1871.] The Great Pyramid of Egypt. 21 



Yet even he is fain to allow that — 



" Stretch the history of architecture how we will, we 

 cannot get beyond the epoch of the Pyramid builders (of 

 Lower Egypt)." 



Or, as another learned writer in the 60th edition of a 

 British Museum catalogue prints it — 



" The earliest known architecture, the Pyramids of the 

 fourth Dynasty." 



A few years ago, certain ruined masses amongst them 

 were thought to be older than the Great Pyramid, the chief 

 work of the said so-called or reputed fourth dynasty, and 

 that Cambridge Humboldt of his day, the travelled Dr. 

 Clarke, at the beginning of the century pronounced from his 

 boat on the Nile that he could distinguish a long succession 

 of earlier ages to that of the Great Pyramid, by the con- 

 tinued approach in their pyramids to a mere mound of soft 

 earth. But as all the more signal of his examples have since 

 then been positively proved by the disciples of Cham- 

 pollion and his post-Clarkian science of hieroglyphical 

 interpretation to have been built by monarchs of dynasties 

 long subsequent to King Shofo of the fourth, and to owe 

 their mouldering forms and subsiding masses to their 

 having been built of perishable brick in place of lasting 

 stone, the claim of the Great Pyramid to be the earliest 

 builded monument that man can put his hand upon in the 

 present day, is now almost, if not quite, universally 

 allowed. 



This claim, too, is equally good, no matter whether along 

 or a short chronology for Egypt and the East be adopted ; 

 for, in so far depending, as we are now doing, upon, and 

 giving all honour to, the disquisitions of literary Egypto- 

 logists, it is differential date only. The Great Pyramid 

 itself, questioned on the scientific theory presently to be 

 expounded, can declare its own absolute date with admirable 

 exactness ; but in this first part of my paper a differential 

 date is enough for our purpose, and I am anxious to make 

 full use of whatever standard points have been ascertained in 

 past years by the literary gentlemen, acknowledged leaders of 

 Egyptology — good men undoubtedly, and very able, some of 

 them, too, gifted with actual genius. 



Wherefore their conclusion as to the earlier comparative 

 date of the Great Pyramid to that of any other known 

 building, whether in Egypt or elsewhere throughout the 

 known world, is a fact of the first magnitude, to be kept 

 vividly before us during the whole of our present inquiry. 



