Surely such lines as these would be as true and as perfect as we could lay out nowadays with all our modern instrumental appliances. A string and a stone here, a clean-cut point of stone twenty miles away, and a great ball of fire behind that point at a distance of ninety odd million miles. The error in such a line would be very trifling.
Such observations as last mentioned would have been probably extended from Cephren for long lines, as being the higher pyramid above the earth's surface, and may have been made from the moon or stars.
In those days was the sun the intimate friend of man. The moon and stars were his hand-maidens.
How many of us can point to the spot of the sun's rising or setting? We, with our clocks, and our watches, and our compasses, rarely observe the sun or stars. But in a land and an age when the sun was the only clock, and the pyramid the only compass, the movements and positions of the heavenly bodies were known to all. These people were familiar with the stars, and kept a watch upon their movements.
How many of our vaunted educated population could point out the Dog-star in the heavens?—but the whole Egyptian nation hailed his rising as the beginning of their year, and as the harbinger of their annual blessing, the rising of the waters of the Nile.
| Fig. 38. From the North West Bearing 315° Sun in the West. | |
| Fig. 39. From the South East Bearing 135° Sun in the West. | |
| Fig. 40. From the North East Bearing 45° Sun in the East. | |
| Fig. 41. From the South West Bearing 225° Sun in the East. |
It is possible therefore that the land surveyors of Egypt made full use of the heavenly bodies in their surveys of the land; and while we are pitifully laying out our new countries by the circumferenter and the compass, we presume to speak slightingly of the supposed dark heathen days, when the land of Egypt was surveyed by means of the sun and the stars, and the theodolites were built of stone, with vertical limbs five hundred feet in height, and horizontal limbs three thousand feet in diameter.
Imagine half a dozen such instruments as this in a distance of about sixty miles (for each group of pyramids was effectually such an instrument), and we can form some conception of the perfection of the surveys of an almost prehistoric nation.
The centre of Lake Mœris, in which Herodotus tells us two pyramids stood 300 feet above the level of the lake, appears from the maps to be about S. 28° W., or S. 29° W. from Gïzeh, distant about 57 miles, and the Meidân group of pyramids appears to be about 33 miles due south of Gïzeh.
Figures 38, 39, 40 and 41, show that north-west, south-east, north-east, and south-west lines from the pyramids could be extended by simply plumbing the angles. These lines would be run in sets of two's and three's, according to the number of pyramids in the group; and their known distances apart at that angle would check the correctness of the work.