THE PYRAMIDS AS GRANARIES.
The land of Shinar, with its desolate tower, the marvellous prototype
of the Great Pyramid of Jeezeh, passed from one conqueror to another;
and when the descendants of the Prophet Mohammed became rulers of the
east and west, the Caliph Al Mamoun, in the year A.D. 820, came from
Bagdad to El Fostat, an earlier Cairo, and determined to enter the
largest Pyramid and examine its contents, for he believed from the
reports brought to him that it contained untold treasures. He ordered
his Mohammedan workmen to begin at the middle of the northern side of
the Great Pyramid. These men worked on unceasingly by night and by day.
Weeks and months were consumed in these toilsome exertions; so
persevering, however, were they, that, though progressing slowly, they
at length penetrated no less than one hundred feet in depth from the
entrance. By that time, they were becoming thoroughly exhausted, and
began to despair of the hard and hitherto fruitless labour, when one
day they heard a great stone fall evidently in some hollow space within
not more than a few feet on one side of them. In the fall of that
particular stone there seems to have been somewhat more than an
accident.
They instantly pushed on in the direction of the strange noise.
Breaking through a wall surface, they burst into the hollow way, very
dark and dreadful to look at, and difficult to pass. It was the
inclined and descending entrance-passage of the Pyramid, where the
Romans and others passed up and down in their occasional visits to the
subterranean chamber and its unfinished, unquarried-out floor.
A large angular-fitting stone, that had been for ages, with its lower
flat side, a smooth and polished portion of the ceiling of the inclined
and narrow entrance-passage, quite undistinguishable from any other
part of the whole of its line, had now dropped on to the floor before
their eyes, and revealed that there was just behind it the end of
another passage, clearly ascending therefrom towards the south. That
ascending passage itself was still closed a little further up by a
portcullis or stopper, formed by a series of huge granite plugs, of
square wedge-like shape, dropped or slid down, and then jammed in
immovably from above. To break this in pieces within the confined
space, and pull out the fragments there, was entirely out of the
question; so the workmen broke through the smaller ordinary masonry,
and thus up again by a huge chasm—still visible, and used by visitors
into the interior—to the ascending passage, at a point past the
terrific hardness of its lower granite obstruction. They found up there
beyond the portcullis the passage-way still blocked, but the filling
material at that part was only limestone; so, making themselves a very
great hole in the masonry along the western side, they there wielded
their tools on the long blocks which presented themselves to their
view. But as fast as they broke up and pulled out the pieces of one of
the blocks in this ascending passage, other blocks, also of such a size
as to completely fill it, slid down from above, and where there should
have been free passage there was still an obstruction of solid stone.
The men despair; but the Caliph, being present, insists that, whatever
the number of stone plugs still to come down from the mysterious
reservoir, his men shall hammer and hammer them, one after the other,
and bit by bit, to little pieces, at the only opening where they can
get at them, until they at last come to the end. So the work goes on,
till at length the ascending passage, beginning just above the granite
portcullis, leading thence upward and to the south, becomes free from
obstruction.
On they rush, up one hundred and ten feet of the steep incline,
crouching hands and knees and chin together, through a passage of
polished white limestone, forty-seven inches in height and forty-one in
breadth. They suddenly emerge into a long high gallery, all black as
night and in death-like silence; still ascending, they see another low
passage. On their right hand is the dark, ominous-looking mouth of a
deep well, in which not even at a depth of more than 140 feet is the
water reached; while onwards and above them is a continuation of the
gallery leading them on.
The way was narrow, not more than six feet broad anywhere, and
contracted to three feet at the floor, but twenty feet high, and of
polished marble-like stone throughout. Ascending at an angle of 26°,
these men had to push their dangerous and slippery way for about a
hundred feet still further; then an obstructing three-foot step to
climb over; next a low doorway; then a hanging portcullis to pass,
almost to creep under; and then another low doorway, with awful blocks
of red granite on either side, above, and below.
After this they leaped without further obstruction at once into the
grand chamber, a right noble apartment now called the King’s Chamber,
about thirty-four feet long, seventeen broad, and nineteen high, of
polished red granite throughout, in blocks squared and put together
with exquisite skill. In this apartment they found—nothing, except an
empty stone chest or box or coffer without a lid![22]
The Caliph Al Mamoun was amazed, for he had arrived at the very
furthest part of the interior of the Great Pyramid he had so long
desired to take possession of, and had now found absolutely nothing
that he could make any use of, or saw the smallest value in. He
returned to El Fostat greatly disappointed, and the Grand Gallery, the
King’s Chamber, and the stone coffer without a lid were troubled by him
no more; for after this he left Egypt and returned to his imperial
residence in Bagdad, where he died in A.D. 842.
The entrance into the Great Pyramid in use in our time is the one thus
made by this prince. The granite chest or coffer without a lid, found
in the King’s Chamber above-mentioned, was not a sarcophagus, or a
coffin, but simply a corn measure, and nothing else, which holds about
four English quarters. It was placed in that chamber by the inspired
builder Joseph, the great-grandson of Abraham the Hebrew, the friend of
God; the Pyramid being a gigantic granary holding corn, and this the
measure by which he ascertained the quantity stored in it. The passages
in the walls, called air-channels by Egyptologists, were apertures
through which the corn was thrown from without into the chamber, and
thence into the vast receptacles below. The grain was brought from the
fields to the apertures up the steps, before the casing-stones were
fitted to the whole edifice, which, being afterwards polished, kept the
contents secure from moth and mildew.
When Joseph died “his body was embalmed and afterwards laid in the
ground near the banks of the Nile.”[23] The locality that exactly
answers this place of sepulture has been discovered in modern times.
“The structure found there is situated about a thousand feet south-east
of the Pyramid building, and still to be seen, descended into, and
measured, is a colossally large and deep burial pit, on the square and
level bottom of which rests an antique rude sarcophagus of very
gigantic proportions. But deep as is the pit containing it, it is
surrounded by a grand rectangular trench which goes down deeper still,
cut clearly in solid limestone rock the whole of the way down; and to
such a depth does it reach at last as to descend below the level of the
adjacent waters of the Nile at inundation time. Then, as the waters of
that river necessarily percolate the hygroscopic rock of the hill up to
their own level, the lower depths of the trench are filled with Nile
water, and the grand old sarcophagus of the interior pit does then rest
in a manner on an island surrounded by the waters of the Nile; and it
is the only known tomb on the Jeezeh hill which is gifted with that
peculiarity or privilege.”[24]
This is the tomb of which Herodotus speaks as the resting-place of the
builder of the Great Pyramid, to whom he gives the names of Chemmis,
Cheops, Xufu, Suphis, Philition the Shepherd, &c. All these
appellations belong to no other person than Zaphnath-paaneah, the
Viceroy of Pharaoh, King of Egypt, the great-grandson of Abraham the
Hebrew, the friend of God!
The sarcophagus is empty, for the bones of Joseph were carried away by
the children of Israel when they took their departure from Egypt under
the leadership of Moses and Aaron.
Visitors who enter the Pyramid get covered with a fine grey dust or
powder similar to that found in large rooms or buildings wherein grain
has been stored; for any person entering such places, though emptied of
their contents, but left unswept, would get covered with a grey powder
fallen from corn, or rice, or wheat, &c., which in every respect
resembles this fine grey dust. In confirmation of this the following is
an instance:—
“Last month (1877) an American newspaper, recounting a recent visit to
the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid, mentions how the clergyman of
the party, the Rev. Dr. ——, insisted on laying himself down full
length inside the coffer. He had heard the inspiration, and scientific
metrological theory of the Great Pyramid duly related by Dr. Grant, and
had not denied it; but so strongly was he imbued with the mere tombic
idea of the Egyptians, that he held, as he lay there, with the notion
that he was lying down in a royal coffin; and when he, Dr. ——, rose
up from that open granite chest and found himself filthy, horrible,
odious, with fine grey dust begriming his hair and transfusing his
clothes, he had a great deal of trouble about it; for not until he had
got right away from Egypt, and obtained the help of the steward’s
assistant on board ship to give the clothes an extra beating over the
waves of the rolling sea, was the last of the penetrating powdery stuff
got rid of.”[25]
Colonel Howard Vyse also found a substance of this description when he
entered the Pyramids, of which he gave a minute account in his work on
the Pyramids of Egypt. It is as follows:—“For a day or two after the
chamber had been opened those who remained in it became blackened as if
by a London fog. As this effect gradually disappeared, I conceive it to
have been occasioned by the blasting and by the sudden admission of the
air.
“Upon first entering the apartment, a black sediment was found, of the
consistence of a hoar-frost, equally distributed over the floor, so
that footsteps could be distinctly seen impressed on it, and it had
accumulated to some depth in the interstices of the blocks. Some of
this sediment which was sent to the French establishment near Cairo was
said to contain ligneous particles. When analysed in England it was
supposed to consist of the exuviæ of insects; but as the deposition was
equally diffused over the floor, and extremely like the substance found
on the 25th instant (1837) at the Second Pyramid, it was most probably
composed of particles of decayed stone. If it had been the remains of
rotten wood, or of a quantity of insects that had penetrated through
the masonry, it would scarcely have been so equally distributed; and if
caused by the latter, it is difficult to imagine why some of them
should not have been found alive when the place was opened evidently
for the first time since the Pyramid was built.”
Previous to the visitation of the seven years’ famine, these granaries
were built and stored, and the casing-stones fitted with cement and
polished, making these edifices appear like natural rocks. Bruce, the
great traveller, and other old travellers of those days, mistook them
for such (natural rocks) and paid no attention to them whatever.
When the time arrived that the Storehouses of the King were required to
be tapped, and food distributed to the famine-stricken people, the
exterior of these buildings was left entire, and the operation of
taking out the grain carried on by means of long shafts bored in the
adjacent ground to a depth reaching the foundation of the Pyramid,
where there were openings from which the contents could be tapped.
These could be opened and shut at pleasure, as Joseph ordered that all
the granaries should be closed with the exception of one, where he
hoped to see his brothers when they came to buy corn in Egypt.
Colonel Howard Vyse gives a description of one of these entrances,
thus:—“The Pyramid of Saccara. This Pyramid was built in steps, or
degrees, and was entered from a sort of well, or shaft, made in the
sand on the northern side. The passage, which was long and winding, and
apparently in many places forced, led to a lofty chamber, in the roof
of which wood had been employed. Various forced passages wound around
this chamber, and conducted to openings, or windows, which looked down
into it from a considerable height.[26] These passages were much
encumbered with rubbish, pieces of alabaster, and decayed wood; and in
one place there was an accumulation of large blocks of polished
granite, raised up by small fragments of stone sufficiently high to
admit of a man’s crawling beneath them. For what purpose they were so
placed we did not find out.”