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.*