s time. The remains of one of them appear to
have been discovered and restored by Vyse.

** Herodotus, ii. 124, 125. The inscriptions which were read
upon the pyramids were the graffiti of visitors, some of
them carefully executed. The figures which were shown to
Herodotus represented, according to the dragoman, the value
of the sums expended for vegetables for the workmen; we
ought, probably, to regard them as the thousands which, in
many of the votive temples, served to mark the quantities of
different things presented to the god, that they might be
transmitted to the deceased.

The whole resources of the royal treasure were not sufficient for such
necessaries: a tradition represents Kheops as at the end of his means,
and as selling his daughter to any one that offered, in order to procure
money.* Another legend, less disrespectful to the royal dignity and to
paternal authority, assures us that he repented in his old age, and that
he wrote a sacred book much esteemed by the devout.**

* Herodotus, ii. 126. She had profited by what she received
to build a pyramid for herself in the neighbourhood of the
great one--the middle one of the three small pyramids: it
would appear in fact, that this pyramid contained the mummy
of a daughter of Kheops, Honitsonu.

** Manetho, Unger's edition, p. 91. The ascription of a book
to Kheops, or rather the account of the discovery of a
"sacred book" under Kheops, is quite in conformity with
Egyptian ideas. The British Museum possesses two books,
which were thus discovered under this king; the one, a
medical treatise, in a temple at Coptos; the other comes
from Tanis. Among the works on alchemy published by M.
Berthelot, there are two small treatises ascribed to Sophe,
possibly Souphis or Kheops: they are of the same kind as the
book mentioned by Manetho, and which Syncellus says was
bought in Egypt.

Khephren had imitated, and thus shared with, him, the hatred of
posterity. The Egyptians avoided naming these wretches: their work was
attributed to a shepherd called Philitis, who in ancient times pastured
his flocks in the mountain; and even those who did not refuse to them
the glory of having built the most enormous sepulchres in the world,
related that they had not the satisfaction of reposing in them after
their death. The people, exasperated at the t