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

completed as a pyramid when his mummy had been laid to rest in the King’s Chamber, thus getting over the difficulty—or, rather, impossibility—as we have pointed out above, of placing a body therein once the chamber had been roofed over. The emptiness of the coffer is explained by the rifling of the chamber by robbers, though how or when entry was gained to effect this—since no signs of a forced entry were known before that of Al Mamoun, early in the ninth century, who found the coffer empty—is not suggested.

The Great Pyramid is thus explained as having been first built up to the level of the floor of the King’s Chamber, that is, up to the top of the fiftieth masonry course, giving it the appearance of a huge frustum. Mr. Proctor illustrates it thus in the frontispiece to his volume.

The upper end of the Grand Gallery was thus open to the southern sky, and rose above the pavement level, which was marked out precisely as modern astrologers map out a horoscope. It thus commanded a long, but relatively narrow vertical space of the heavens.

Being thus erected purely as a horoscope of Khufu, it was no longer required after his death. The building was consequently completed by construction of the ante-chamber and King’s Chamber and the short passages connecting them, and the masonry carried up to the summit.

This theory, also, like nearly every other that has been suggested, is discounted by all the evidence, structural and Egyptological. From the structural point of view it will be sufficient to give two instances; the Granite Plug blocking the Ascending Passage at its very commencement ; and the fact that the Grand Gallery being built on the same principle as an arch, and thus depending on the solid masonry behind its walls to support it, like

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