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

could copy upon paper those only which may be seen upon the surface of these two pyramids (Great and Second), one would fill more than six thousand pages.”

Another Arab writer, Ibn Abd-al-Hokim, gives a similar report respecting the contents of the Pyramids to that left by Masoudi and Abd-al-Latif. “In the Western (or Second) Pyramid,” he states, “ (were) thirty treasuries filled with a store of riches and utensils . . . with arms which rust not, and with glass which might be bended and yet not broken.” This last statement reads like an inspired forecast of the inventions of the twentieth century, for rustless steel is a fairly recent discovery, while flexible glass was first produced experimentally in the laboratory at the end of 1925, but is not yet a commercial proposition.

Abd-al-Hokim then continues: “In the East (Great) Pyramid (were) divers celestial spheres and stars, and what they severally operate in their aspects. . .and the books that treat of these matters. He (i.e. King Surid) also put into the Coloured pyramid” (the Third Pyramid, socalled from the red granite casing-stones which covered it compared to the white limestone of the Great Pyramid) ““the commentaries of the priests . . . and with every priest a book, in which the wonders of his profession . . . were written, and what was done in his time, and what is and what shall be from the beginning of time to the end of it.”

The number of Arab writers who thus refer to the Great Pyramid seems almost endless. While their accounts agree in the main with but variations of detail, they all make it clear that in their day nothing at all certain was known about it. Professor Greaves, the Oxford Astronomer of the seventeenth century, who visited the Pyramid in 1637, and gathered much interesting matter, fact and fable, in his travels, afterwards published in Pyramidographia

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