The Secrets of the Great Pyramid by Peter Tompkins: An Honest Review

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What This Book Is

Harper and Row published Secrets of the Great Pyramid in 1971, subtitled as two thousand years of adventures and discoveries surrounding the mysteries of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. It is generously illustrated, well written, and considerably more substantial than its reputation among archaeologists suggests.

The structure is chronological. Tompkins walks through what successive generations of visitors, tunnellers, surveyors and theorists have said about the monument, from classical antiquity to the mid twentieth century. Attached at the end is a long technical appendix by Livio Catullo Stecchini, a historian of science, on ancient systems of measurement.

The book is best understood as two things bound together. The main text is a history of an idea. The appendix is a scholarly argument. They do not sit comfortably beside each other, and most readers finish the first and skim the second.

The History It Tells Well

The narrative is the reason to own the book.

Classical visitors arrive first, reporting what Egyptian guides told them, already many centuries after the fact and already wrong in places. Then the Arab period, and the extraordinary episode of the Caliph al-Ma'mun in the ninth century, who reportedly had a tunnel driven into the north face in search of treasure and broke into the internal passages. The forced entrance is still the tourist route in.

Then Europe. Napoleon's expedition of 1798 brought scholars as well as soldiers, and the resulting Description de l'Égypte is where modern measurement of the monument begins. Through the nineteenth century the surveys multiply, and with them the theories. Howard Vyse blasts his way into chambers with gunpowder. John Taylor, who never visited Egypt, works out from published figures that the pyramid encodes pi. Charles Piazzi Smyth, Astronomer Royal for Scotland, takes Taylor's arithmetic and builds it into a system of biblical prophecy.

Tompkins tells all of this clearly and with an eye for the human detail, and a reader comes away understanding how a monument becomes a screen. Every generation found in the dimensions exactly the concerns it brought with it: divine measure for the Victorians, lost science for the moderns, an encoded history of the world for the millenarians.

The Petrie Story

The finest episode in the book is one that works against the tradition the book favours, and Tompkins tells it honestly.

William Matthew Flinders Petrie grew up in a household devoted to Piazzi Smyth's theories. His father was a believer. The young man went to Giza in the early 1880s with better instruments than anyone had brought before and the explicit intention of confirming the pyramid inch by precise measurement.

He measured for two seasons. The numbers did not support Smyth. The dimensions Smyth's system required were not the dimensions that were there, the unit in evidence was the Egyptian royal cubit, and the discrepancies were far outside any plausible error. Petrie published the refutation of the theory he had gone out to prove.

He went on to become one of the founders of scientific archaeology, and his Giza survey is still cited. The episode is a model of what intellectual honesty costs and what it is worth.

The Pyramid Inch

The theory Petrie destroyed deserves a paragraph, because it explains the whole Victorian phase.

Taylor and then Smyth proposed that the builders had worked in a unit almost identical to the British inch, and that this unit was divinely ordained. From there the monument's internal passages could be read as a timeline: so many inches of corridor equalling so many years of history, with the junctions and changes of gradient marking events. Prophecies were published and dates were named. When the dates passed, the measurements were revised and new dates were produced.

The appeal is not hard to reconstruct. It made a British unit of measure sacred at the height of British imperial confidence, it placed scriptural history on a physical foundation, and it turned an ancient monument into a machine for predicting the future. It was, in the most precise sense, a mirror.

Pi, Phi, and the Seked

The mathematical claims that survive the pyramid inch are more interesting and have a mundane explanation.

The relationships are genuinely present. The perimeter of the base divided by the height comes close to two pi. Certain ratios in the structure approximate phi, the golden section. These are not invented and any measurement confirms them.

The likely explanation lies in how Egyptian builders actually specified a slope. They used the seked, a ratio expressing how far a face moves horizontally for a fixed vertical rise, measured in palms and fingers against the royal cubit. It is a practical builder's unit, recorded in surviving mathematical papyri, and it is how you communicate an angle to a work gang without trigonometry.

A seked of five and a half palms produces a slope very close to the Great Pyramid's, and it also produces the pi relationship as an arithmetical consequence. The builders chose a convenient constructional ratio and pi came along uninvited. Our guide to the golden ratio discusses the same problem in its general form, and the sacred geometry overview covers where these relationships are demonstrable and where they are read in.

None of which makes the builders unsophisticated. Laying out a structure of that size to that accuracy, with those alignments, is an extraordinary achievement in surveying and organisation. The question is only whether they were encoding constants they had discovered or using a slope that worked, and the second requires far fewer assumptions.

What Is Actually Inside the Pyramid

The book spends a great deal of time on the interior and it is worth stating plainly what is there, since popular accounts routinely inflate it.

The internal arrangement is three chambers and a set of passages. A descending corridor runs down into the bedrock to an unfinished subterranean chamber. An ascending corridor branches upward to a horizontal passage leading to the chamber traditionally called the Queen's Chamber, a name given by early Arab visitors and carrying no Egyptological meaning. The ascending route continues into the Grand Gallery, a corbelled passage of remarkable construction, and then into the King's Chamber, which contains a granite box without a lid and nothing else.

Above the King's Chamber are five relieving spaces, discovered by blasting in the nineteenth century, containing quarry marks daubed by work gangs. Those marks include the name of Khufu, and they are in positions no forger could plausibly have reached, which is the argument most often used against the claim that Howard Vyse faked them.

Narrow shafts run from both upper chambers toward the exterior. Their purpose is debated, with the leading explanations being ventilation and a ritual function connected to stellar alignments. Robotic exploration of the shafts from the Queen's Chamber has found small blocking stones with copper fittings and, behind one, further blank space. That is a real unsolved detail and it is much smaller than the theories built on it.

What the interior does not contain is any inscription of the sort that fills later royal pyramids. The Pyramid Texts appear in the pyramid of Unas at Saqqara, roughly two centuries later, and their absence at Giza is one of the genuinely striking features of the monument.

The Appendix That Is Another Book

Livio Catullo Stecchini's contribution occupies a substantial part of the volume and is written in a completely different register.

Stecchini was a historian of science, and his argument is that the ancient units of measure used across Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece formed a single coherent system derived from measurements of the Earth itself. On his account the cubit, the stadion and their relatives are not arbitrary local conventions but expressions of a geodetic framework, which would imply that the ancient world knew the dimensions of the planet with considerable accuracy.

The work is serious and it has not been accepted. Specialists in ancient metrology have not adopted the conclusions, and the argument depends on selections among variant unit values that other scholars weigh differently. It deserves better than dismissal and it has not survived scrutiny.

For a general reader, the honest description is that this is the most demanding hundred pages in the book, that it is far more rigorous than what precedes it, and that its status is that of an unaccepted minority position by a credentialled scholar rather than either established fact or crankery.

What Merer's Logbook Settled

Here is what makes this book a period piece rather than a live controversy.

In 2013 a French and Egyptian team led by Pierre Tallet excavated at Wadi al-Jarf, a harbour site on the Red Sea coast, and found a group of papyri stored in limestone caves. They are the oldest inscribed papyri known from Egypt.

Two of the best preserved are the working logbook of an inspector named Merer. He led a crew of around two hundred men, and the document records their operations in the twenty-seventh year of the reign of Khufu: loading limestone at the Tura quarries across the Nile, sailing to Giza, delivering the stone, and returning. The entries are administrative and completely undramatic. Dates, cargoes, journeys, rations.

The twenty-seventh year of Khufu is late in his reign, the period when the outer casing of fine Tura limestone was being fitted to the Great Pyramid. Merer's crew were delivering that casing.

It does not stand alone. Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass have excavated the settlements south of the plateau where the workforce lived: bakeries, breweries, barracks, a cemetery of workers buried with their titles. The picture that has emerged is of a large, organised, seasonal state project, staffed by paid and fed Egyptians rather than by slaves or by anyone else.

The Man Who Wrote It

Peter Tompkins had an unusual life before he wrote about pyramids. He was an American journalist who worked for the Office of Strategic Services during the Second World War and ran an intelligence network inside German-occupied Rome in 1944, which he later wrote about directly.

This was his first book on unorthodox subjects. The Secret Life of Plants, written with Christopher Bird, followed in 1973 and became far more famous. Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids came in 1976.

The same method runs through all of them. Tompkins gathers an enormous quantity of material, much of it genuinely interesting, reports the sceptical position accurately, and then declines to let the sceptical position conclude anything. He is not a fabricator and he is not a careful weigher of evidence. He is a first-class reporter of what people have claimed, working in fields where the claims outrun the evidence, and the reader has to supply the weighing.

How to Read It Now

Read the historical chapters and enjoy them. The survey history, the personalities, the illustrations and the sheer accumulation of human effort spent on one building are all worth your time.

Read Petrie's story as the moral of the book, whether or not that is how it was intended.

Read the modern material for the archaeology, since Tompkins's is more than fifty years out of date. Mark Lehner's The Complete Pyramids covers the structures and the construction evidence for a general reader, and Tallet's publication of the Red Sea papyri gives the documentary side.

Who Should Read It

Read it if you want to understand where the modern pyramid theories came from. Almost everything circulating today is a descendant of something in this book, usually without the caveats.

Read it for the nineteenth century, which is the richest part and the funniest.

Read it as a study in how people look at old things and see themselves.

Do not read it as current archaeology, do not cite the pyramid inch, and treat Stecchini's conclusions as an interesting minority argument rather than as established.

For related territory, see the Pyramid Texts for what Egyptians actually wrote inside these monuments, and Egyptian mystery schools for the initiatory tradition later readers projected backward onto them.

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