The Great Pyramid: Why Was It Built? And Who Built It? (Cambridge Library Collection - Egyptology)

The publisher and author John Taylor (1781-1864) , who took an interest in various antiquarian matters, published this work in 1859. Using the measurements taken by the seventeenth-century archaeologist John Greaves and by the French savants who had examined the Great Pyramid at Giza during Napoleon's Egyptian expedition, he deduced the existence of a 'pyramid inch' (fractionally longer than the British inch) , which was one twenty-fifth of the so-called 'sacred cubit' and was derived from ancient astronomical and time-measurement observations; and as a convinced Christian, he concluded that the British inch was therefore divinely inspired. His work was very influential and had a considerable following (the astronomer Charles Piazzi Smyth's 1864 book on Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid is also reissued in this series) , but was later debunked by the more accurate surveys and measurements of Flinders Petrie, whose interest in Egypt was partly aroused by reading this book.