Pyramidology
[2][3] Some "pyramidologists" also concern themselves with the monumental structures of pre-Columbian America (such as Teotihuacan, the Mesoamerican Maya civilization, and the Inca of the South American Andes), and the temples of Southeast Asia.
Some pyramidologists claim that the Great Pyramid of Giza has encoded within it predictions for the Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt,[4] the crucifixion of Jesus,[4] the start of World War I,[5][6] the founding of modern-day Israel in 1948, and future events including the beginning of Armageddon; this was discovered by using what they call "pyramid inches" to calculate the passage of time where one British inch equals one solar year.
John Greaves, an English mathematician, astronomer and antiquarian, first took precise measurements of the Great Pyramid at Giza using the best mathematical instruments of the day.
Shaw thought the Great Pyramid was a temple to Osiris; I. Newton created the concept of "sacred code" to denote one of the two supposed instruments used to erect them.
Al-Baghdadi ponders whether the pyramid pre-dated the Great flood as described in Genesis, and even briefly entertained the idea that it was a pre-Adamic construction.
[11] Taylor also proposed that the inch used to build the Great Pyramid was 1⁄25 of the "sacred cubit" (whose existence had earlier been postulated by Isaac Newton).
Taylor was also the first to claim that the pyramid was divinely inspired, contained a revelation and was built not by the Egyptians, but instead by the Hebrews, pointing to Biblical passages (Is.
This was the year that John Taylor, an eccentric partner in a London publishing firm, issued his The Great Pyramid: Why was it Built?
[16] In 1891 pyramidology reached a global audience when it was integrated into the works of Charles Taze Russell, founder of the Bible Student movement.
[18] Adopting Joseph Seiss's designation that the Great Pyramid of Giza was "the Bible in stone" Russell taught that it played a special part in God's plan during the "last days" basing his interpretation on Isaiah 19:19–20: "In that day shall there be an altar (pile of stones) to the Lord in the midst of the land of Egypt, and a pillar (Hebrew matstebah, or monument) at the border thereof to the Lord.
[26] The cult of creation theory also provided the basis for Alford's next idea: that the sarcophagus in the King's Chamber, commonly supposed to be Khufu's final resting place, actually enshrined iron meteorites.
[30] Lewis Spence in his An Encyclopaedia of Occultism (1920) summed up the earliest pseudoarcheological claims: ... in the 1880s, Ignatius Donnelly had suggested that the Great Pyramid had been built by the descendants of the Atlanteans.
This theory was based on their initial claims regarding the alignment of the Giza pyramids with Orion[36] are later joined with speculation about the age of the Great Sphinx.
[44] Petrie refused to respond to these criticisms, claiming he had disproved the pyramid inch and compared continuing proponents to "flat earth believers": It is useless to state the real truth of the matter, as it has no effect on those who are subject to this type of hallucination.
[45]In 1930, Belgian Egyptologists Jean Capart and Marcelle Werbrouck stated that "with the help of mathematicians – and often mingling with them – mystics have invented what might be called the 'religion of the pyramids'".
On 24 January 1937, Gustave Jéquier chose to expose his criticism of the pyramidology assumptions on a mass media, the newspaper Gazette de Lausanne, lamenting that "these speculations didn't deserve the resonance they have had" and warning the audience against "prophecies incurred by arguments masked as science, when the very foundations of these reasonings, cleverly disguised, are nothing but inaccurate news or simple hypotheses and that the whole argument is clearly tendentious".
[48] In 1964 Barbara Mertz, reflecting the views of the scientific establishment, reported: Even in modern times when people, one would think, should know better, the Great Pyramid of Giza has proved a fertile field for fantasy.
[51][52] French Egyptologist and architect Jean-Philippe Lauer undertook a scientific analysis of several pyramidologists' claims by reconstructing their reasoning step-by-step and redoing their mathematical calculations.
