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

MYSTERY OF THE GREAT PYRAMID

and the predictions of the priests to be inscribed upon columns and upon the large stones belonging to them ; and he placed within them his treasures . . . together with the bodies of his ancestors. He also ordered the priests to deposit within them written accounts of their wisdom and acquirements in the different arts and sciences . . . and of arithmetic and geometry, that they might remain as records for the benefit of those who would afterwards be able to comprehend them.”

After describing the construction of the first three pyramids of Gizeh, Masoudi goes on to say: “In the Eastern (Great) Pyramid were inscribed the heavenly spheres, and figures representing the stars and planets in the forms in which they were worshipped. The king also deposited the instruments and the thuribula (censers) with which his forefathers had sacrificed to the stars, and also their writings ; likewise the position of the stars and their circles (cycles), together with the history and chronicles of time past, of that which is to come, and of every future event which would take place in Egypt.” Masoudi concludes “that, according to the Copts, the following passage was inscribed, in Arabic, upon the Pyramids : ‘I, Surid the King, have built these Pyramids, and have finished them in sixty-one years. Let him who comes after me, and imagines himself a king like me, attempt to destroy them in six hundred. To destroy is easier than to build.’”” (See Note F.)

Masoudi also mentions a papyrus, found in the monastery of Abou Hormeis, which is said to refer to the Pyramids as having written upon their walls ‘‘ the mysteries of science, astronomy, physics, and such useful knowledge which any person understanding our writing can read.”

Abd-al-Latif, an Arab writer of the thirteenth century, and also Herodotus, both likewise assert that inscriptions

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