It is surely a minor point, but one which has vaguely troubled me for years.

Tompkins’ coyness about his source prevents the reader from properly assessing the material - from making suitable allowance for the preoccupations of the writer, say. (There is much less God-bothering in Vyse’s book than the quote would lead one to expect.)

Which has not stopped some from using it in their own presentations - Hancock and (at least nominally) Bauval, for example.

In Keeper of Genesis - aka Message of the Sphinx - we find the following:

Quote

The story of the Great Pyramid’s shafts, and the oddly contradictory Egyptological responses to whatever is discovered in them - or whatever new ideas are proposed concerning them - goes back to the late 1830s when the British explorer Colonel Howard Vyse ‘sat down before the Great Pyramid as at a fortress to be besieged’. This comment, from one of his contemporaries, alludes to Vyse’s renowned use of dynamite to ‘explore’ the Great Pyramid. . . .

No, it doesn’t. It obviously doesn’t. Going no further than the cited source, Tompkins, it obviously doesn’t.

What it ‘alludes’ to (and in fact spells out at length, in what follows the phrase Hancock quotes) is Vyse’s patience and persistence. The point of the simile is another aspect of siege warfare entirely: its often lengthy duration. The opinion expressed is entirely favourable to Vyse - and again, this is entirely obvious from what Tompkins provides: knowing that the writer was Mrs. Piazzi Smyth serves merely to confirm that she shared her husband’s good opinion of him.

We may note in passing a subtle falsification of the quote: ‘as a fortress to be besieged’ has turned into ‘as at a fortress to be besieged’.

Hancock attributes the comment to ‘one of his contemporaries’; his only basis for doing so is Tompkins’ attribution of the fuller quote to ‘a Victorian lady admirer’. Victoria reigned from 1837 to 1901, while Vyse died in 1853, making Hancock’s assumption - that ‘a Victorian lady admirer’ was necessarily his contemporary - a risky one.

As it turns out, Hancock was not as wrong as he could have been. Jessie Piazzi Smyth (née Duncan) was born in 1815, the year in which Vyse turned 31. Their lives did at least overlap, but to call her a contemporary of Vyse would really be reaching, in my opinion.

Whatever one thinks of that, it was certainly not a contemporary comment: it was written some 30 years after Vyse died (and some 46 years after the events described).

Hancock continues (charmingly):

Quote

. . . It might have been more appropriate, though less polite, to say that he confronted the last surviving wonder of the ancient world as though it were a woman to be raped. . . .

He is, I suppose, entitled to his opinion. What he is not entitled to do is to pass off something like this as a mere dysphemistic paraphrase of the adverse comment of a contemporary, when the comment in question was neither adverse nor contemporary.

Lest it be supposed that misuse of this material is confined to the ‘alternative’ camp, it would seem that Brian M. Fagan (Quest for the Past ) not only relied unwisely upon it, but added his own confabulations - assuming, for example, that the ‘lady admirer’ visited Vyse at Giza. No, she didn’t.

Such is what happens when people make too much of an unreferenced quote.

M.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/13/2007 11:18AM by Hermione.