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

THEORIES AND TRADITIONS

being discarded for something less remote, thereby bringing them more into accord with contemporary Biblical chronology.t Thus, as a result of recent discoveries of clay tablets at Kish, which, in conjunction with other tablets in the British Museum, were found to give valuable astronomical information, Professor Stephen Langdon has put the date of Menes, the founder of the First Dynasty, at 3100 B.C., compared to Petrie’s 5510 B.c. Let the reader apply similar differences to our own history, and he will appreciate what they mean.

These great discrepancies in Egyptian chronology have arisen from the use—mostly as a matter of convenienceof the King Lists of Manetho, compiled in the third century B.c., and are still accepted as the highest authority by at least one leading school of Egyptology. According to Professor Breasted, however, this view, inherited from a past generation of Egyptologists, is to-day maintained “only by a small and constantly diminishing number of modern scholars ”’.

These King Lists were originally fabricated from what the Egyptian compilers thereof supposed were the dimensions of the Great Pyramid. Knowing that the measurements of that edifice embodied astronomical data, and that its symbolism revealed a chronologic prophecy, they presented their own history as fulfilling that prophecy. This fictitious presentation necessitated inventing a system of chronology based upon the dimensions of the Great Pyramid with years for inches. All the data proving this false chronology, and the methods by which it was utilized, are set out at plate xvi of Davidson’s Great Pyramid : its Divine Message.

* Sir Flinders Petrie, however, appears to cling to the older system of chronology, which places the early dynasties some 2,000 years back compared to the more modern acceptance of the minimum chronology as represented by Professor Breasted and the Berlin School.

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