ho reported the doctrine that the soul of man is
immortal, and that when the body dies, the soul enters into another
creature which chances then to be coming to the birth, and when it has
gone the round of all the creatures of land and sea and of the air, it
enters again into a human body as it comes to the birth; and that it
makes this round in a period of three thousand years. This doctrine
certain Hellenes adopted, some earlier and some later, as if it were
of their own invention, and of these men I know the names but I abstain
from recording them.

124. Down to the time when Rhampsinitos was king, they told me there
was in Egypt nothing but orderly rule, and Egypt prospered greatly; but
after him Cheops became king over them and brought them 104 to every
kind of evil: for he shut up all the temples, and having first kept them
from sacrificing there, he then bade all the Egyptians work for him.
So some were appointed to draw stones from the stone-quarries in the
Arabian mountains to the Nile, and others he ordered to receive the
stones after they had been carried over the river in boats, and to draw
them to those which are called the Libyan mountains; and they worked by
a hundred thousand men at a time, for each three months continually. Of
this oppression there passed ten years while the causeway was made by
which they drew the stones, which causeway they built, and it is a work
not much less, as it appears to me, than the pyramid; for the length
of it is five furlongs 105 and the breadth ten fathoms and the height,
where it is highest, eight fathoms, and it is made of stone smoothed
and with figures carved upon it. For this, they said, the ten years
were spent, and for the underground chambers on the hill upon which the
pyramids stand, which he caused to be made as sepulchral chambers for
himself in an island, having conducted thither a channel from the Nile.
For the making of the pyramid itself there passed a period of twenty
years; and the pyramid is square, each side measuring eight hundred
feet, and the height of it is the same. It is built of stone smoothed
and fitted together in the most perfect manner, not one of the stones
being less than thirty feet in length.

125. This pyramid was made after the manner of steps, which some call
"rows" 106 and others "bases": 107 and when they had first made it thus,
they raised the remaining stones with machines made of short pieces of
timber, raising them first from th