328 The Great Pyramid. seem to have discovered the secret of the other chambers. I do not mean to repeat here what may be found in other books except when it is needed for further remarks of my own. Ventilation was thought necessary for the King's Chamber, either for the benefit of the mummy of the king or the breathing of the undertakers and masons, and it is worth while to observe that the Egyptians of as many years B.C. (and more) as our A.D. knew what some of our architects and builders now do not, that ventilation requires both an inlet and outlet. Accordingly you see in the section one air chimney going to the north or right side of the Pyramid and another to the south, so that there would always be a draught through the chamber-unless they also were to be closed up by the facing stones like the entrance for men after the funeral to prevent any discovery. The great puzzle of the building is the enlargement which you see in the section of the small passage into the large one called the Grand Gallery Gg, which again is suddenly contracted before it reaches the King's Chamber. The floor of the gallery is 4 cubits wide and the middle 2 cubits are sunk about cubit below the sides, which therefore rise along it like benches, except that the whole is on a slope of 26° 18'. These benches, or raised parts of the floor, are what Mr. Smyth calls ramps'; and the channel clearly was for something heavy to slide down between them. Probably Sir H. James is right in saying that the portcullis stones were kept there at the foot of the deep step at the top of the gallery, where the channel ceases, and were slid down afterwards, and over some planks which must have been laid for them across the end of The Great Gallery in it. 329 the horizontal passage to the Queen's Chamber, and there is actually a recess cut for the lower end of such planks, and poles for beams to carry them. But that is not enough to account for the great size of the gallery, which is 14 cubits high (on the square); and I think this is the explanation.-The portcullis stones are 2 cubits wide and 48 in. high, to fit their ultimate place exactly; and the channel between the ramps is just over 2 cubits, and the ramps themselves just under a cubit, leaving about 7 in. on each side as clearance for the stones to slide down easily. The width of the ramps, and therefore of the whole gallery was wanted for the men to pass by those stones while lying there, and there are besides a series of upright holes in them, evidently for posts; but what the posts were for is not so clear, as the men could easily guide the stones down without them. But the width of the gallery being so determined, they made it so high in order to contract it very gradually to a narrow top for fear it should be crushed in by the immense weight above. You may see in Fergusson's Handbook how they protected the flat roof of long stones over the King's Chamber by four other roofs of equally large stones over it, and finally an arch of two stones. And there is a niche in the Queen's Chamber about 15 feet high and 2 cubits deep, gradually contracted by short set-offs from 65 in. wide at the bottom to 25.3* at the top in the same way as the * This is the nearest approach that Mr. Smyth could find to the 25 inch cubit which he went to Egypt and searched the whole Pyramid to look for. When he found it he exclaimed, Why here is the very sacred cubit of the Jews.' But that unlucky decimal 3 is fatal to his rejoicings; for 25·3 is nothing like the 20 millionth of the earth's axis, which he wants it to be, and instead of giving him 3651 of such cubits in the base of the pyramid for the days of the year, it only gives 361: a hopelessly impracticable number. 330 The Great Pyramid. gallery. No one knows what that was for: perhaps for a queen's body to be walled in upright, as there was no stone coffin there. I am not aware that there is any real authority even for calling it the Queen's Chamber. It is curious that that niche too is not in the middle of the wall, as if to help it to escape detection when walled up, which however it never was. The use or object of the ante-chamber to the King's Chamber is by no means evident, except that a more genuine, but much smaller portcullis, i.e. a flat stone or slab sliding down in grooves was apparently intended to be worked there, though it was found sticking up and had never been let down. And there are some other grooves in which no slabs were found. It is no answer to this explanation of these parts to say that the business of stopping up the passages might have been managed more simply. The simplest contrivances often do not occur to designers till too late, and often not to the original designers at all. No other rational explanation has been thought of, so far as I know; and though that is not conclusive in favour of the one that has been thought of, it tends to confirm it if the theory is probable in itself and involves no unexplained difficulties, even though there are some details of grooves along the walls of the gallery, &c., of which the objects are not yet known, and perhaps never will be. The only remaining question of importance is, why was the slope of all the passages 26° 18′ rather than 25° 55', which would be exactly half the external slopes, or 26° exactly? For the circle was divided into 360° from the earliest times known, and the builders were evidently skilled in mathematics. Sir H. James says the 26° 18′ is the angle of repose' at which those 6 Angle of the passage. 331 heavy portcullis stones would either stand or slide on the stone floor under very little pressure either way. And I daresay that is true. But it is no more true of 26° 18′ in particular than of other inclinations near it; and in fact it was not right, if that was all they meant ; for the stones ran down too fast and cracked the passage with the bang of stopping them. I do not myself believe that the slope of the passages was left to be any approximation to the angle of repose which the builders might hit upon, any more than the external slopes were left to be anything from 51° to 53° as in the other pyramids. Moreover we must remember that no portcullis stones had to slide down the long descending passage, which has exactly the same slope: at any rate there were none in it, and the way to what we may call the false burying chamber below the Pyramid was left clear as soon as the entrance was discovered by the Romans, or whoever first found it. I must say that Mr. Smyth's and Sir J. Herschel's astronomical solution of the inclination of that passage seems the most probable; and indeed the only definite one yet propounded; viz. that it was chosen because it looked straight at the pole star (a Draconis) of that period, about 2170 B.C., which is generally agreed to be the date of the building, at its lower transit over the meridian every day. For that star was then 3° 42′ from the pole, although now, by the precession of the equinoxes, it is 24° off, and the present pole star is Ursæ minoris; for the Pyramid being in lat. 30°, we have 3° 42′ + 26° 18′ = the latitude, or elevation of the pole above the horizon. The building would be about the time when also the tower of Babel was built and 'the earth divided,' Gen. vi. Herodotus says it took 20 years to build. 332 The Great Pyramid. Mr. Wackerbarth says that this hypothesis is liable to the objection that the mouth of the passage being walled up it is not easy to conceive how a star could be observed through it.' Certainly not, after it was closed; but what has that to do with the question whether the builders thought fit to indicate the date to any one who might in after ages find the passage, by reference to the celestial dial, in which the pole of the earth travels round the pole of the eeliptic in 25,827 years, like the hand of a clock round the dial? We might as well ask what was the use of all that exquisite building of the King's and Queen's Chambers, one of polished granite and the other of equally fine limestone, when they were intended to be hidden for ever after the death of their builder Cheops? The answer is, no use at all :* but there they are, as a matter of fact; and it is no more improbable that the principal passage was designed with a view to recording its date by the pole star than that an external shape should have been selected because it satisfied certain mathematical conditions, in themselves of still less use than the recording of a date. Mr. Wackerbarth has partly answered his own questions too by saying that Cheops, who reigned 50 years, pro *He might with much more reason ask, how can it be conceived that a civilised nation could bury people in two or three coffins, one sometimes lined with satin, another of lead, and another of oak, and put them in brick graves, which only tend to keep the process of putrefaction going on as long as possible? The Egyptians did at any rate preserve their bodies by mummifying them, and from their point of view building sepulchres to preserve them was rational, though of course intrinsically absurd. Our practice is utterly irrational from every point of view, and is only a manifestation of that spirit of corpse-worship which seems to be increasing in England, and is actually believed by some people to be a sort of religious manifestation, whereas it certainly has no connection with the Christian religion at any rate. Life of Bishop Lonsdale, 2nd edition, p. 109. See my |