertained by the Rev. Alfred Cachemaille, of the Parsonage, Oldham.

He had remarked acutely, that inasmuch as the Great Pyramid building itself ends in a manner with the entrance-passage, carrying the Dispersion date of 2528 B.C. on the very floor end, upwards and outwards, of 533Wait, the header as printed reads "CHAP. XXII.] THE SHEPHERD KINGS. 533".

that passage,—some device in the way of doubling back was evidently necessary for indicating, within the building, and on the eminently white-stone lining of its entrance-passage, any still earlier date. Now there was to his eye, most precisely such a doubling back, in the shape of the double wall courses, both east and west, of the first part of, but nowhere else along, the entrance-passage (see pp. 21 to 26 of Vol. II. of “Life and Work.”) And the mean result for the eight different measures there detailed of the four different factors to the ultimate result, is, to the nearest inch year, 215. Wherefore 2528 B.C. $+ 215 =$ 2743 B.C., as the directly measured and most easily measurable Great Pyramid date of that most notable re-commencement of the course of humanity, whose further religious history the Great Pyramid was to trace.

But now what is the Bible date for the same event?

There, unfortunately, mankind in the present age cannot speak very decidedly as to the exact figure; for the earliest known copies of the Sacred Scriptures differ from each other, anywhere between 2327 B.C., and 3246 B.C.; and Divines still hotly dispute which of these two, or any intermediate numbers, are the most trustworthy. In this dilemma, I ventured to write to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and received from Lambeth Palace, in May, 1866, the following positive information:—

(1.) The Church of England has assigned no date to the Noachian Deluge.

(2.) The Church has not fixed any dates between which it must have taken place.

(3.) The Church of England has not authorized the insertion into the authorized copy of the English Bible, of any system of dates.

Being thus thrown back on my own weak resources, I searched out the dates arrived at and stated to be 534the Scriptural ones, i.e. founded partly on the words and partly on the figures actually to be read piecemeal in various copies of the Scriptures, and finally summed up by various Divines of repute; and then took an average of the whole, thus (see p. 489 of Vol. III. of “Life and Work”):—

This 2741 B.C. was therefore printed by me in 1867 as the best result of all the foremost Bible authorities known to the community, for that most important event in Biblical history, the Noachian Deluge. And in 1878, the Great Pyramid's chronology, further interpreted by the Rev. Alfred Cachemaille, gives 2743 B.C.