The Great Pyramid: Its Secrets and Mysteries Revealed

by Charles Piazzi Smyth

Intriguing look into the architecture and construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza. Full of details, dimensions, and amazing insights into its occult meanings and mysteries. Facsimile of a beautiful, rare 1880 volume. Over 40 black and white illustrations. 702 pages.

Genres: History, Egypt, Archaeology

664 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Charles Piazzi Smyth FRSE FRS FRAS FRSSA (3 January 1819 – 21 February 1900) was an Italian-born British astronomer who was Astronomer Royal for Scotland from 1846 to 1888; he is known for many innovations in astronomy and, along with his wife Jessica Duncan Piazzi Smyth, his pyramidological and metrological studies of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Source: Wikipedia

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book I read has the same jacket as pictured. It was published in 1978 by Bell publishing company, New York. The copyright page says this edition is a reprint of the1880 edition originally published by W. Isbister, London under the title: Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid. It has 664 pages not counting an index. It may have been the most influential of all books establishing the cult around the Great Pyramid. It is at once magnificent, astonishing, and ridiculous. First of all, Mr. Smyth has been discredited by others for his extreme opinions which are based on a strict religious fervor. He was an astronomer by trade who was inspired by the works of a man named John Taylor to investigate the Great Pyramid. He went to Egypt and conducted an extensive series of measurements of the pyramid both externally and internally and came to some astonishing conclusions. These conclusions are highly controversial. I would recommend the reader to other books that summarize or abridge Mr. Smyth. Reading the original is very difficult. It is in an older style that modern readers are not used to. The sentences are byzantine. I have to admit to being fascinated by the sentence structures which went on for hundreds of words full of clauses, sub clauses, sub-sub clauses, parenthetical asides, obscure allusions, archaic words, and other literary paraphernalia all peppered with semicolons, colons, hyphens, and quotes. People just don't write or talk that way anymore. Here is an example of one sentence from page 13: "On this ground it was that Mr. Taylor took his stand; and, after disobeying the world's long formed public opinion of too passively obedient accord with profane Egyptian tradition, and after thereby also setting at nought some of the most time-honored prejudices of modern Egyptological scholars, so far as to give a full, fair, and impartial examination to the whole case from the beginning, announced that he had discovered in some of the arrangements and measures of the Great Pyramid-when corrected for injuries of intervening time-certain scientific results, which speak of neither Egyptian nor Babylonian, nor Roman nor Greek, but of something much more than, as well as quite different from, any ordinary human ways". You have to love it. It's even better if read aloud. But 664 pages of it is hard to endure. Again, try something more recent that builds on Smyth's foundation.

[Callum · Rating 4 out of 5]

Earlier parts of the book contain extremely useful measurements, and the author notes many intriguing relationships between the measurements and ratios of the GP.

(I am yet to come across a modern book that goes into as much detailed measurement of the GP as this book does - if someone could point me to such a book that would be much appreciated).

As with many authors of the time, Smyth's evident infatuation with King James biblical dogma and the out-of-place interpolations of measurements along the passageways representing apocalytic time-stamped dates, ruins an otherwise intriguing book for me.

I wonder if Edgar Casey got that mad AD-time, GP-measurement apocalytic idea from Smyth.

[Wendy]

(found read date in diary) pretty sure this is the book I read by this title