Islamic Legends Come to Europe Another effort to remake the pyramids in Biblical image surrounded the claim, popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that the King's Chamber in the Great Pyramid was intended as the burial place of the Pharaoh who drowned when Moses parted the Red Sea. Some European travelers like Sandys brought back the story that the pyramids were the work of Queen Daluka after the Exodus, with its quasi-biblical pedigree. At the same time, however, the late Arab legend, current in Egypt in those days, that the Giza pyramids and the Sphinx were guardians against the Nile flood (a bastardization of the older Noachian Flood version) found their way into European travelogues and scientific treatises. The Arabic myth of Sūrīd or Hermes as the builder of the Great Pyramid appeared almost simultaneously in three different parts of Europe during the brief seventeenth-century explosion of European interest in Arabic material--and it was no coincidence. In Britain, John Greaves included the story in the first Western scientific investigation of the pyramids, which he produced in 1646. In Italy not long after, a German Jesuit scholar named Athanasius Kircher investigated Arabic sources for Egyptian history as part of a series of works laying the foundation for Egyptology. In France, the scholar Pierre Vattier made a translation of Murta ibn al-Aff in 1666 which was itself translated into English in 1672, to great curiosity and interest. All three scholars knew one another and were working toward similar aims. Taken together, these scholarly sources helped to inject the Sūrīd/Hermes story into a cultural mainstream still defined by alchemy and the occult and not yet by the full embrace of what we would consider modern science. It was a time, after all, when Isaac Newton could be both the greatest scientist of his day and an occultist with strange ideas about hidden truths encoded in the stars. As a result, when European scholarly interest in Arabic material declined in the eighteenth century, the Sūrīd story would linger on the edges of respectable history, an Eastern curiosity of greatest interest to artists and occultists. John Greaves and the Science of the Pyramids Travelers to Egypt in the Middle Ages brought back reports of the pyramids and the wonders of Egypt, but they rarely went much beyond describing the pyramids as Joseph's granaries and the hieroglyphs as mysterious writing or magical formulae. With the Renaissance, however, scholars began to question the received wisdom about Egypt and to start to investigate it in a more objective and rigorous way, albeit from a distance. Pierio Valeriano Bolzani was one of the first in the West to attempt to decipher the hieroglyphs, inspired by the rediscovery and publication of Horapollo's discussion of hieroglyphs. Working from Italy, he studied Egyptian artifacts in Rome, and he developed an allegorical interpretation of the hieroglyphs from Horapollo's speculative ideas. Despite its inaccuracies, it was an important step in the development of a scientific discipline of Egyptology. John Greaves, an Oxford University mathematician, astronomer, and antiquary, was not initially interested in the hieroglyphs or the mysteries of occult Egypt. Instead, he had a practical purpose in mind when he set off from England in 1637 to visit Egypt as part of a grand tour of the East, ostensibly to obtain rare books and manuscripts, particularly in Arabic. Greaves hoped to investigate Ptolemy's Almagest, an ancient Greek book of astronomy that survived only in Arabic, by discovering the exact spot in Alexandria where Ptolemy had taken his measurements. En route, Greaves stopped at Rome, where he met with Athanasius Kircher, who had not yet written his great books on Egypt. (Some believe they actually met on Greaves's return trip home.) Kircher had just discovered a century-old Arabic treatise on the pyramids by Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūi, whom he called Gelaldinus, which Abraham Ecchellensis had obtained in the early 1630s and brought to Rome in 1636, and it is possible that Kircher and Greaves discussed its account of the many Arabic myths about who built the pyramids. Greaves and Kircher hit it off, and Greaves planned to dedicate a book to him, writing out a draft dedication that he never published. He sought after Greek texts in Constantinople and spent nearly five months at Alexandria. While there, he twice visited Cairo and made a scientific survey of the Giza pyramids and engraved his name in one of the chambers. His measurements were the most accurate that had yet been made and served as the start of the scientific study of Giza. He also collected a large number of manuscripts in Greek, Arabic, and Persian before he returned to England and set to work writing up his account of the pyramids, known as Pyramidographia, which he published in 1646 and later revised after readers found some mathematical errors. The book was translated into French, where it helped spark the interest of French scholars in the mysteries of Egypt. The French translator, Melchisedech Thévenot, was a friend of Pierre Vattier, who translated Murta ibn al-Aff for Louis XIV. But for the moment our interest lies with Greaves. Most of his Pyramidographia is devoted to description, measurements, and scientific investigation of the Giza pyramids, which is beyond our interest, but in his first chapter he relates ancient legends of the Giza pyramids from the standard Greco-Roman sources and follows this with Arabic legends that would have been news to his readers. He gives a summary of the many different Arab legends found in al-Jawzī's Mir'āt al-zamān, and then he relates the Sūrīd story in the form we know it from what he says is a work by Ibn 'Abd al-Hakam, though this is almost certainly wrong. The attribution to al-Hakam, however, has caused great trouble over the years because it has led many to wrongly conclude that the Sūrīd story dates back to the eighth or ninth century. As for Greaves, he considered the story to be a fanciful romance, so encrusted with Eastern extravagance as to be wholly divorced from truth. He gave no credence to myths, though he inadvertently helped pass them on to the West. Excerpted from The Legends of the Pyramids: Myths and Misconceptions about Ancient Egypt by Jason Colavito All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
