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    1. Preface

    The Great Pyramid: Why Was It Built? & Who Built It? (1859)

    Preface

    PREFACE.

    IN the following work I have made an attempt to recover a lost leaf in the World's History. There was no need that the information which it contains should form any portion of the Hebrew Scriptures, since all the particulars relating to man's salvation are complete without it; and as to the heathen records, the earliest of the Greek historians did not live till more than 1500 years after the Great Pyramid is supposed to have been built.

    The materials out of which this volume is composed, were obtained chiefly from the Great Pyramid itself, in the accounts given of it by various writers, from the earliest times to the present day. Many brief but interesting memorials have descended to us from Greek and Roman sources; but the most important, because the most minute," descriptions of the Great Pyramid, are those which have been given to the world in modern times by the writers of England and France. So complete, indeed, is the knowledge now obtained, that it leaves scarcely anything to be desired.

    I have confined my observations to the Great Pyramid alone. It was not only the largest of the three most important structures, called the Pyramids of Gizeh, but was, probably, the most correct and exact of them all in its proportions. It is, happily, also the most perfect of the three; and its minutest details, internal and external, have been recorded with scrupulous fidelity. The uncertainty which has prevailed as to the purpose for which the Pyramids were originally built, was no doubt one of the causes of that extreme care which each writer took, to remark and narrate every little peculiarity he could discover in their construction: this, while it prevented him from establishingany theory of his own, necessarily led to the accumulation of a multitude of facts, which are at length found capable of harmonious adjustment.

    The Drawing of The Pyramid Coffer in the King's Chamber is taken from Sir Robert Ainslie's Views in Egypt, 1804; and that of The Discovery of the Casing Stones is copied from Colonel Howard Vyse's work on the Pyramids, published in 1840.

    john taylor.

    leonard place kensington September 1859

    Chapter 1. . . .►

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