The great pyramid passages and chambers

looked up on those same time-defying piles, and thought them old .... The old and popular supposition which regards them as royal tombs or monuments continues by far the most probable, especially when it is considered that human remains have actually been found in some of the smaller pyramids .... On this supposition, with the name of the monarch that erected them to his own glory buried in impenetrable oblivion, what a monument are they at once of human power, folly, and crime!

3 “Yet these mountain structures which were almost contemporaneous in their erection with the beginning of human history, and may very possibly be standing at its close, suggest more than one conclusion. They prove at how early a period human rule assumed the form of gigantic despotisms. We learn from Herodotus that twenty thousand men, relieved every three months, were employed for twenty years in erecting the one Pyramid of Cheops [the Great Pyramid of Gizeh]. The energies of a whole nation were bent for so long a period, and its resources drained, to gratify the mad ambition of one of the earliest of the Pharoahs. And they also place it beyond doubt that Egypt must have been one of the first peopled countries, as well as one of the earliest cradles of the arts. There must have been something more than mere brute strength—a considerable knowledge of some of the great mechanical laws, as well as of the rules of masonry—to be able to raise those huge blocks to their appointed place, and to rear those Pyramids. And when we find among Egypt’s earliest tomb-paintings and imperishable frescoes, pictures of the shoemaker’s knife, of the weaver’s handshuttle, and of the whitesmith’s blowpipe as it is used in our own days, we cannot admit that there is a shade of extravagance in those lines of the old bard,—

‘The fertile plains of Egypt flourished then, Productive cradle of the first of men.’”

4 However true it may be that some, possibly all, of the smaller pyramids were built as tombs, we hope to give abundant proof that the Great Pyramid of Gizeh, at all events, was not intended as a tomb, but that, while constructed by man, it is like the Bible of Divine origin, elected for the purpose of teaching the important truth of God's infinite wisdom and foreknowledge. The first to propose and prove this view was John Taylor of London in a book published in 1859 A.D. and entitled The Great Pyramid: why was it built ? and who built it? What convinced him was mainly the many important scientific truths which he found to be embodied in this wonderful structure, but he was assisted greatly in coming to this conclusion by reasoning on the basis of information derived from the writings of Herodotus and Manetho. The former recorded that the Egyptians detested the memory of the kings who caused their forefathers to build the Great and Second Pyramids, partly because of this, and partly because they made them close their temples, and that for this reason they were not willing to mention their names, but called the two pyramids after Philition, a shepherd who at that time fed his cattle about the place. Manetho, himself an Egyptian, wrote: ‘‘ There came up from the East, in a strange manner, men of an ignoble race, who had the confidence to invade our country, and easily subdue it without a battle. All this invading nation was styled Hyksos, that is, Shepherd Kings.’ He then related how afterwards they departed for Judea and built a city there, named Jerusalem. This was long before the Exodus under Moses.