The great pyramid passages and chambers

to the equator, was early accomplished with all possible accuracy. This star once selected, it was believed that it should remain for ever in its place. ... But a time arrives at last when the bright star, which for more than five hundred years had, with its morning ray, announced the season of flowers, is lost. . . . Each year the interval from the first appearance of the star in the early dawn, up to the equality of day and night, had grown less and less, and now the equinox came, but the star remained invisible, and did not emerge from the sun’s beams until the equinox had passed. Long and deeply were these facts pondered and weighed. At length the truth dawned, and the discovery broke upon the unwilling mind that the sun’s path among the fixed stars was actually changing, and that his point of crossing the equator was slowly moving backwards towards the west, and leaving the stars behind. . . . The retrograde motion of the equinoctial points, caused the sun to reach those points earlier than it would have done had they remained fixed, and hence arose the precession of the equinoxes. . .. Its rate of motion has been determined, and its vast period of nearly twenty-six thousand years has been fixed. Once revealed, the slow movement of the equinox makes it a fitting hour-hand on the dial of the heavens, with which to measure the revolutions of ages. As the sun's path has been divided into twelve constellations, each fillmg the twelfth part of the entire circuit of the heavens, for the equinox to pass the twelfth part of the dial, or from one constellation to the next, will require a period of more than two thousand years. Since the astronomer [Hipparchus] first noted the position of this hour-hand on the dial of the stars, but one of its mighty hours of two thousand years has rolled away. In case any record could be found, any chiselled block of granite, exhibiting the place of the equinox among the stars, at its date, no matter if ten thousand years had elapsed, we can reach back with certainty, and fix the epoch of the record. No such monument has ever been found.”

25 These words were written in the year 1853 by Professor O. M. Mitchell in his Discoveries of Modern Astronomy. Only a dozen years later, Professor C. Piazzi Smyth demonstrated that such a monument did exist, namely, the Great Pyramid of Gizeh; and not only so, but that it recorded in its measurements the exact duration of the precession of the equinoxes, a period of 25,827 years. To quote his words :—* This peculiar celestial cycle, the grand chronological dial, in fact, of the great Pyramid,so much is its architecture found to base upon it,—is further defined at that Pyramid, but at no other throughout all Egypt, by, amongst other intentional features, the length of the two diagonals of the base (the mean socket floor level), when their sum is reckoned up in inches, at the rate of a Pyramid inch to a year. For they amount to 25,827 nearly. Further still, this feature is memorialized again at the King’s Chamber level of the Great Pyramid; for that chamber’s floor being by measure 1702 inches above the socket base of the whole building, Professor H. L. Smith has shown that the circuit of the Pyramid at that level equals 25,827 Pyramid inches [Plate V]. And if the whole vertical height of the Great Pyramid, 5813 inches, typifies the sun-distance [Par. 22], the partial vertical height from the King’s Chamber level upwards, 4110, indicates the radius of the precessional circle of the equinoxes, in years.”

26 These are but a few of the many scientific features embodied in the Great Pyramid of Gizeh, and were there no others, they would be amply sufficient to show the superior wisdom of its great architect.