e unable to extricate themselves.
Poorer classes became so degraded that in times of famine they were
obliged to sell their liberty, their lives, or {159} their labor to
kings for food. They became merely toiling animals, forced for the
want of bread to build the monuments of kings. The records of Egyptian
civilization through art, writing, painting, sculpture, architecture,
and the great pyramids, obelisks, and sphinxes were but the records of
the glory of kings, built upon the shame of humanity. True, indeed,
there was some advance in the art of writing, in the science of
astronomy and geometry, and the manufacture of glass, pottery, linens,
and silk in the industrial arts. The revelations brought forth in
recent years from the tombs of these kings, where were stored the art
treasures representing the civilization of the time, exhibit something
of the splendors of royalty and give some idea of the luxuries of the
civilization of the higher classes. Here were stored the finest
products of the art of the times.

The wonders of Egypt were manifested in the structure of the pyramids,
which were merely tombs of kings, which millions of laborers spent
their lives in building. They represent the most stupendous structures
of ancient civilization whose records remain. Old as they appear, as
we look backward to the beginning of history, they represent a
culminating period of Egyptian art. Sixty-seven of these great
structures extended for about sixty miles above the city of Cairo,
along the edge of the Libyan Desert. They are placed along the great
Egyptian natural burying place in the western side of the Nile valley,
as a sort of boulevard of the tombs of kings and nobles. Most of them
are constructed of stone, although several are of adobe or sun-dried
brick. The latter have crumbled into great conical mountains, like
those of the pyramid temples of Babylon.

The largest pyramid, Cheops, rises to a height of 480 feet, having a
base covering 13 acres. The historian Herodotus relates that 120,000
men were employed for 20 years in the erection of this great structure.
It has never been explained how these people, not yet well developed in
practical mechanics, and not having discovered the use of steam and
with no {160} use of iron, could have reared these vast structures.
Besides the pyramids, great palaces and temples of the kings of Thebes
in Upper Egypt rivalled in grandeur the lonely pyramids of Memphis.
Age a