The mystery of the Great pyramid : traditions concerning it and its connection with the Egyptian Book of the dead : with numerous illustrations

NOTES Note C: Books ON THE GREAT PYRAMID (page 8)

In the second volume of Col. Howard Vyse’s Pyramids of Gizeh, there is a running account and abridgment of some hundred or more authors—Greek, Roman, Arab, French, Italian, German, and English—who have written upon the Great Pyramid from the time of Herodotus onwards. All of them describe the building as an object of more or less curiosity and mystery, combined with great antiquity. Col. Vyse’s own work of three volumes, published in 1840, was the most complete on the Great Pyramid, and gave the fullest particulars thereof, that had been then issued, and so remained until the appearance of Piazzi Smyth’s great work—also in three volumesLife and Work at the Great Pyramid in 1865 (Isbister), issued in 1867.

Note D: THe ARCHITECT OF THE GREAT PYRAMID (page 9)

In this connection the following passage from Diodorus would seem to indicate that there is at least some tradition that Khufu and the actual architect of the Great Pyramid were not necessarily the same individual. He says: ‘‘ The architects who built the pyramids are much more to be admired than the monarchs themselves, who were at the cost of them. For those performed all by their own ingenuity, but these did nothing but by the wealth handed to them by descent from their predecessors, and by the toil and labour of other men.”

Note E: Tue Great Pyramip as A GRANARY (page 10)

This conception of the Great Pyramid—than which nothing could be more ill adapted for such a purpose, to say nothing of the years taken to build it—it is interesting to note, is referred to by the Syrian writer Dionysius, a Christian who lived during the ninth century of our era, and who refuted the idea. In the course of his travels in Egypt, he says of the Pyramids of Gizeh: “ They are not

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