336 Proceedings of the Boyal Society 
It is, that the Arabian writer, A1 Hokm, states that Khaliph 
A1 Mamoon, when he broke into the G-reat Pyramid, in or near to 
830 a.d., found in the coffer an embalmed human corpse ; proving, 
therefore, as some will have it, that the coffer had been from the 
beginning only a coffin. Wherefore, let us inquire, who is this A1 
Hokm, who vouches, and is so readily accepted as a voucher, 
that A1 Mamoon’s chief finding was a dead body ? 
Mr St John Day showed two months ago, before the Philoso- 
phical Society of Glasgow, on the strength of the publications 
of Colonel Howard Yyse and Dr Sprenger, that A1 Hokm lived 6C0 
years after A1 Mamoon ; and could not, therefore, be any certain or 
contemporary authority for what that Khaliph found in a dark 
chamber in the Great Pyramid, six centuries before. Mr Day also 
showed, out of Yyse’s book, that there is no known Arab writer 
who begins to attribute body-finding to A1 Mamoon, within the 
first three centuries after his death ; those who are earlier, and 
closer to that Khaliph’s times, having completely different stories 
to tell ; and telling them too in the most positive manner. 
Yet the Proceedings' author will by no means give up his 
selected Mohammedan latter-day tales (or those which Mr Day 
had criticised in their newspaper edition of January 22, 1868); 
and after adducing, in a note, two other Arab writers, to a similar 
effect with Al Hokm, — but both of them living between 300 and 
400 years after Al Mamoon, according to the same either Howard 
Vyse’s or Dr Sprenger’s authority, — he virtually clenches up these 
later Arab accounts on to, or makes them as good as if written in, 
Al Mamoon’s own day, by stating, most remarkably, at the end of 
the same note, — that “ Colonel Vyse observes , that the Arabian 
“ authors have given the same accounts of the pyramids , with little or 
“ no variation, for above a thousand years." 
Yet neither the words, nor the sentiments in the above juxta- 
position, are Colonel Howard Yyse’s. The words are out of his 
book, no doubt, but they are spoken by Dr Sprenger ; and, what is 
much more important, he is applying them to authors of far earlier 
date than any of those who mentioned Al Mamoon. 
That it was to these far earlier men, talking of perfectly dif- 
ferent matters, that Dr Sprenger was alluding, — would have 
appeared clearly enough in the Proceedings and even from the very 
