Chapter II: The Memphite Empire (2)

Here the labourers employed on the works came every evening to huddle together, and the refuse of their occupation still encumbers the ruins of their dwellings, potsherds, chips of various kinds of hard stone which they had been cutting, granite, alabaster, diorite, fragments of statues broken in the process of sculpture, and blocks of smooth granite ready for use. The chapel commands a view of the eastern face of the pyramid, and communicated by a paved causeway with the temple of the Sphinx, to which it must have borne a striking resemblance.* The plan of it can be still clearly traced on the ground, and the rubbish cannot be disturbed without bringing to light portions of statues, vases, and tables of offerings, some of them covered with hieroglyphs, like the mace-head of white stone which belonged in its day to Khephren himself.

* The connection of the temple of the Sphinx with that of
the second pyramid was discovered in December, 1880, during
the last diggings of Mariette. I ought to say that the whole
of that part of the building into which the passage leads
shows traces of having been hastily executed, and at a time
long after the construction of the rest of the edifice; it
is possible that the present condition of the place does not
date back further than the time of the Antonines, when the
Sphinx was cleared for the last time in ancient days.

Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Emil Brugsch-Bey. See
on p. 199 the carefully executed drawing of the best
preserved among the diorite statues which the Gîzeh Museum
now possesses of this Pharaoh.

The internal arrangements of the pyramid are of the simplest character; they consist of a granite-built passage carefully concealed in the north face, running at first at an angle of 25°, and then horizontally, until stopped by a granite barrier at a point which indicates a change of direction; a second passage, which begins on the outside, at a distance of some yards in advance of the base of the pyramid, and proceeds, after passing through an unfinished chamber, to rejoin the first; finally, a chamber hollowed in the rock, but surmounted by a pointed roof of fine limestone slabs.

The sarcophagus was of granite, and, like that of Kheops, bore neither the name of a king nor the representation of a god. The cover was fitted so firmly to the trough that the Arabs could not succeed in detaching it when they rifled the tomb in the year 1200 of our era; they were, therefore, compelled to break through one of the sides with a hammer before they could reach the coffin and take from it the mummy of the Pharaoh.*

* The second pyramid was opened to Europeans in 1816 by
Belzoni. The exact date of the entrance of the Arabs is
given us by an inscription, written in ink, on one of the
walls of the sarcophagus chamber: “Mohammed Ahmed Effendi,
the quarryman, opened it; Othman Effendi was present, as
well as the King Ali Mohammed, at the beginning and at the
closing.” The King Ali Mohammed was the son and successor of
Saladin.

Of Khephren’s sons, Menkaûrî (Mykerinos), who was his successor, could scarcely dream of excelling his father and grandfather;* his pyramid, the Supreme--Hirû** --barely attained an elevation of 216 feet, and was exceeded in height by those which were built at a later date.*** Up to one-fourth of its height it was faced with syenite, and the remainder, up to the summit, with limestone.****

* Classical tradition makes Mykerinos the son of Kheops.
Egyptian tradition regards him as the son of Khephren, and
with this agrees a passage in the Westcar Papyrus, in which
a magician prophesies that after Kheops his son (Khâfrî)
will yet reign, then the son of the latter (Menkaûrî), then
a prince of another family.

** An inscription, unfortunately much mutilated, from the
tomb of Tabhûni, gives an account of the construction of the
pyramid, and of the transport of the sarcophagus.

*** Professor Petrie reckons the exact height of the pyramid
at 2564 ±15 or 2580 ± 2 inches; that is to say, 214 or 215
feet in round numbers.

**** According to Herodotus, the casing of granite extended
to half the height. Diodorus states that it did not go
beyond the fifteenth course. Professor Petrie discovered
that there were actually sixteen lower courses in red
granite.

For lack of time, doubtless, the dressing of the granite was not completed, but the limestone received all the polish it was capable of taking. The enclosing wall was extended to the north so as to meet, and become one with, that of the second pyramid. The temple was connected with the plain by a long and almost straight causeway, which ran for the greater part of its course* upon an embankment raised above the neighbouring ground. This temple was in fair condition in the early years of the eighteenth century,** and so much of it as has escaped the ravages of the Mameluks, bears witness to the scrupulous care and refined art employed in its construction.

* This causeway should not be confounded, as is frequently
done, with that which may be seen at some distance to the
east in the plain: the latter led to limestone quarries in
the mountain to the south of the plateau on which the
pyramids stand. These quarries were worked in very ancient
times.

** Benoit de Maillet visited this temple between 1692 and
1708. “It is almost square in form. There are to be found
inside four pillars which doubtless supported a vaulted roof
covering the altar of the idol, and one moved around these
pillars as in an ambulatory. These stones were cased with
granitic marble. I found some pieces still unbroken which
had been attached to the stones with mastic. I believe that
the exterior as well as the interior of the temple was cased
with this marble” (Le Mascrier, Description de l’Egypte,
1735, pp. 223, 224).

Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph, by Emil Brugsch-Bey, of
a statue preserved in the Museum of Gîzeh.

Coming from the plain, we first meet with an immense halting-place measuring 100 feet by 46 feet, and afterwards enter a large court with an egress on each side: beyond this we can distinguish the ground-plan only of five chambers, the central one, which is in continuation with the hall, terminating at a distance of some 42 feet from the pyramid, exactly opposite the middle point of the eastern face. The whole mass of the building covers a rectangular area 184 feet long by a little over 177 feet broad. Its walls, like those of the temple of the Sphinx, contained a core of lime-stone 7 feet 10 inches thick, of which the blocks have been so ingeniously put together as to suggest the idea that the whole is cut out of the rock. This core was covered with a casing of granite and alabaster, of which the remains preserve no trace of hieroglyphs or of wall scenes: the founder had caused his name to be inscribed on the statues, which received, on his behalf, the offerings, and also on the northern face of the pyramid, where it was still shown to the curious towards the first century of our era. The arrangement of the interior of the pyramid is somewhat complicated, and bears witness to changes brought unexpectedly about in the course of construction. The original central mass probably did not exceed 180 feet in breadth at the base, with a vertical height of 154 feet. It contained a sloping passage cut into the hill itself, and an oblong low-roofed cell devoid of ornament. The main bulk of the work had been already completed, and the casing not yet begun, when it was decided to alter the proportions of the whole.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin. The coffin is in the British Museum.
The drawing of it was published by Vyse, by Birch-Lenormant,
and by Lepsius. Herr Sethe has recently revived an ancient
hypothesis, according to which it had been reworked in the
Saite period, and he has added to archaeological
considerations, up to that time alone brought to bear upon
the question, new philological facts.

Mykerinos was not, it appears, the eldest son and appointed heir of Khephren; while still a mere prince he was preparing for himself a pyramid similar to those which lie near the “Horizon,” when the deaths of his father and brother called him to the throne. What was sufficient for him as a child, was no longer suitable for him as a Pharaoh; the mass of the structure was increased to its present dimensions, and a new inclined passage was effected in it, at the end of which a hall panelled with granite gave access to a kind of antechamber.* The latter communicated by a horizontal corridor with the first vault, which was deepened for the occasion; the old entrance, now no longer of use, was roughly filled up.**

* Vyse discovered here fragments of a granite sarcophagus,
perhaps that of the queen; the legends which Herodotus (ii.
134, 135), and several Greek authors after him, tell
concerning this, show clearly that an ancient tradition
assumed the existence of a female mummy in the third pyramid
alongside of that of the founder Mykerinos.

** Vyse has noticed, in regard to the details of the
structure, that the passage now filled up is the only one
driven from the outside to the interior; all the others were
made from the inside to the outside, and consequently at a
period when this passage, being the only means of
penetrating into the interior of the monument, had not yet
received its present dimensions.

Mykerinos did not find his last resting-place in this upper level of the interior of the pyramid: a narrow passage, hidden behind the slabbing of the second chamber, descended into a secret crypt, lined with granite and covered with a barrel-vaulted roof. The sarcophagus was a single block of blue-black basalt, polished, and carved into the form of a house, with a façade having three doors and three openings in the form of windows, the whole framed in a rounded moulding and surmounted by a projecting cornice such as we are accustomed to see on the temples.*

* It was lost off the coast of Spain in the vessel which was
bringing it to England. We have only the drawing remaining
which was made at the time of its discovery, and published
by Vyse. M. Borchardt has attempted to show that it was
reworked under the XXVIth Saite dynasty as well as the
wooden coffin of the king.

The mummy-case of cedar-wood had a man’s head, and was shaped to the form of the human body; it was neither painted nor gilt, but an inscription in two columns, cut on its front, contained the name of the Pharaoh, and a prayer on his behalf: “Osiris, King of the two Egypts, Menkaûrî, living eternally, given birth to by heaven, conceived by Nûît, flesh of Sibii, thy mother Nûît has spread herself out over thee in her name of ‘Mystery of the Heavens,’ and she has granted that thou shouldest be a god, and that thou shouldest repulse thine enemies, O King of the two Egypts, Menkaûrî, living eternally.” The Arabs opened the mummy to see if it contained any precious jewels, but found within it only some leaves of gold, probably a mask or a pectoral covered with hieroglyphs. When Vyse reopened the vault in 1837, the bones lay scattered about in confusion on the dusty floor, mingled with bundles of dirty rags and wrappings of yellowish woollen cloth.

The worship of the three great pyramid-building kings continued in Memphis down to the time of the Greeks and Romans. Their statues, in granite, limestone, and alabaster, were preserved also in the buildings annexed to the temple of Phtah, where visitors could contemplate these Pharaohs as they were when alive.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a chromolithograph in Prisse
D’Avennes, _Histoire de l’Art Égyptien_.

Those of Khephren show us the king at different ages, when young, mature, or already in his decadence. They are in most cases cut out of a breccia of green diorite, with long irregular yellowish veins, and of such hardness that it is difficult to determine the tool with which they were worked. The Pharaoh sits squarely on his royal throne, his hands on his lap, his body firm and upright, and his head thrown back with a look of self-satisfaction. A sparrow-hawk perched on the back of his seat covers his head with its wings--an image of the god Horus protecting his son. The modelling of the torso and legs of the largest of these statues, the dignity of its pose, and the animation of its expression, make of it a unique work of art which may be compared with the most perfect products of antiquity. Even if the cartouches which tell us the name of the king had been hammered away and the insignia of his rank destroyed, we should still be able to determine the Pharaoh by his bearing: his whole appearance indicates a man accustomed from his infancy to feel himself invested with limitless authority. Mykerinos stands out less impassive and haughty: he does not appear so far removed from humanity as his predecessor, and the expression of his countenance agrees, somewhat singularly, with the account of his piety and good nature preserved by the legends. The Egyptians of the Theban dynasties, when comparing the two great pyramids with the third, imagined that the disproportion in their size corresponded with a difference of character between their royal occupants. Accustomed as they were from infancy to gigantic structures, they did not experience before “the Horizon” and “the Great” the feeling of wonder and awe which impresses the beholder of to-day. They were not the less apt on this account to estimate the amount of labour and effort required to complete them from top to bottom. This labour seemed to them to surpass the most excessive corvée which a just ruler had a right to impose upon his subjects, and the reputation of Kheops and Khephren suffered much in consequence. They were accused of sacrilege, of cruelty, and profligacy.

Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Émil Brugsch-Bey. It
is one of the most complete statues found by Mariette in the
temple of the Sphinx.

It was urged against them that they had arrested the whole life of their people for more than a century for the erection of their tombs. Kheops began by closing the temples and by prohibiting the offering of sacrifices: he then compelled all the Egyptians to work for him. To some he assigned the task of dragging the blocks from the quarries of the Arabian chain to the Nile: once shipped, the duty was incumbent on others of transporting them as far as the Libyan chain. A hundred thousand men worked at a time, and were relieved every three months.*

* Professor Petrie thinks that this detail rests upon an
authentic tradition. The inundation, he says, lasts three
months, during which the mass of the people have nothing to
do; it was during these three months that Kheops raised the
100,000 men to work at the transport of the stone. The
explanation is very ingenious, but it is not supported by
the text: Herodotus does not relate that 100,000 men were
called by the corvée for three months every year; but from
three months to three months, possibly four times a year,
bodies of 100,000 men relieved each other at the work. The
figures which he quotes are well-known legendary numbers,
and we must leave the responsibility for them to the popular
imagination (Wiedemann, Herodots Zweites Buck, p. 465).

The period of the people’s suffering was divided as follows: ten years in making the causeway along which the blocks were dragged--a work, in my opinion, very little less onerous than that of erecting the pyramid, for its length was five _stadia_, its breadth ten _orgyio_, its greatest height eight, and it was made of cut stone and covered with figures.* Ten years, therefore, were consumed in constructing this causeway and the subterranean chambers hollowed out in the hill.... As for the pyramid itself, twenty years were employed in the making of it.... There are recorded on it, in Egyptian characters, the value of the sums paid in turnips, onions, and garlic, for the labourers attached to the works; if I remember aright, the interpreter who deciphered the inscription told me that the total amounted to sixteen hundred talents of silver. If this were the case, how much must have been expended for iron to make tools, and for provisions and clothing for the workmen?**

* Diodorus Siculus declares that there were no causeways to
be seen in his time. The remains of one of them appear to
have been discovered and restored by Vyse.

** Herodotus, ii. 124, 125. The inscriptions which were read
upon the pyramids were the graffiti of visitors, some of
them carefully executed. The figures which were shown to
Herodotus represented, according to the dragoman, the value
of the sums expended for vegetables for the workmen; we
ought, probably, to regard them as the thousands which, in
many of the votive temples, served to mark the quantities of
different things presented to the god, that they might be
transmitted to the deceased.

The whole resources of the royal treasure were not sufficient for such necessaries: a tradition represents Kheops as at the end of his means, and as selling his daughter to any one that offered, in order to procure money.* Another legend, less disrespectful to the royal dignity and to paternal authority, assures us that he repented in his old age, and that he wrote a sacred book much esteemed by the devout.**

* Herodotus, ii. 126. She had profited by what she received
to build a pyramid for herself in the neighbourhood of the
great one--the middle one of the three small pyramids: it
would appear in fact, that this pyramid contained the mummy
of a daughter of Kheops, Honîtsonû.

** Manetho, Unger’s edition, p. 91. The ascription of a book
to Kheops, or rather the account of the discovery of a
“sacred book” under Kheops, is quite in conformity with
Egyptian ideas. The British Museum possesses two books,
which were thus discovered under this king; the one, a
medical treatise, in a temple at Coptos; the other comes
from Tanis. Among the works on alchemy published by M.
Berthelot, there are two small treatises ascribed to Sophé,
possibly Souphis or Kheops: they are of the same kind as the
book mentioned by Manetho, and which Syncellus says was
bought in Egypt.

Khephren had imitated, and thus shared with, him, the hatred of posterity. The Egyptians avoided naming these wretches: their work was attributed to a shepherd called Philitis, who in ancient times pastured his flocks in the mountain; and even those who did not refuse to them the glory of having built the most enormous sepulchres in the world, related that they had not the satisfaction of reposing in them after their death. The people, exasperated at the tyranny to which they had been subject, swore that they would tear the bodies of these Pharaohs from their tombs, and scatter their fragments to the winds: they had to be buried in crypts so securely placed that no one has succeeded in finding them.

Like the two older pyramids, “the Supreme” had its anecdotal history, in which the Egyptians gave free rein to their imagination. We know that its plan had been rearranged in the course of building, that it contained two sepulchral chambers, two sarcophagi, and two mummies: these modifications, it was said, belonged to two distinct reigns; for Mykerinos had left his tomb unfinished, and a woman had finished it at a later date--according to some, Nitokris, the last queen of the VIth dynasty; according to others, Rhodopis, the Ionian who was the mistress of Psammetichus I. or of Ainasis.*

* Zoega had already recognized that the Rhodopis of the
Greeks was no other than the Nitokris of Manetho, and his
opinion was adopted and developed by Bunsen. The legend of
Rhodopis was completed by the additional ascription to the
ancient Egyptian queen of the character of a courtesan: this
repugnant trait seems to have been borrowed from the same
class of legends as that which concerned itself with the
daughter of Kheops and her pyramid. The narrative thus
developed was in a similar manner confounded with another
popular story, in which occurs the episode of the slipper,
so well known from the tale of Cinderella. Herodotus
connects Rhodopis with his Amasis, Ælian with King
Psammetichus of the XXVIth dynasty.

The beauty and richness of the granite casing dazzled all eyes, and induced many visitors to prefer the least of the pyramids to its two imposing sisters; its comparatively small size is excused on the ground that its founder had returned to that moderation and piety which ought to characterize a good king. “The actions of his father were not pleasing to him; he reopened the temples and sent the people, reduced to the extreme of misery, back to their religious observances and their occupations; finally, he administered justice more equitably than all other kings. On this head he is praised above those who have at any time reigned in Egypt: for not only did he administer good justice, but if any one complained of his decision he gratified him with some present in order to appease his wrath.” There was one point, however, which excited the anxiety of many in a country where the mystic virtue of numbers was an article of faith: in order that the laws of celestial arithmetic should be observed in the construction of the pyramids, it was necessary that three of them should be of the same size. The anomaly of a third pyramid out of proportion to the two others could be explained only on the hypothesis that Mykerinos, having broken with paternal usage, had ignorantly infringed a decree of destiny--a deed for which he was mercilessly punished. He first lost his only daughter; a short time after he learned from an oracle that he had only six more years to remain upon the earth. He enclosed the corpse of his child in a hollow wooden heifer, which he sent to Sais, where it was honoured with divine worship.*

* Herodotus, ii. 129-133. The manner in which Herodotus
describes the cow which was shown to him in the temple of
Sais, proves that he was dealing with Nit, in animal form,
Mihî-ûîrît, the great celestial heifer who had given birth
to the Sun. How the people could have attached to this
statue the legend of a daughter of Mykerinos is now
difficult to understand. The idea of a mummy or a corpse
shut up in a statue, or in a coffin, was familiar to the
Egyptians: two of the queens interred at Déir el-Baharî,
Nofritari Ahhotpû II., were found hidden in the centre of
immense Osirian figures of wood, covered with stuccoed
fabric. Egyptian tradition supposed that the bodies of the
gods rested upon the earth. The cow Mîhî-ûîrît might,
therefore, be bodily enclosed in a sarcophagus in the form
of a heifer, just as the mummified gazelle of Déîr el-Baharî
is enclosed in a sarcophagus of gazelle form; it is even
possible that the statue shown to Herodotus really contained
what was thought to be a mummy of the goddess.

“He then communicated his reproaches to the god, complaining that his father and his uncle, after having closed the temples, forgotten the gods and oppressed mankind, had enjoyed a long life, while he, devout as he was, was so soon about to perish. The oracle answered that it was for this very reason that his days were shortened, for he had not done that which he ought to have done. Egypt had to suffer for a hundred and fifty years, and the two kings his predecessors had known this, while he had not. On receiving this answer, Mykerinos, feeling himself condemned, manufactured a number of lamps, lit them every evening at dusk, began to drink and to lead a life of jollity, without ceasing for a moment night and day, wandering by the lakes and in the woods wherever he thought to find an occasion of pleasure. He had planned this in order to convince the oracle of having spoken falsely, and to live twelve years, the nights counting as so many days.” Legend places after him Asychis or Sasychis, a later builder of pyramids, but of a different kind. The latter preferred brick as a building material, except in one place, where he introduced a stone bearing the following inscription: “Do not despise me on account of the stone pyramids: I surpass them as much as Zeus the other gods. Because, a pole being plunged into a lake and the clay which stuck to it being collected, the brick out of which I was constructed was moulded from it.” The virtues of Asychis and Mykerinos helped to counteract the bad impression which Kheops and Khephren had left behind them. Among the five legislators of Egypt Asychis stood out as one of the best. He regulated, to minute details, the ceremonies of worship. He invented geometry and the art of observing the heavens.*

* Diodorus, i. 94. It seems probable that Diodorus had
received knowledge from some Alexandrian writer, now lost,
of traditions concerning the legislative acts of Shashanqû
I. of the XXIInd dynasty; but the name of the king, commonly
written Sesonkhis, had been corrupted by the dragoman into
Sasykhis.

He put forth a law on lending, in which he authorized the borrower to pledge in forfeit the mummy of his father, while the creditor had the right of treating as his own the tomb of the debtor: so that if the debt was not met, the latter could not obtain a last resting-place for himself or his family either in his paternal or any other tomb.

History knows nothing either of this judicious sovereign or of many other Pharaohs of the same type, which the dragomans of the Greek period assiduously enforced upon the respectful attention of travellers. It merely affirms that the example given by Kheops, Khephren, and Mykerinos were by no means lost in later times. From the beginning of the IVth to the end of the XIVth dynasty--during more than fifteen hundred years--the construction of pyramids was a common State affair, provided for by the administration, secured by special services. Not only did the Pharaohs build them for themselves, but the princes and princesses belonging to the family of the Pharaohs constructed theirs, each one according to his resources; three of these secondary mausoleums are ranged opposite the eastern side of “the Horizon,” three opposite the southern face of “the Supreme,” and everywhere else--near Abousir, at Saqqâra, at Dahshur or in the Fayûm--the majority of the royal pyramids attracted around them a more or less numerous cortège of pyramids of princely foundation often debased in shape and faulty in proportion. The materials for them were brought from the Arabian chain. A spur of the latter, projecting in a straight line towards the Nile, as far as the village of Troiû, is nothing but a mass of the finest and whitest limestone. The Egyptians had quarries here from the earliest times. By cutting off the stone in every direction, they lowered the point of this spur for a depth of some hundreds of metres. The appearance of these quarries is almost as astonishing as that of the monuments made out of their material. The extraction of the stone was carried on with a skill and regularity which denoted ages of experience. The tunnels were so made as to exhaust the finest and whitest seams without waste, and the chambers were of an enormous extent; the walls were dressed, the pillars and roofs neatly finished, the passages and doorways made of a regular width, so that the whole presented more the appearance of a subterranean temple than of a place for the extraction of building materials.*

* The description of the quarries of Turah, as they were at
the beginning of the century, was somewhat briefly given by
Jomard, afterwards more completely by Perring. During the
last thirty years the Cairo masons have destroyed the
greater part of the ancient remains formerly existing in
this district, and have completely changed the appearance of
the place.

Hastily written graffiti, in red and black ink, preserve the names of workmen, overseers, and engineers, who had laboured here at certain dates, calculations of pay or rations, diagrams of interesting details, as well as capitals and shafts of columns, which were shaped out on the spot to reduce their weight for transport. Here and there true official stelas are to be found set apart in a suitable place, recording that after a long interruption such or such an illustrious sovereign had resumed the excavations, and opened fresh chambers. Alabaster was met with not far from here in the Wady Gerrauî. The Pharaohs of very early times established a regular colony here, in the very middle of the desert, to cut the material into small blocks for transport: a strongly built dam, thrown across the valley, served to store up the winter and spring rains, and formed a pond whence the workers could always supply themselves with water. Kheops and his successors drew their alabaster from Hâtnûbû, in the neighbourhood of Hermopolis, their granite from Syene, their diorite and other hard rocks, the favourite material for their sarcophagi, from the volcanic valleys which separate the Nile from the Red Sea--especially from the Wady Hammamât. As these were the only materials of which the quantity required could not be determined in advance, and which had to be brought from a distance, every king was accustomed to send the principal persons of his court to the quarries of Upper Egypt, and the rapidity with which they brought back the stone constituted a high claim on the favour of their master. If the building was to be of brick, the bricks were made on the spot, in the plain at the foot of the hills. If it was to be a limestone structure, the neighbouring parts of the plateau furnished the rough material in abundance. For the construction of chambers and for casing walls, the rose granite of Elephantine and the limestone of Troiu were commonly employed, but they were spared the labour of procuring these specially for the occasion. The city of the White Wall had always at hand a supply of them in its stores, and they might be drawn upon freely for public buildings, and consequently for the royal tomb. The blocks chosen from this reserve, and conveyed in boats close under the mountain-side, were drawn up slightly inclined causeways by oxen to the place selected by the architect.

The internal arrangements, the length of the passages and the height of the pyramids, varied much: the least of them had a height of some thirty-three feet merely. As it is difficult to determine the motives which influenced the Pharaohs in building them of different sizes, some writers have thought that the mass of each increased in proportion to the time bestowed upon its construction--that is to say, to the length of each reign. As soon as a prince mounted the throne, he would probably begin by roughly sketching out a pyramid sufficiently capacious to contain the essential elements of the tomb; he would then, from year to year, have added fresh layers to the original nucleus, until the day of his death put an end for ever to the growth of the monument.*

* This was the theory formulated by Lepsius, after the
researches made by himself, and the work done by Erbkam, and
the majority of Egyptologists adopted it, and still maintain
it. It was vigorously attacked by Perrot-Chipiez and by
Petrie; it was afterwards revived, with amendments, by
Borchardt whose conclusions have been accepted by Ed. Meyer.
The examinations which I have had the opportunity of
bestowing on the pyramids of Saqqâra, Abusir, Dahshur,
Rîgah, and Lisht have shown me that the theory is not
applicable to any of these monuments.

This hypothesis is not borne out by facts: such a small pyramid as that of Saqqâra belonged to a Pharaoh who reigned thirty years, while “the Horizon” of Gîzeh is the work of Kheops, whose rule lasted only twenty-three years.

The plan of each pyramid was arranged once for all by the architect, according to the instructions he had received, and the resources at his command. Once set on foot, the work was continued until its completion, without addition or diminution, unless something unforeseen occurred. The pyramids, like the mastabas, ought to present their faces to the four cardinal points; but owing to unskilfulness or negligence, the majority of them are not very accurately orientated, and several of them vary sensibly from the true north. The great pyramid of Saqqâra does not describe a perfect square at its base, but is an oblong rectangle, with its longest sides east and west; it is stepped--that is to say, the six sloping sided cubes of which it is composed are placed upon one another so as to form a series of treads and risers, the former being about two yards wide and the latter of unequal heights. The highest of the stone pyramids of Dahshur makes at its lower part an angle of 54° 41’ with the horizon, but at half its height the angle becomes suddenly more acute and is reduced to 42° 59’. It reminds one of a mastaba with a sort of huge attic on the top. Each of these monuments had its enclosing wall, its chapel and its college of priests, who performed there for ages sacred rites in honour of the deceased prince, while its property in mortmain was administered by the chief of the “priests of the double.” Each one received a name, such as “the Fresh,” “the Beautiful,” “the Divine in its places,” which conferred upon it a personality and, as it were, a living soul. These pyramids formed to the west of the White Wall a long serrated line whose extremities were lost towards the south and north in the distant horizon: Pharaoh could see them from the terraces of his palace, from the gardens of his villa, and from every point in the plain in which he might reside between Heliopolis and Mêdûm--as a constant reminder of the lot which awaited him in spite of his divine origin. The people, awed and inspired by the number of them, and by the variety of their form and appearance, were accustomed to tell stories of them to one another, in which the supernatural played a predominant part. They were able to estimate within a few ounces the heaps of gold and silver, the jewels and precious stones, which adorned the royal mummies or rilled the sepulchral chambers: they were acquainted with every precaution taken by the architects to ensure the safety of all these riches from robbers, and were convinced that magic had added to such safeguards the more effective protection of talismans and genii. There was no pyramid so insignificant that it had not its mysterious protectors, associated with some amulet--in most cases with a statue, animated by the double of the founder. The Arabs of to-day are still well acquainted with these protectors, and possess a traditional respect for them. The great pyramid concealed a black and white image, seated on a throne and invested with the kingly sceptre. He who looked upon the statue “heard a terrible noise proceeding from it which almost caused his heart to stop beating, and he who had heard this noise would die.” An image of rose-coloured granite watched over the pyramid of Khephren, standing upright, a sceptre in its hand and the urous on its brow, “which serpent threw himself upon him who approached it, coiled itself around his neck, and killed him.” A sorcerer had invested these protectors of the ancient Pharaohs with their powers, but another equally potent magician could elude their vigilance, paralyze their energies, if not for ever, at least for a sufficient length of time to ferret out the treasure and rifle the mummy. The cupidity of the fellahîn, highly inflamed by the stories which they were accustomed to hear, gained the mastery over their terror, and emboldened them to risk their lives in these well-guarded tombs. How many pyramids had been already rifled at the beginning of the second Theban empire!

The IVth dynasty became extinct in the person of Shop-siskaf, the successor and probably the son of Mykerinos.* The learned of the time of Ramses II. regarded the family which replaced this dynasty as merely a secondary branch of the line of Snofrûi, raised to power by the capricious laws which settled hereditary questions.**

* The series of kings beginning with Mykerinos was drawn up
for the first time in an accurate manner by E. de Rougé,
_recherches sur les Monu-mails qu’on peut attribuer aux six
premières dynasties_, pp. 66-84, M. de Rouge’s results have
been since adopted by all Egyptologists. The table of the
IVTH dynasty, restored as far as possible with the
approximate dates, is subjoined:--

** The fragments of the royal Turin Papyrus exhibit, in
fact, no separation between the kings which Manetho
attributes to the IVth dynasty and those which he ascribes
to the Vth, which seems to show that the Egyptian annalist
considered them all as belonging to one and the same family
of Pharaohs.

Nothing on the contemporary monuments, it is true, gives indication of a violent change attended by civil war, or resulting from a revolution at court: the construction and decoration of the tombs continued without interruption and without indication of haste, the sons-in-law of Shopsiskaf and of Mykerinos, their daughters and grandchildren, possess under the new kings, the same favour, the same property, the same privileges, which they had enjoyed previously. It was stated, however, in the time of the Ptolemies, that the Vth dynasty had no connection with the IVth; it was regarded at Memphis as an intruder, and it was asserted that it came from Elephantine.* The tradition was a very old one, and its influence is betrayed in a popular story, which was current at Thebes in the first years of the New Empire. Kheops, while in search of the mysterious books of Thot in order to transcribe from them the text for his sepulchral chamber,** had asked the magician Didi to be good enough to procure them for him; but the latter refused the perilous task imposed upon him.

* Such is the tradition accepted by Manetho. Lepsius thinks
that the copyists of Manetho were under some distracting
influence, which made them transfer the record of the origin
of the VIth dynasty to the Vth: it must have been the VIth
dynasty which took its origin from Elephantine. I think the
safest plan is to respect the text of Manetho until we know
more, and to admit that he knew of a tradition ascribing the
origin of the Vth dynasty to Elephantine.

** The Great Pyramid is mute, but we find in other pyramids
inscriptions of some hundreds of lines. The author of the
story, who knew how much certain kings of the VIth dynasty
had laboured to have extracts of the sacred books engraved
within their tombs, fancied, no doubt, that his Kheops had
done the like, but had not succeeded in procuring the texts
in question, probably on account of the impiety ascribed to
him by the legends. It was one of the methods of explaining
the absence of any religious or funereal inscription in the
Great Pyramid.

“‘Sire, my lord, it is not I who shall bring them to thee.’ His Majesty asks: ‘Who, then, will bring them to me?’ Didi replies, ‘It is the eldest of the three children who are in the womb of Rudîtdidît who will bring them to thee.’ His Majesty says: ‘By the love of Râ! what is this that thou tellest me; and who is she, this Rudîtdidît?’ Didi says to him: ‘She is the wife of a priest of Râ, lord of Sakhîbû. She carries in her womb three children of Râ, lord of Sakhîbû, and the god has promised to her that they shall fulfil this beneficent office in this whole earth,* and that the eldest shall be the high priest at Heliopolis.” His Majesty, his heart was troubled at it, but Didi says to him: “‘What are these thoughts, sire, my lord? Is it because of these three children? Then I say to thee: ‘Thy son, his son, then one of these.’”** The good King Kheops doubtless tried to lay his hands upon this threatening trio at the moment of their birth; but Râ had anticipated this, and saved his offspring. When the time for their birth drew near, the Majesty of Râ, lord of Sakhîbû, gave orders to Isis, Nephthys, Maskhonît, Hiquît,*** and Khnûmû: “Come, make haste and run to deliver Budîtdidît of these three children which she carries in her womb to fulfil that beneficent office in this whole earth, and they will build you temples, they will furnish your altars with offerings, they will supply your tables with libations, and they will increase your mortmain possessions.”

* This kind of circumlocution is employed on several
occasions in the old texts to designate royalty. It was
contrary to etiquette to mention directly, in common speech,
the Pharaoh, or anything belonging to his functions or his
family. Cf. pp. 28, 29 of this History.

** This phrase is couched in oracular form, as befitting the
reply of a magician. It appears to have been intended to
reassure the king in affirming that the advent of the three
sons of Râ would not be immediate: his son, then a son of
this son, would succeed him before destiny would be
accomplished, and one of these divine children succeed to
the throne in his turn. The author of the story took no
notice of Dadufrî or Shopsiskaf, of whose reigns little was
known in his time.

*** Hiquît as the frog-goddess, or with a frog’s head, was
one of the mid-wives who is present at the birth of the sun
every morning. Her presence is, therefore, natural in the
case of the spouse about to give birth to royal sons of the
sun.

The goddesses disguised themselves as dancers and itinerant musicians: Khnûmû assumed the character of servant to this band of nautch-girls and filled the bag with provisions, and they all then proceeded together to knock at the door of the house in which Budîtdidît was awaiting her delivery. The earthly husband Baûsîr, unconscious of the honour that the gods had in store for him, introduced them to the presence of his wife, and immediately three male children were brought into the world one after the other. Isis named them, Maskhonît predicted for them their royal fortune, while Khnûmû. infused into their limbs vigour and health; the eldest was called Ûsirkaf, the second Sahûrî, the third Kakiû. Kaûsîr was anxious to discharge his obligation to these unknown persons, and proposed to do so in wheat, as if they were ordinary mortals: they had accepted it without compunction, and were already on their way to the firmament, when Isis recalled them to a sense of their dignity, and commanded them to store the honorarium bestowed upon them in one of the chambers of the house, where henceforth prodigies of the strangest character never ceased to manifest themselves. Every time one entered the place a murmur was heard of singing, music, and dancing, while acclamations such as those with which kings are wont to be received gave sure presage of the destiny which awaited the newly born. The manuscript is mutilated, and we do not know how the prediction was fulfilled. If we may trust the romance, the three first princes of the Vth dynasty were brothers, and of priestly descent, but our experience of similar stories does not encourage us to take this one very seriously: did not such tales affirm that Kheops and Khephren were brothers also?

The Vth dynasty manifested itself in every respect as the sequel and complement of the IVth.* It reckons nine Pharaohs after the three which tradition made sons of the god Râ himself and of Rudîtdidîfc. They reigned for a century and a half; the majority of them have left monuments, and the last four, at least, Ûsirnirî Ânû, Menkaû-horû, Dadkerî Assi, and Unas, appear to have ruled gloriously. They all built pyramids,** they repaired temples and founded cities.***

* A list is appended of the known Pharaohs of the Vth
dynasty, restored as far as can be, with the closest
approximate dates of their reigns:--

** It is pretty generally admitted, but without convincing
proofs, that the pyramids of Abûsîr served as tombs for the
Pharaohs in the Vth dynasty, one for Sahûrî, another to
Ûsirnirî Anû, although Wiedemann considers that the
truncated pyramid of Dahshur was the tomb of this king. I am
inclined to think that one of the pyramids of Saqqâra was
constructed by Assi; the pyramid of Unas was opened in 1881,
and the results made known by Maspero, _Études de Mythologie
et d’Archéologie_, vol. i. p. 150, et seq., and _Recueil de
Travaux_, vols. iv. and v. The names of the majority of the
pyramids are known to us from the monuments: that of Ûsirkaf
was called “Ûâbisîtu”; that of Sahûrî, “Khâbi”; that of
Nofiririkerî, “Bi”; that of Anû, “Min-isûîtû”; that of
Menkaûhorû, “Nûtirisûîtû”; that of Assi, “Nutir”; that of
Unas, “Nofir-isûîtû.”

*** Pa Sahûrî, near Esneh, for instance, was built by
Sahûrî. The modern name of the village of Sahoura still
preserves, on the same spot, without the inhabitants
suspecting it, the name of the ancient Pharaoh.

Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Emil Brugsch-Bey.

The Bedouin of the Sinaitic peninsula gave them much to do. Sahûrî brought these nomads to reason, and perpetuated the memory of his victories by a stele, engraved on the face of one of the rocks in the Wady Magharah; Anû obtained some successes over them, and Assi repulsed them in the fourth year of his reign. On the whole, they maintained Egypt in the position of prosperity and splendour to which their predecessors had raised it.

In one respect they even increased it. Egypt was not so far isolated from the rest of the world as to prevent her inhabitants from knowing, either by personal contact or by hearsay, at least some of the peoples dwelling outside Africa, to the north and east.

Drawn by Boudier, from the water-colour published in
Lepsius, _Denhn._, i. pl. 8, No. 2

They knew that beyond the “Very Green,” almost at the foot of the mountains behind which the sun travelled during the night, stretched fertile islands or countries and nations without number, some barbarous or semi-barbarous, others as civilized as they were themselves. They cared but little by what names they were known, but called them all by a common epithet, the Peoples beyond the Seas, “Haûi-nîbû.” If they travelled in person to collect the riches which were offered to them by these peoples in exchange for the products of the Nile, the Egyptians could not have been the unadventurous and home-loving people we have imagined. They willingly left their own towns in pursuit of fortune or adventure, and the sea did not inspire them with fear or religious horror. The ships which they launched upon it were built on the model of the Nile boats, and only differed from the latter in details which would now pass unnoticed. The hull, which was built on a curved keel, was narrow, had a sharp stem and stern, was decked from end to end, low forward and much raised aft, and had a long deck cabin: the steering apparatus consisted of one or two large stout oars, each supported on a forked post and managed by a steersman. It had one mast, sometimes composed of a single tree, sometimes formed of a group of smaller masts planted at a slight distance from each other, but united at the top by strong ligatures and strengthened at intervals by crosspieces which made it look like a ladder; its single sail was bent sometimes to one yard, sometimes to two; while its complement consisted of some fifty men, oarsmen, sailors, pilots, and passengers. Such were the vessels for cruising or pleasure; the merchant ships resembled them, but they were of heavier build, of greater tonnage, and had a higher freeboard. They had no hold; the merchandise had to remain piled up on deck, leaving only just enough room for the working of the vessel. They nevertheless succeeded in making lengthy voyages, and in transporting troops into the enemy’s territory from the mouths of the Nile to the southern coast of Syria. Inveterate prejudice alone could prevent us from admitting that the Egyptians of the Memphite period went to the ports of Asia and to the Haûi-nîbû by sea. Some, at all events, of the wood required for building* and for joiner’s work of a civil or funereal character, such as pine, cypress or cedar, was brought from the forests of Lebanon or those of Amanus.

* Cedar-wood must have been continually imported into Egypt.
It is mentioned in the Pyramid texts; in the tomb of Ti, and
in the other tombs of Saqqâra or Gîzeh, workmen are
represented making furniture of it. Chips of wood from the
coffins of the VIth dynasty, detached in ancient times and
found in several mastabas at Saqqâra, have been pronounced
to be, some cedar of Lebanon, others a species of pine which
still grows in Cilicia and in the north of Syria.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Emil Brugsch-
Bey; the picture is taken from one of the walls of the tomb
of Api, discovered at Saqqâra, and now preserved in the
Gîzeh Museum (VIth dynasty). The man standing at the bow is
the fore-pilot, whose duty it is to take soundings of the
channel, and to indicate the direction of the vessel to the
pilot aft, who works the rudder-oars.

Beads of amber are still found near Abydos in the tombs of the oldest necropolis, and we may well ask how many hands they had passed through before reaching the banks of the Nile from the shores of the Baltic.* The tin used to alloy copper for making bronze,** and perhaps bronze itself, entered doubtless by the same route as the amber.

* I have picked up in the tombs of the VIth dynasty at Kom-
es-Sultan, and in the part of the necropolis of Abydos
containing the tombs of the XIth and XIIth dynasties, a
number of amber beads, most of which were very small.
Mariette, who had found some on the same site, and who had
placed them in the Boulaq Museum, mistook them for corroded
yellow or brown glass beads. The electric properties which
they still possess have established their identity.

** I may recall the fact that the analysis of some objects
discovered at Mèdûm by Professor Petrie proved that they
were made of bronze, and contained 9.l per cent, of tin; the
Egyptians, therefore, used bronze from the IVth dynasty
downwards, side by side with pure copper.

The tribes of unknown race who then peopled the coasts of the Ægean Sea, were amongst the latest to receive these metals, and they transmitted them either directly to the Egyptians or Asiatic intermediaries, who carried them to the Nile Valley. Asia Minor had, moreover, its treasures of metal as well as those of wood--copper, lead, and iron, which certain tribes of miners and smiths, had worked from the earliest times. Caravans plied between Egypt and the lands of Chaldæan civilization, crossing Syria and Mesopotamia, perhaps even by the shortest desert route, as far as Ur and Babylon. The communications between nation and nation were frequent from this time forward, and very productive, but their existence and importance are matters of inference, as we have no direct evidence of them. The relations with these nations continued to be pacific, and, with the exception of Sinai, Pharaoh had no desire to leave the Nile Valley and take long journeys to pillage or subjugate countries from whence came so much treasure. The desert and the sea which protected Egypt on the north and east from Asiatic cupidity, protected Asia with equal security from the greed of Egypt.

On the other hand, towards the south, the Nile afforded an easy means of access to those who wished to penetrate into the heart of Africa. The Egyptians had, at the outset, possessed only the northern extremity of the valley, from the sea to the narrow pass of Silsileh; they had then advanced as far as the first cataract, and Syene for some time marked the extreme limit of their empire. At what period did they cross this second frontier and resume their march southwards, as if again to seek the cradle of their race? They had approached nearer and nearer to the great bend described by the river near the present village of Korosko,* but the territory thus conquered had, under the Vth dynasty, not as yet either name or separate organization: it was a dependency of the fiefdom of Elephantine, and was under the immediate authority of its princes.