BOOKS.
MR. FLINDERS PETRIE ON THE PYRAMIDS.*
No one interested in Egyptian archaeology can fail to profit by the study of the exact, sober, and luminous account of the Pyramids of Gizeh, which Mr. Petrie, with some aid from the Royal Society, has recently published. Professor Piazzi Smyth, whose theories have been so much laughed at, was the first to explore the Pyramids in a truly scientific manner ; and Mr. Gill's geodetic survey is justly characterised in the present volume as surpassing all previous work in its accuracy. But Mr. Petrie's own labours have been on a scale hitherto unattempted. Piazzi Smyth left the serious task of triangulation untouched, and Mr. Gill's operations were begun and concluded within the scanty space of three days. Mr. Petrie spent nine months at Gizeh, living in a tomb, contented with the hardest fare, and in almost complete seclusion from intercourse with Europeans. Ten hours of the twenty-four were occupied with. theodolite and measuring-tape, or in superintending the excavations, and the subsequent paper-work of each day was not usually completed until midnight. The result is the present exhaustive treatise, which cannot fail to give a powerful impetus to the study of Egyptian archaeology in this country, where, for the last two or three decades, it has fallen into a neglect which does us little credit.
The pathetic anxiety of the ancient Egyptians that the body should be preserved from decay, and the tomb be within easy dis- tance of home, was amply met by the situation of the vast necro- polis of the Memphic nome. Occupying the tract of desert border- ing upon the cultivable district that stretched north and south of the capital of the third dynasty, no part of it was more than a few miles distant from the towns, villages, and homesteads that dotted the broad, fertile plain. The line of counterscarp of the great plateau of the Libyan Desert, running almost true north, served as a barrier against the penetration westward of the annual inundation. Along its base the traveller may still walk with one foot in the green bersim of the irrigated fields, and the other in the loose sand that has blown over the edge of the plateau, to accumulate in shifting masses below. In such a resting-place the dead knew no change, and the soul could await without dread the moment of its reunion with the body.
The Great Pyramid stands upon a limestone pavement, ex- tending from 529 to 627 inches beyond the foot of the smooth- surfaced casing which originally covered the four faces. The pavement itself rests upon an uneven foundation of somewhat larger area, excavated out of the underlying nummulitic lime- stone, which, with alternating tracts of sandstone, forms the basis of the great Libyan Desert beneath the ridges of wind- driven sand, separated by broad, hollow valleys, that give it its peculiar character. Hitherto the measurements of explorers had not !Iowa the base of the Pyramid to be a perfect square, but Mr. Petrie's profounder researches and exacter measure- ments enabled him to determine it to be practically a true square, with a side of 9,0638 inches, exhibiting the wonderfully small mean error of •65 inch in length, and 12" in angle. Upon this extraordinary accuracy of these primaeval builders, in conjunction with other considerations, Mr. Petrie has demonstrated the falsity of the accretion theory, which holds that the Pyramids were designed upon a smaller plan, to be afterwards gradually added to. The whole discussion is well worthy of perusal, and affords an admirable example of the means and methods of the author. The theory never had pro- bability to recommend it, for to an Egyptologist the idea of an early monarch purposely half building his tomb in order that it might be indefinitely enlarged by his successors (who would
• The Pyramids and Temples of Giseh. By W. M. FlinderkPetrie. London : Field and Thor. 1883. have their own tombs to look after), is nothing less than an• absurdity. Mr. Petrie estimates the number of stones accumulated' in the Great Pyramid at 2,300,000, weighing, on an average, 21 tons each. The granite beams of the Kings' Chamber weigh between 50 and 60 tons. No representation of the mode in which these huge and huger masses were lifted into position is afforded by the monuments, and ancient authors are silent upon the subject, save so far as they refer to a machine made of short pieces of wood. Mr. Petrie's ingenious supposition that the allusion is to a method of resting the stones upon piles of wooden slaps, and " rocking them up alternately to one side and the other by a spar under the block, thus heightening the piles alternately, and so raising the stone," is a legitimate explanation of the mystery; the more so in that, as Mr. Petrie shows, even the fifty-ton beams could be dealt with in such a manner that only five tons' weight would have to be raised at once, which could easily be done by tea men with crowbars, so that sixty men might raiso the whole of them in one year. Almost every stone is carefully- dressed and levelled ; so accurate, indeed, is the workmanship, that very commonly the joints, filled with cement, are not more than one-fiftieth of an inch in width. In addition, the proofs are numerous that every block was marked for position while on the ground, not trimmed after having been got into place, showing how carefully and exactly the whole structure must have been planned before a single block was " rocked-up " into its proper niche. As to the time occupied in the building of Khufu's Pyramid, Mr. Petrie's calculations go to sub- stantiate the account given by Herodotus, that 100,000 men were employed twenty years during three months of each year in bringing over the materials from the Mokattam and Turra ranges, on the east side of the Nile. The throe months, no doubt, would be those of the inundation, beginning about the end of July, when the stones could be brought over on rafts. No great hardship, as Mr. Petrie acutely points out, would be involved in a requisition of labour during a portion of the year, when all agricultural operations in ancient Egypt were at a stand-still, and when the means of transit were afforded by the inundation which, in the days of the fourth dynasty, probably almost touched the base of the Gizeh plateau. His examination of the extensive remains of masonry that lie hidden under the sand behind the Pyramid of Khafra, hitherto regarded as a mere heap of waste and rubbish, shows them to be the debris and ruins of the thick rubble walls of a series of galleries, that were doubtless roofed over with straw and mud to serve as barracks for the masons, some three or four thousand of whom may have been thus housed. These men, with the attendant labourers, would represent the per- manent charge imposed upon the population by the building of the Great as well as of the Second Pyramid; and if the masons received wages as well as their food, the theory that the Pyramids were the outcome• of a vast and cruel oppression would vanish. The accuracy of the base-contours and of the angles of the Pyramids of Khufu and Khafra leads to the expectation of equal accuracy on the part of the builders in the orientation of the faces. And Mr. Petrie's observations, in effect, show that the orientation of the Great Pyramid, like that of the second, is only about 5' west of north, a difference amply accounted for by- the change that has taken place in the direction of the earth's axis since the date of their construction. Both architect and masons knew their business and did their work faithfully.
The importance of the precision with which the survey re- corded in this volume was made is constantly brought home to the reader. It has always, for instance, been a favourite theory that the so-called Queen's Chamber was intended to hold the blocks which, it was supposed, were required to plug the ascend- ing passage. Mr. Petrie's measurements, however, render the theory wholly untenable, and his conclusion that the Queens' Chamber was the sepulchre of the co-regent of Khufu is probably the right one. In fact, it is more than doubtful whether the passages were ever plugged up at all. The device is a priori a somewhat coarse one to attribute to the builders of such struct- ures as the Pyramids. Strabo's account of the entrance to the Great Pyramid, cited by Mr. Petrie, is as follows :—" The Greater [Pyramid], a little way up one side, has a stone that may be taken out, which being raised up, there is a sloping passage to the foundations." Mr. Petrie's researches place this description in a new and instructive light, and render it almost certain that a stone door or portcullis is alluded to, like the one• of which he examined the traces in the South Pyramid of
Dahshur. On the eleventh of the plates appended to the volume, diagrams will be found of both doors. The stone, which a pull of five hundredweight would suffice to turn, would form part of the casing, and, on being replaced, would leave no sign of the passage. To the Romans in Strabo's time the secret of the door was known, but the Arabs could not discover it, and Mamun, in consequence, was obliged to force an entrance below.
With Mr. Petrie's valuable and interesting discussion of the various numerical theories that have been propounded in connection with his subject, we have no space to deal. They in no way affect the tombic theory of the Great Pyramid, which is accepted as the only possible one. We are equally obliged to content ourselves with a mere reference to the instructive chapter on the mechanical methods of the Pyramid builders, while we must leave the three appendices, 'treating of the dis- crimination and elimination of observational error, to the criticism of mathematicians and metrologists.
The Great Pyramid is the oldest and the most perfect of all. Mr. Petfie has made it quite clear that it was planned as a whole (save, possibly, some portions of the interior) before a stone was lifted into position. How are we to account for so magnificent an idea starting into being, in all its perfection and grandeur, as it were at a bound ? We cannot account for it in the present state of our knowledge. When Memphis could boast of the grandest necropolis the world has ever known, Egypt was not in her youth. An intricate social hierarchy held together the various classes of her people. She had reached a high pitch of civilisation, shown, if by nothing else, by the honour in which the art of writing was held, and by the minute accuracy of her records, from those of the State down to those of a farm.. Perhaps a dozen feet, perhaps two dozen feet, under the existing surface of Nile mud the clue to the solution of the mystery will some day be found, profounder and earlier strata of Egyptian history will be explored, and in the vestiges of a period long anterior to that of the Memphite Kings, we shall be enabled to read the very beginnings of a civilisation the grandeur of which becomes more manifest as our knowledge of it increases in fullness.
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