This is certainly the biggest pyramid now standing, and probably the largest ever built; but there are many pyramids to which reference is made in the inscriptions or writings which have entirely disappeared. Probably their materials have been used for other buildings, and sand-storms from the desert have helped to cover their foundations.
Temples
A temple, in which the pious people might worship, was often connected with the pyramid. When this was so, the temple always seems to have been placed to the east of the burial pyramid, so that the worshippers should look towards the body and to the west. It was towards the west of the burial chamber that a passage was made, with a door of exit for the soul to go out into the under-world. We have to remember that even in life the Egyptian king was regarded as a kind of god. It is difficult for us to find our way back into the thoughts of these ancient people, who saw far less difference than we know that we are obliged to see between the human nature and the divine; but we must try to get back into their thoughts, if we want to understand them.
And this, and a great deal more that I have written in this chapter and in the one before, is true not of the early Egyptians only, but of early man all the world over. I shall not keep you nearly so long in my description of what went on in the old days along the Euphrates and Tigris and elsewhere, because a good deal of what I am telling you now about these old Egyptians applies to dwellers in those other places.
Some of the inscriptions speak of the important part which a priest accompanying the spirit in the under-world played in getting the spirit through the various demon-guarded doors and arguing his case, as a barrister might, before the judge. I say spirit, but in the pictures the body is shown, very substantially. Of course it was all the more to the priests' advantage to prove how useful they could be in the after-life, as well as in this.
The mummies, as you must know, were dead bodies preserved by putting chemicals into them and over them, and wrapping them round, and often by painting their faces, and giving them altogether an appearance which to us, discovering them after all these years, seems rather dreadful, but no doubt was much admired. We have no record of the time when the Egyptians began thus to "mummy" their dead; we may almost say that we have no record of a time when they did not do so. There were mummies long before Menes, whose date, you may remember, has been guessed so early as 5500 years B.C. and so late as 3300 B.C. At first it seems as if only kings were mummied. The kings were always looked on as semi-divine, and later the people began to regard the king as being almost identical with—almost the same as—Osiris. It is as if they thought that the god came down in spirit to live in the body of the reigning king.
BANDAGING A MUMMY.