The annihilation of Memphian palaces and temples indeed is almost compensated by the existence of the pyramids, which alone are sufficient to engage the attention of mankind. The three largest are situated at Gees, or Ghesa, and named from their founders, Cheops, Chephren, and Mycerines; of these only we shall speak.
1. That of Cheops, the largest, is four hundred and forty-eight feet in height, and seven hundred and twenty-eight on each side of the base: that is, forty feet higher than St. Peter's, at Rome; and one hundred and thirty-three feet higher than St. Paul's, in London.
This pyramid, like the rest, was built on a rock, having a square base, cut on the outside as so many steps, and decreasing gradually quite to the summit. It was built with stones of a prodigious size, the least of which were thirty feet, wrought with wonderful art, and covered with hieroglyphics. According to several ancient authors, each side was eight hundred feet broad, and as many high. The summit of the pyramids, which, to those who viewed it from below, seemed a point, was a fine platform, composed of ten or twelve massy stones, and each side of that platform sixteen or eighteen feet long.
It is also remarkable that the four sides of this, and indeed of all the pyramids, face the cardinal points. The inside contained numberless rooms and apartments. There were expressed on the pyramid, in Egyptian characters, the sums it cost only in garlic, leeks, onions, and the like, for the workmen; and the whole amounted to sixteen hundred talents of silver; from whence it was easy to conjecture what a vast sum the whole must have amounted to.
Herodotus ascribes this pyramid to Cheops, a tyrannical and profligate sovereign. He barred the avenues to every temple, and forbade the Egyptians to offer sacrifice to their gods; after which he compelled the people at large to perform the work of slaves. Some he condemned to hew stones out of the Arabian mountains, and drag them to the banks of the Nile; others were stationed to receive the same in vessels, and transport them to the edge of the Libyan Desert. In this service a hundred thousand men were employed, who were relieved every three months. Ten years were spent in the hard labour of forming the road on which these stones were to be drawn,—a work of no less difficulty and fatigue than the erection of the pyramid itself. This causeway is five stadia in length, forty cubits wide, and its greatest height thirty-two cubits; the whole being composed of polished marble, adorned with the figures of animals. Ten years were consumed in forming this pavement, in preparing the hill on which the pyramids are raised, and in excavating chambers under the ground. The burial-place which he intended for himself, he contrived to insulate within the building, by introducing the waters of the Nile. The pyramid itself was a work of twenty years; it is of a square form, every side being eight plethra in length and as many in height. The stones are very skilfully cemented, and none of them of less dimensions than thirty feet. Such is the account of Herodotus.
Pliny and Diodorus Siculus agree in stating that not less than three hundred and sixty thousand men were employed in the work[363].
The pyramid next in size was erected by Cephrenus, and is thence called Cephren: he was the son of Cheops. These two princes, who were truly brothers by the similitude of their manners, seem to have striven which of them should distinguish himself most, by a barefaced impiety towards the gods, and a barbarous inhumanity to men. Cheops reigned fifty years, and his son Cephrenus fifty-six years after him. They kept the temples shut during the whole time of their long reigns, and forbade the offering of sacrifices under the severest penalties. On the other hand, they oppressed their subjects, by employing them in the most grievous and useless works; and sacrificed the lives of numberless multitudes of men, merely to gratify a senseless ambition of immortalising their names by edifices of an enormous magnitude and a boundless expense. It is remarkable, that those stately pyramids which have so long been the admiration of the whole world, were the effect of the irreligion and merciless cruelty of those princes.
The magnificent prospect from the top of this pyramid has been described by the French traveller, Savary, who visited Egypt in 1770, in glowing terms. After occupying seven hours in ascending to its summit, "the morning light," says he, "discovered to us every moment new beauties: the tops of gilded minarets, and of date-tree and citron groves, planted round the villages and hills; anon the herds left the hamlets; the boats spread their light sails, and our eyes followed them along the vast windings of the Nile. On the north appeared sterile hills and barren sands; on the south, the river and waving fields, vast as the ocean; to the west, the plain of Fayum, famous for its roses: to the east, the picturesque town of Gizeh, and the towers of Fostat, the minarets of Cairo, and the castle of Saladin, terminated the prospect. Seated on the most wonderful of the works of man, as upon a throne, our eyes beheld by turns a dreadful desert; rich plains in which the Elysian fields had been imagined; villages; a majestic river; and edifices which seemed the work of giants. The universe contains no landscape more variegated, more magnificent, or more awful."
The ancients knew little of the interior structure of these giant piles.[364] Herodotus, who lived 445 years before Christ, merely speaks of an entrance leading to the interior, by hearsay from the priests, who informed him that there were secret vaults beneath, hewn out of the natural rock. Strabo, who lived after the Christian era, only describes a single slanting passage which led to a chamber in which was a stone tomb. Diodorus Siculus, who lived forty-four years before Christ, agrees with this; and Pliny, who lived A. D. 66, adds, that there was a well in the Great Pyramid, eighty cubits deep. This is all the ancients have said about the interior.
"The Egyptian priests, indeed, assured Aristides, a Greek traveller about two centuries before Christ, that 'the excavations beneath were as great as the height above.' And Ebn Abd Alkokim, an Arabic writer of the ninth century, says, that the builders 'constructed numerous excavated chambers, with gates to them, forty cubits under ground.' Other Arabian writers say, that these chambers contain chests of black stone, in which were deposited the sacred archives of king Saurid, who built the pyramid. Many discoveries (perhaps a burial-place under ground) obviously remain to be made.