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The Building of the Great Pyramid

(2024)


Three Reports from c.2600BC: A Trilogy of Parables for our Time 

To be published by Liberalis Books, 31 May 2024
ISBN: 978-1-78535-159-4 (Paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-78535-160-1 (e-book)

When he was ten Nicholas Hagger’s dentist, Howard Carter’s brother, told him about the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb, and he was later given a shawabti (funerary figurine) of Tutankhamun that came from the tomb. As a teenager he was fascinated by the Great Pyramid, and in 1963 wrote ‘The Riddle of the Great Pyramid’ as a parable for our time. A report from an official living at Giza in c.2600BC, it explains the organisation and endeavour that has gone into the building when those involved in the work do not know why it is being built.

The notion of the Great Pyramid as a microcosm of Western society has haunted Hagger throughout his working life. After visiting it in 2005 he wrote a sequel by the same official, ‘The Meaning and Purpose of the Great Pyramid’ which carries the story forward, and after another visit in 2020 he wrote ‘The Great Pyramid as a House of Eternity’, which completed a Pyramid trilogy. These three stories, which have followed research into the building of the Great Pyramid for 57 years, are now brought out together with illustrations that throw light on the events described. Collectively they offer a factual account of the construction soon after 2600BC and the aspirations of humans seeking a second life before the birth of the established religions, and in the tradition of Swift profoundly question the modern world of work and organisation of Western society. They present a quest for eternity that is also a self-aggrandising folly at the beginning of recorded history, and illustrate the dialectic between a quest for Reality and condemnation of follies and vices that Hagger identified as the fundamental theme of world literature in A New Philosophy of Literature (also published by O-Books).

Nicholas Hagger