28 The Great Pyramid of Egypt. [January, 



our more tardily built cathedrals do — begun perhaps in 

 sturdy Norman and ending in flamboyant Gothic. But 

 instead of anything of that kind, behold one, and one only, 

 style both of building and quality of material reigns 

 throughout the Great Pyramid from top to bottom, and from 

 side to side. 



The surest, too, of the local traditions collected by Hero- 

 dotus on the spot 2300 years ago, declare emphatically that 

 the structure was begun from the first as a great building 

 with enormous subterraneans, which occupied the workmen 

 ten years, and a large part of which excavations may still be 

 seen descending into the rock far deeper and further than 

 those of any other pyramid ; also that the entire building of 

 the structure was fully prepared for beforehand, and then 

 carried out energetically during only twenty very hard work- 

 ing years, and with well organised bands of workmen 

 relieving each other every three months ; and finally, that it 

 was finished by its founder and cased definitely outside 

 when the original finite design was completed, not when he 

 could no longer, on account of death, go on. extending it. 



And what was the design according to the same Hero- 

 dotus, — not, indeed, by any means a perfect authority on 

 all Egyptian matters, but as the " father of history," duly to 

 be noted and commented on ? 



A duplex design. Partly tombic— though he says that that 

 failed, for the king, after all, was not buried in any part of 

 the Pyramid — and partly mathematical, in a manner too 

 which has been tested by modern scientific mensuration, and 

 found true to within so small a quantity for extensive sub- 

 aerial masonry as two minutes of angle. 



Hence, however well the Lepsius-Wylde tombic growing 

 theory applies to other pyramids, it is totally opposed to the 

 manner and history of construction of the Great Pyramid. 



7. The Universal Egyptological Tombic Theory. 

 Nothing daunted, however, by that failure, and nothing 

 interested in the recovery of the old mathematical problem 

 by modern measures, too many of the regular Egyptologists 

 still go on asserting, that the Great Pyramid could never 

 have been intended for anything else than a tomb, because, 

 say they, the preparation of a tomb, or the " good house " 

 for a man's soul to revisit in its future long and thousands-of 

 years-between returns from the other world, was the grand 

 occupation of every Egyptian's life while in the flesh : the 

 only object, indeed, in whose cause that people cared to 

 " build for eternity," or in so perdurable a manner as the 



