PREFACE.

When the late worthy John Taylor (publisher to the London University) produced, in 1859, his larger work entitled The Great Pyramid: why was it built, and who built it? and afterwards, in January, 1864, his smaller pamphlet, The Battle of the Standards (of Linear Measure): the ancient of four thousand years against the modern of the last fifty years—the less perfect of the two,—he opened up for archæology a purer, nobler, more intellectual pathway to light than that study had ever enjoyed before.

But academic archæology would not accept it; indeed the whole reading world stood askance; and I can hardly now explain how it came about that something induced me, in February, 1864, to commence an independent examination of Mr. Taylor's theory; and my publication in September of that year (i.e. the first edition of the present book) contained the findings so arrived at. Findings, in many points confirmatory of the principal thread of Mr. Taylor's chief and most startling discovery; but exhibiting in the general literature of the subject, and on which, unfortunately, he had been obliged to depend too much, a lamentable deficiency in the accurateness of almost all the numerical data required; and which necessary exactitude, nothing but viiipractical examination and instrumental measure at the place could hope properly to supply.

Meanwhile John Taylor died, and with almost his last breath emphatically confided this, the most important labour of his long life-toil, to my most unworthy hands; and yet hands not altogether unused to some of the operations next required. How, then, with little help from any one, save a single subscription volunteered by a kind friend¹ in Edinburgh, my Wife and self did, on very scanty private means, sail for Egypt in November, 1864; and did, through a four months’ residence on the Great Pyramid hill in 1865, employ a variety of surveying and astronomical instruments, in obtaining many measures of the mighty monument; some of them to far more exactness than had ever been attempted before, and others descending to numerous details unnoticed by former observers, though still leaving other large parts to the future efforts of the nation—all this was described by me, first in abstract to the Royal Society, Edinburgh, in April, 1866; and afterwards, at much greater length to the world in my three-volumed book, “ Life and Work at the Great Pyramid ” in 1867.²

That last publication, even from the very oppositions it called up, helped to spread a knowledge both of the importance of the question at issue, and the only means for solving it; especially as against the modern hieroglyphic scholars, the so-called Egyptologists; who, though exceedingly learned in their lettered way ixtouching Egyptian remains of more recent times, have never much troubled themselves to examine the far more ancient, as well as purer, Great Pyramid in the mechanical and scientific manner now required.

Indeed, the literary Egyptologists seem, by their criticisms, rather angered than otherwise, to hear that such precise and strictly provable data, in merely modern instrumental measure, when at last collected by others than themselves, are most successful in showing a radical difference throughout between the Great, and every other, Pyramid in Egyptian land. In fact these measures tend to establish that the Great Pyramid, though in Egypt, is not, and never was, of Egypt—that is, of, belonging to, or instructing about Pharaonic, idolatrous, and chiefly Theban, Egypt. Also, that though built in the earliest ages, far before written history, the Great Pyramid was yet prophetically intended—by inspiration afforded to the architect from the one and only living God, who rules in heaven, and announced vengeance against the sculptured idols of Egypt (Ezekiel xxx. 13)—to remain quiescent during those earlier ages; and only, in a manner, to come forth at this time to subserve a high purpose for these latter days. That it, the Great Pyramid, was never even remotely understood, either by the Egyptian, or any other branch of the Cainite and anti-Israelite family of nations. But that it is able nevertheless to explain its grand, even Messianic, mission, most unmistakably. Not, indeed, in the usual manner of less ancient monuments, by the use of any written language, whether hieroglyphic or vulgar, but by aid of the mathematical and physical science of modern times applied xto show the significance residing in the exact amount of its ancient length, breadth and angles; a means most efficacious both for preventing the parable being read too soon in the history of an, at first, unlearned world; but for insuring its being correctly read, and by all nations, when the fulness of prophetic time, in a science age, has at last arrived.

This confirmation of the main view arrived at by John Taylor, viz. that in the Great Pyramid the world now possesses a Monument of Inspiration, as it has long possessed a Book of Inspiration, one dating altogether, and the other partly, from primeval times—brought by degrees many able intellectualists of the mathematical and Christian, rather than the Egyptological and rationalistic, order into the field. And some of them have succeeded, or are succeeding, in demonstrating the purpose and meaning of so many successive parts of the structure, according to the measures taken in 1865, —that if a second and amended edition of my original work was called for in 1874, and a third in 1877, much more is a fourth required now, when there are so many additional discoveries by other workers to be cited; and when the whole is gaining shape, acquiring purpose and now almost day by day illustrating our modern history, our Israelitic brotherhood with America, the future of Egypt, Syria, and the way of the Kings of the East, in these eventful times so truly foreseen, and absolutely monumentalized of old, by supernaturally inspired men, by prophets of the living God.