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

TOMB OR OBSERVATORY ?

dangerous task owing to the threatened collapse of the walls—was found empty.

While both Herodotus and Diodorus are correct in stating that Khufu was not buried in his pyramid, too many writers have followed the former in fixing his burial-place as that known as Campbell’s Tomb (discovered by Colonel Vyse and named by him after the British Consul then in Egypt—1837), in the neighbourhood of the Great Pyramid, because it appeared to answer the description given by Herodotus to the tomb of that monarch— in a subterranean region, on an island there surrounded by the waters of the Nile” 4—a description which some investigators in the past have even tried to apply to the subterranean pit of the Pyramid itself.

Such a pit, so constructed that, at high Nile, water percolated into the trench round it, thus converting it into an artificial island, has been found at a spot southeast of the Great Pyramid. Though a sarcophagus, described by Smyth as “ an antique, rude sarcophagus of very gigantic proportions ”, was found in this burial pit, it was empty. Modern research has found no evidence to uphold its identification with Khufu, and it is now ascribed to a later date. Piazzi Smyth gives a plan and vertical section of this tomb at plate xix of Our Inheritance (4th ed.), showing high Nile levels at different periods of observation. The subterranean chamber of the Great Pyramid is well above any possible flood level.

That Herodotus connected this tomb with Khufu was probably from a tradition told him either by the priests

* Pliny makes a similar statement with regard to the so-called wellshaft which opens out near the lower end of the Grand Gallery and which he describes as ‘‘ communicating with the waters of the Nile ”, though he may be referring to the same pit as Herodotus.

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