Pyramid

This book traces the history of the exploration of the Giza site, from the earliest Greek and Roman travellers, through the investigations of the Arabian prince Abdullah Al-Mamun in the ninth century AD, to the work of Athanasius Kircher and John Greaves eight hundred years later. It examines the origins of Egyptolgy: the exhaustive surveys carried out under Napoleon following the French invasion of Egypt in 1798; Jean-Francois Champollion's cracking of the hieroglyphic 'code'; and the work of scholars such as Auguste Mariette and Sir William Flinders Petrie in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Links with Freemasonry and the effects of mass tourism are also explored. Finally, the book considers the less orthodox theories of the pyramidologists, and looks at how the Great Pyramid has become a magnet for all manner of charlatans, heretics and cranks, among them the mystic, "Madame" Helena Blavatsky, and the self-styled 'Great Beast' Aleister Crowley, who claimed to have spent a night of his honeymoon inside the tomb.