Pyramid Quest (23 page)

An accomplished scientist, Smyth became astronomer royal of Scotland and professor of astronomy at the University of Edinburgh when he was only 24 years old. Later in his scientific life he became a leading investigator in the then-new field of spectroscopy. Nowadays, though, Smyth is known in many circles less for his scientific research than for the rigor and meticulousness he brought to arguing for his fundamentalist religious beliefs.

The link Smyth drew between the science of the Great Pyramid and his theology originated in a relationship with John Taylor (1781-1864), the writer, editor, and publisher who spent the later years of his life studying the Great Pyramid from afar. As we saw in chapter 5, Taylor was convinced that the Great Pyramid encoded the spherical dimensions of the earth and that this knowledge had been imparted to the monument’s builders by divine inspiration to be passed on to later generations. Over the last few weeks of Taylor’s life, he and Smyth carried on an intense, idea-filled correspondence. After Taylor died, Smyth decided that the only way to validate Taylor’s assertion of the Great Pyramid’s scientific accuracy and divine origin was to do what Taylor had not done: go to Egypt himself and measure the monument with the care this important task required.

Smyth was no stranger to long-range scientific expeditions. As a teenager he had gone to South Africa to assist in observations of Halley’s Comet, and he later investigated the advantages of mountaintop astronomical observatories on Tenerife in the Canary Islands. For the journey to Giza, he prepared an extraordinary armamentarium of measuring rods, clinome ters, cords, theodolites, telescopes, and thermometers and added to it the most advanced tools of a then-new technology: photography. Unable to line up outside funding, Smyth paid for the trip out of his own pockets, which were none too deep. He and his wife set up housekeeping in an abandoned tomb on the Giza Plateau’s eastern face as 1864 became 1865 and spent the next four months measuring, recording, and photographing.

The result was the most accurate survey of the Great Pyramid up to that time. Working from his expertise as an astronomer, Smyth explored the monument’s connection to the circumpolar stars. He asserted that the monument must have been built when the Pleiades reached their zenith at midnight on the autumnal equinox of 2170 B.C. He came up, too, with a precise measurement of the Great Pyramid’s latitude, showing it to be just south of the thirtieth parallel. And he was convinced that Taylor was right in finding the value of pi incorporated into the Great Pyramid, an idea we will explore in the following chapter.

In his work
Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid,
Smyth wrote that understanding the Great Pyramid required three keys. The first two were pure mathematics, like pi, and applied mathematics, such as astronomy and physics. The third was “positive human history . . . as supplied . . . by Divine Revelation to certain chosen and inspired men of the Hebrew race, through ancient and medieval times; but now to be found, by all the world, in THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS.”
⁴
Should mathematics say something different from what scripture did, then scripture won.

Take, for example, Smyth’s conundrum over the perimeter of the Great Pyramid. To begin with, he was convinced that the pyramid’s builders had used the same cubit as Noah in constructing his ark, a measure equal to 25.025 British inches (see the appendices for a discussion of the various values for the cubit assumed by different authors). Since
of this cubit was almost exactly the same as the British inch, Smyth was convinced that the British were still using a divinely ordained unit of measurement that had come down to them from the time of the Hebrew patriarchs. He was further convinced, as John Taylor had been, that the perimeter of the Great Pyramid in inches encoded the correct length of the solar year, or 365.242 days, multiplied by 100. To get this number and to adjust for the slight difference between the pyramid inch based on the cubit and the British inch, each side of the pyramid needed to be 9,140.18 British inches long. That was a problem. The French
savants
and Vyse had come up with numbers within 6 inches of each other, indicating a fairly high degree of accuracy, but they were about 2 feet too long to prove Smyth’s point. In hopes of getting the number he needed even though he was about to leave Egypt, Smyth commissioned two Scottish engineers to survey the Great Pyramid’s base. He didn’t get their results until he was back in Edinburgh, but one can imagine his reaction. At only 9,110 inches, the side was 2.5 feet short. So Smyth decided that the real value had to be the mean of his surveyors’ number and Vyse’s 9,168. That came out to 9,139, a little more than 1 inch short of the value he was looking for but close enough to add cogency to Smyth’s hypothesis.

Actually, there was nothing scientific about the mean. It wasn’t a factual measurement, only a mathematical midpoint between conflicting data. In an argument that demanded extreme exactness, Smyth was willing to split the difference, as long as this exercise in applied mathematics fit his take on divine revelation.

Still, for all his willingness to wink at unfriendly data, Smyth was right in concluding that the builders of the Great Pyramid were scientifically adept in ways history failed to recognize. The Great Pyramid “revealed a most surprisingly accurate knowledge of high astronomical and geographical physics . . . nearly 1,500 years earlier than the extremely infantine beginning of such things among the ancient Greeks,” he wrote.
⁵
Since there was no adequate human-based theory for such a premature manifestation of advanced scientific understanding, the only explanation was the workings of God. “The Bible tells us that in very early historic days, wisdom, and metrical instructions for buildings, were occasionally imparted perfect and clear, for some special and unknown purpose, to chosen men, by the Author of all wisdom.”
⁶
The Old Testament recorded God’s precise instructions to Noah on building the ark; something of the same had happened with the Great Pyramid. Smyth pronounced it “that inspired scientific Appendix to the Sacred Scriptures.”
⁷

This left Smyth with a theological problem, however. How was it that the Great Pyramid was built by the Egyptians, a people condemned in the scriptures as the worst of pagan idolaters and enslavers of the chosen Hebrew people? Smyth worked out an answer. The Egyptians had nothing to do with it: “the Great Pyramid, though
in
Egypt, is not, and never was,
of
Egypt—that is, of, belonging to, or instructing about Pharaonic, idolatrous, and chiefly Theban, Egypt.”
⁸
Rather, according to Smyth, the Great Pyramid was the work of Philitis, a divinely inspired royal priest or prince. Philitis had been mentioned by Herodotus not as the ancient builder, nor as a royal priest or prince, but simply as a shepherd who herded his flock near the pyramids. But in Smyth’s interpretation, Philitis became much more than a simple shepherd. When Philitis (sometimes equated by Smyth with Melchizedek, a king mentioned in Genesis 14) finished building the Great Pyramid, he retired to what would become the kingdom of Israel. There he selected the site of Jerusalem and built that holiest of Jewish cities.

The message of the Great Pyramid was encoded in such a manner that it meant nothing to the people of that time. “The Great Pyramid was yet prophetically intended . . . to remain quiescent during those earlier ages; and, only in a manner, to come forth at this time to subserve a high purpose for these latter days.”
⁹
Humankind needed to achieve scientific sophistication before it could crack the Great Pyramid’s divine code.

There was good reason why the Great Pyramid’s inspired message was encrypted in its “
ancient
length, breadth, and angles.”
¹⁰
This was a “means most efficacious for preventing the parable being read too soon in the history of an, at first, unlearned world; but for insuring its being correctly read, and by all nations, when the fullness of prophetic time, in a science age, has at last arrived.”
¹¹

Smyth’s work took Greaves and Newton’s metric analyses in a direction they never could have imagined. He elevated the vague, implicit sense of timelessness they ascribed to the Great Pyramid to the realm of divine eternity. He also served the needs of the British Empire, although unwittingly. It was hard to believe that a colonial people like the Egyptians could have built anything as magnificent as the Giza pyramids. Smyth provided a religious explanation showing that they had had nothing to do with it. In terms of the history of divine inspiration, the Egyptians were interlopers in their own land.

Another undercurrent informs Smyth’s writings. He was living in an age in which science contended with faith. In 1859—the year before John Taylor brought out his
The Great Pyramid. Why Was It Built? & Who Built It?
and less than six years before Smyth departed for Egypt—Charles Darwin published
On the Origin of Species.
Darwin undercut the theory of special creation and implied that humans were but another animal species evolved from yet other animal species. Even without Darwin’s overarching theory, many geologists were convinced that the earth was much older than the 6,000 years biblical fundamentalists claimed was the planet’s scripture-based age. Like Taylor, Smyth wanted to show that science served the cause of Christianity and that it gave the British a special place in religious history. As the inheritors of an inch passed down from the Hebrews and sanctified in both Noah’s ark and the Great Pyramid, the British stood as a bulwark of faith against what Smyth called the “atheistical French metric system.”
¹²
The Great Pyramid was one more reason for the British to look down their noses at their neighbors, and sometime enemies, across the English Channel.

Smyth’s colleagues received his work with admiration for his meticulousness, and with skepticism and derision for his religious explanation of the Great Pyramid builders’ scientific sophistication. Among scientists, his research went nowhere. But among true believers, it spawned a line of prophetic writing about the Great Pyramid that stretched Smyth’s ideas even farther than he meant them to go.

Jumping on Smyth’s ideas soon after the first edition of
Our Inheritance
was published in 1864, Robert Menzies (?-1877) argued that the interior passages and chambers of the Great Pyramid replicated the chronology of divine history. The key to understanding the correspondence lay in realizing that one inch equaled one year. The lengths of the passages and the dimensions of the chambers told the exact story of the Bible, year by year by year. For example, the Grand Gallery represents the Christian era, which began with Christ’s birth. Proceed 33 inches up the gallery from its starting point, and you come to the Well, which stands for the tomb in which the crucified body of Christ was interred. Some observers claimed that the rock around the mouth of the Well looked as if it had been blown out in an explosion. In a scriptural manner of speaking, it had, according to Menzies, since the Well embodied the great burst with which the resurrected Christ had emerged from the sepulcher on Easter morning in his thirty-third year.

David Davidson, an English engineer who considered himself agnostic, took on Menzies to prove him wrong. In the end, though, Davidson became convinced that Menzies was right and that the Great Pyramid was “an expression of the Truth in structural form.”
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At least a millennium before the Hebrews, the builders of the Great Pyramid predicted the coming of Christ. “In all essential features, the ancient Egyptian prophecy concerning the Messiah, the Hebrew Old and New Testament prophecies relating to Him, and the Pyramid’s symbolism are in complete agreement,” Davidson wrote in
The Great Pyramid, Its Divine Message: An Original Co-ordination of Historical Documents and Archaeological Evidences
(1st ed. 1924; reprinted many times since), a book he coauthored with H. Aldersmith.
¹⁴
Equally important, this ancient civilization had achieved an extraordinary degree of scientific accomplishment, not through the hit-or-miss of hypothesis and experiment scientists use but through a thorough, inspired understanding of natural law. Like Smyth, Davidson saw the Great Pyramid as a form of revelation purposely encrypted by God until our civilization had achieved sufficient knowledge to parse its hidden meaning and accept the revelation. Seen in this way, the Great Pyramid becomes God’s time capsule.

The overlapping expositions of Smyth-Menzies-Davidson have created a tradition that portrays the Great Pyramid as the product of the same divine inspiration that led to the Bible. What the Bible says in words, the Great Pyramid says in stone, so that these two great gifts of inspiration reinforce one another. Although the various writers who have contributed to this tradition have their own emphases and hobbyhorses, certain common ideas unite them.