e 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 corvee 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 hi