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

or by his dragoman,! a tradition which may have arisen in order to account for the emptiness of the supposed burial-chamber in the Great Pyramid, which has also given rise to suggestions connecting it with the Pharaoh of the Exodus, and even with Joseph himself, it being assumed that the former was drowned with his army in the Red Sea, when in pursuit of the fleeing Israelites, while Joseph’s body was carried to Canaan for burial. The probabilities are, however, that, bearing in mind the circumstances connected with the reign of Khufu and Khafra, and their foreign origin, both of them were taken out of Egypt altogether, and, in the case of the first-named particularly, this view is strengthened by the fact that recently the burial place of the mother and of a daughter of Khufu was discovered on the Gizeh Plateau, but both found empty. It seems likely, therefore, that while, according to custom, preparations were made in their lifetime for burial in Egypt, at the last moment the bodies of the whole family were secretly conveyed out of the country altogether and buried elsewhere. And Diodorus tells us that, owing to the hostility aroused against Khufu and Khafra by reason of the suppression of the temples, they “ commanded their friends to bury them in an obscure place ”’.

In this connection, Sir Wallis Budge, in his Dwellers on the Nile, sets forth the following view as to the reasons why the ancient Egyptians were at such pains to conceal the bodies of their kings :—

“Tt has always been assumed that the Egyptians

1 Since Egyptian priests would not, as a rule, be acquainted with Greek sufficiently to be able to converse with a foreigner, apart from the fact that their religion forbade them having any intercourse with such, since they were regarded as ‘‘ unclean’’—merely to converse with Herodotus would have caused pollution—the ‘‘ priests” so frequently mentioned by him must have been minor officials or ‘‘ beadles ”, who conducted visitors over the temples and other places of interest, like the vergers of our own cathedrals.