The great pyramid passages and chambers
Great Pyramid is by far the most suitable zero of longitude for all nations.
15 Magnitude of the Great Pyramid. Owing to the difficulty of making exact measurements on account of the absence of almost all the casing stones, and especially because of the presence of huge mounds of rubbish round the base of the Great Pyramid, it has hitherto been impossible to state with absolute accuracy the magnitude of this mountain of stone. Professor C. Piazzi Smyth calculated the vertical height of the ancient apex above the mean socket floor as 485 feet; the vertical depth of the Subterranean Chamber below the mean socket floor as 100 feet: each base-side breadth between the corner sockets as 761 feet 8 inches; each base diagonal between the sockets as 1077 feet. Professor Flinders Petrie makes the various measurements slightly less.
16 Unless one is accustomed to think of great dimensions, these figures do not convey an adequate idea of the magnitude of the Great Pyramid. The best plan is to compare it with something with which one is familiar. The area of the square base is more than thirteen acres. The total distance on the level between the four corner sockets is only 160 yards less than two-thirds of a mile, although at present, owing to the large rubbish mounds at the bases of the four sides, one requires to walk for nearly a mile in order to make the circuit. The vertical height is approximately a hundred feet more than that of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, and only 70 feet less than the monument at Washington, D.C., U.S.A. It is 180 feet higher than the statue on the summit of the dome of Washington capitol, which building covers an area of three and a half acres. The bulk of the building is more than ninety million cubic feet, that is to say, there is enough stone in the Great Pyramid to build a wall four feet in height and one foot in thickness, which would extend considerably more than 4000 miles, the distance across the Atlantic Ocean from Great Britain to Newfoundland and back.
17 Other Scientific features. As the purpose of this book is to show forth the religious teaching of the Great Pyramid, only a brief mention will be made of a few of the more prominent scientific features embodied in the Great Pyramid. For a full description of these and many other features, the reader who is interested in such matters is referred to Professor C. Piazzi Smyth’s works, of which Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid is the chief.
18 Sguaring the circle. The scientific feature which was first discovered, was that the ancient vertical height of the Great Pyramid was to twice the breadth of its square base, as the diameter of a circle is to its circumference, that is, 5813 inches is to twice 9131 inches, as 1 is to 314159. This ratio of the diameter of a circle to its circumference receives from mathematicians the name of the Greek letter + (Pi), and was first accurately determined by Von Ceulen in the sixteenth century. (Von Ceulen caused his discovery to be engraved upon his tomb.) It follows that the ancient vertical height of the Great Pyramid is the radius of a circle, the circumference of which equals the total measurement of all four sides of the Pyramid’s square base. Professor C. Piazzi Smyth, commenting on this, claims it as a practical solution of the old problem of “ squaring the circle,” and adds, ‘the thing was thus practically done, truly and properly, at the Great Pyramid thousands of years before those Medieval days of our forefathers ... Not one out of all the thirty-seven other measured pyramids in Egypt has been proved to be endowed even approximately with this particular proportion of height to breadth of
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