If any people were entitled to so great a favour, it might be the Inhabitants of this Country. Our Motto, from Deuteronomy, points to a very important consideration: vis.-That the people who maintain a perfect and just weight, and a perfect and just measure, may expect lengthened days in the land which God giveth them. He found his justification in the Old Testament, mixed liberally with the doctrine of British Exceptionalism that has always haunted that nation’s relations with mainland Europe. He claimed that the old, so-called “imperial” standard was not only “more perfect” than the alternative-a highly dubious claim at best-but that it was actually favored by God. A staunch traditionalist by education and inclination, Taylor knew exactly where he stood. By the mid-1800s, a debate was raging in Britain as well over whether the country should join much of the European continent in embracing the new standard. It was then spread across Europe by Napoleon’s armies. He was violently opposed to the new metric system, which had been adopted as the standard in France at the end of the last century as a gift of the in-with-the-new sentiment of that country’s revolution. Yet the subject was in fact inextricably bound up with the politics of the time, at least in the minds of reactionary thinkers like Taylor. He focused much of his attention on an oddly specific subject, one that may sound more innocuous than divisively political to modern ears: systems of measurement. Late in his life, religion and politics began to fill the lion’s share of his output, his fundamentalist views on the former fueling his ever more reactionary views on the latter. When not shepherding the works of these others to publication, Taylor also wrote prolifically in his own hand on a bewildering variety of topics. He’s still remembered by historians of literature today for having advised, encouraged, and published the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and John Clare. Already 78 years old at the time he finished his book about the Pyramid of Khufu, he had been a prominent editor and publisher on the London literary scene for decades by that point. Whatever else one can say about him, Taylor was no idiot. But Taylor, needless to say, begged to differ. Even in 1859, most sober-minded Egyptologists thought they had already done a pretty good job of answering those questions. It was called The Great Pyramid: Why Was It Built and Who Built It? by John Taylor. The founding text of this alternative Egyptology was published the very same year as On the Origin of Species. Thus began a conflict that remains with us to this day, between the “mainstream” or “respectable” branches of Egyptology and what a steadfastly neutral observer might refer to as “alternative Egyptology” respectable Egyptologists, for their part, tend to prefer terms like “the pyramidiots.” Here's how the battle began. Later in the century, though, as men like Samuel Birch, Karl Richard Lepsius, and Auguste Mariette moved toward a more empirical understanding of ancient Egypt, that became less and less the case. Early on, men like Giovanni Caviglia and Howard Vyse, full of metaphysical notions about Egyptian civilization that were drawn from the Bible and various mystical texts, could still have their work taken seriously by the international community of scholars. In the nineteenth century, a rift opened in the study of Egyptology. The following excerpt comes from The Pyramids of Giza by Jimmy Maher, the author behind the world wonders history site, The Analog Antiquarian.
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