iangles meeting in an apex.

_Secondly_, He objected to the statement that, "from the very earliest
historic periods in the architecture of Egypt, Assyria, Greece, etc.,
circles and spirals, or modifications of them, constituted perhaps the
most common fundamental types of lapidary decoration;" because, though
circles, spirals, etc., occurred in the later architecture of Thebes,
etc., yet in the Great Pyramid of Gizeh no such decorations were to be
found, nor, indeed, lapidary decorations of any other kind. Cheops, the
builder of the Great Pyramid, was, according to Manetho, "arrogant
towards the gods." Was it this spirit of religious infidelity or
scepticism that led to the rejection of any ornamentation? Professor
Smyth notices what he himself terms an "ornament," "a most unique thing
certainly," on the upper stone of what Greaves calls "the granite leaf"
portcullis, in the interior of the Great Pyramid (ii. 100), and he
represents it, it is now said erroneously in plate xii. as a portion of
a double circle instead of a general raised elevation.[275]

All the other Pyramids of Gizeh seem, like the Great Pyramid,
wonderfully free from lapidary decorations on their interior walls, the
exteriors of all of them being now too much dilapidated to offer any
distinct proof in relation to the subject; though in Herodotus' time
there were hieroglyphics, at least on the external surface of the Great
Pyramid. The whole surface of the basalt sarcophagus in the Third
Pyramid, or that of Mycerinus, was sculptured. "It was," to use the
words of Baron Bunsen, "very beautifully carved in compartments, in the
Doric style" (vol. ii. 168). This carving, in the well-known carpentry
form, was, according to Mr. Fergusson, a representation of a palace
(_Handbook of Architecture_, p. 222).

Fragments, however, of lapidary sculpture have been found among the
ruins of Egyptian pyramids supposed to be older than those of Gizeh, or
than their builders, the Memphite kings of the _fourth_ dynasty. Thus
one of the most able and learned of modern Egyptologists, Baron Bunsen,
has written at some length to show that the great northern brick pyramid
of Dashoor belongs to the preceding or _third_ dynasty of kings. Colonel
Vyse and Mr. Perring, when digging among its ruins, discovered two or
three fragments of sculptured casing and other stones, with a few pieces
presenting broken hieroglyphic inscriptions. One of the ornamented
fragments represents a ro