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 ?

expended such time and thought on the burial of their dead because they loved and revered them, and many writers have denounced the excavator for disturbing the dead in their last sleep, and destroying the ‘ houses of eternity in which loving hands had placed them’. But it is possible that the Egyptians did not take all this trouble in hiding their dead in what they deemed to be inaccessible places through love, but through fear . .. Mummification of the body, the bandaging of the same, the nailed coffin and sarcophagus, the well-constructed tomb with its walledup doorways and concealed entrance, were all intended to keep the deceased in his tomb and to prevent him from coming back among the living and working his will upon them.”

Evidence that the Great Pyramid was not used, nor even intended, as a tomb is also furnished by the fact that, while all those pyramids clearly meant to be tombs possessed small temples, or funerary chapels, in which certain prescribed rites were performed, situated close to their eastern faces, no such provision was made in the case of the Great Pyramid. Remains of such temples have been found in front of the Second and Third Pyramids of Gizeh—and other pyramids elsewhere—but not in front of Khufu’s, while the three very small pyramids which stand near its eastern face are built too close to allow room for any such temple, however small, to have been erected in such a position (see Plate iii in Piazzi Smyth’s volume).

It is, however, when we come to examine the interior construction of the Great Pyramid itself that we find conclusive evidence which disproves the Tombic theory entirely, and it is because Egyptologists have overlooked this evidence as not appealing to them that they have regarded this pyramid solely as a tomb. The reason for

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