'Too great a morsell for time to devoure': Seventeenth-Century Surveys of the Pyramids at Giza

Author: Vine, Angus¹

Source: Journeys, Volume 8, Numbers 1-2, Summer/Winter 2007 , pp. 21-40(20)

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Abstract:

This essay explores the responses of early modern travel-writers, primarily English, to the Pyramids at Giza. By examining a series of surveys, scholarly and otherwise, it proposes that the Pyramids became sites of overwhelming curiosity for seventeenth-century travellers. It also explores the literary, antiquarian and mathematical influences behind this curiosity, the influences which resulted in the emergence of an architectural and mensural approach to those three iconic Egyptian monuments.

Keywords: EGYPT; SURVEY; CURIOSITY; WONDER; EARLY MODERN

DOI: 10.3167/jys.2007.08010202

Affiliations: 1: Centre for Research in the Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities, University of Cambridge

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