h exact accuracy, but the disagreements
between the various students of the subject need give us little concern.
For our present purpose it does not in the least matter whether the
pyramids were built three thousand or four thousand years before the
beginning of our era. It suffices that they date back to a period long
antecedent to the beginnings of civilization in Western Europe. They
prove that the Egyptian of that early day had attained a knowledge of
practical mechanics which, even from the twentieth-century point of
view, is not to be spoken of lightly. It has sometimes been suggested
that these mighty pyramids, built as they are of great blocks of stone,
speak for an almost miraculous knowledge on the part of their builders;
but a saner view of the conditions gives no warrant for this thought.
Diodoras, the Sicilian, in his famous World's History, written about
the beginning of our era, explains the building of the pyramids by
suggesting that great quantities of earth were piled against the side
of the rising structure to form an inclined plane up which the blocks
of stone were dragged. He gives us certain figures, based, doubtless,
on reports made to him by Egyptian priests, who in turn drew upon the
traditions of their country, perhaps even upon written records no
longer preserved. He says that one hundred and twenty thousand men
were employed in the construction of the largest pyramid, and that,
notwithstanding the size of this host of workers, the task occupied
twenty years. We must not place too much dependence upon such figures as
these, for the ancient historians are notoriously given to exaggeration
in recording numbers; yet we need not doubt that the report given by
Diodorus is substantially accurate in its main outlines as to the method
through which the pyramids were constructed. A host of men putting their
added weight and strength to the task, with the aid of ropes, pulleys,
rollers, and levers, and utilizing the principle of the inclined plane,
could undoubtedly move and elevate and place in position the
largest blocks that enter into the pyramids or--what seems even more
wonderful--the most gigantic obelisks, without the aid of any other
kind of mechanism or of any more occult power. The same hands could, as
Diodorus suggests, remove all trace of the debris of construction and
leave the pyramids and obelisks standing in weird isolation, as if
sprung into being through a miracle.

ASTRONOMICAL SCI