The Great Pyramid was called Khûît, the “Horizon” in which Khûfûî had to be swallowed up, as his father the Sun was engulfed every evening in the horizon of the west. It contained only the chambers of the deceased, without a word of inscription, and we should not know to whom it belonged, if the masons, during its construction, had not daubed here and there in red paint among their private marks the name of the king, and the dates of his reign.*
* The workmen often drew on the stones the cartouches of the
Pharaoh under whose reign they had been taken from the
quarry, with the exact date of their extraction; the
inscribed blocks of the pyramid of Kheops bear, among
others, a date of the year XVI.
Worship was rendered to this Pharaoh in a temple constructed a little in front of the eastern side of the pyramid, but of which nothing remains but a mass of ruins. Pharaoh had no need to wait until he was mummified before he became a god; religious rites in his honour were established on his accession; and many of the individuals who made up his court attached themselves to his double long before his double had become disembodied. They served him faithfully during their life, to repose finally in his shadow in the little pyramids and mastabas which clustered around him. Of Dadûfri, his immediate successor, we can probably say that he reigned eight years;* but Khephren, the next son who succeeded to the throne,** erected temples and a gigantic pyramid, like his father.
* According to the arrangement proposed by E. de Rougé for
the fragments of the Turin Canon. E. de Rougé reads the name
Râ-tot-ef, and proposes to identify it with the Ratoises of
the lists of Manetho, which the copyists had erroneously put
out of its proper place. This identification has been
generally accepted. Analogy compels us to read Dadûfrî, like
Khâfrî, Menkaurî, in which case the hypothesis of de Rougé
falls to the ground. The worship of Dadûfrî was renewed
towards the Saite period, together with that of Kheops and
Khephren, according to some tradition which connected his
reign with that of these two kings. On the general scheme of
the Manethonian history of these times, see Maspero, Notes
sur quelques points de Grammaire et d’Histoire dans le
Recueil de Travaux, vol. xvii. pp. 122-138.
** The Westcar Papyrus considers Khâfri to be the son of
Khûfû; this falls in with information given us, in this
respect, by Diodorus Siculus. The form which this historian
assigns—I do not know on what authority—to the name of the
king, Khabryies, is nearer the original than the Khephren of
Herodotus.
He placed it some 394 feet to the south-west of that of Kheops; and called it Ûîrû, the Great. It is, however, smaller than its neighbour, and attains a height of only 443 feet, but at a distance the difference in height disappears, and many travellers have thus been led to attribute the same elevation to the two. The facing, of which about one-fourth exists from the summit downwards, is of nummulite limestone, compact, hard, and more homogeneous than that of the courses, with rusty patches here and there due to masses of a reddish lichen, but grey elsewhere, and with a low polish which, at a distance, reflects the sun’s rays. Thick walls of unwrought stone enclose the monument on three sides, and there may be seen behind the west front, in an oblong enclosure, a row of stone sheds hastily constructed of limestone and Nile mud.
Facsimile by Faucher-Gudin of the sketch in Lepsius, Denkm.,
ii., 1 c.
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.