ver, which excited
the anxiety of many in a country where the mystic virtue of numbers
was an article of faith: in order that the laws of celestial arithmetic
should be observed in the construction of the pyramids, it was necessary
that three of them should be of the same size. The anomaly of a third
pyramid out of proportion to the two others could be explained only on
the hypothesis that Mykerinos, having broken with paternal usage,
had ignorantly infringed a decree of destiny--a deed for which he was
mercilessly punished. He first lost his only daughter; a short time
after he learned from an oracle that he had only six more years to
remain upon the earth. He enclosed the corpse of his child in a hollow
wooden heifer, which he sent to Sais, where it was honoured with divine
worship.*

* Herodotus, ii. 129-133. The manner in which Herodotus
describes the cow which was shown to him in the temple of
Sais, proves that he was dealing with Nit, in animal form,
Mihi-uirit, the great celestial heifer who had given birth
to the Sun. How the people could have attached to this
statue the legend of a daughter of Mykerinos is now
difficult to understand. The idea of a mummy or a corpse
shut up in a statue, or in a coffin, was familiar to the
Egyptians: two of the queens interred at Deir el-Bahari,
Nofritari Ahhotpu II., were found hidden in the centre of
immense Osirian figures of wood, covered with stuccoed
fabric. Egyptian tradition supposed that the bodies of the
gods rested upon the earth. The cow Mihi-uirit might,
therefore, be bodily enclosed in a sarcophagus in the form
of a heifer, just as the mummified gazelle of Deir el-Bahari
is enclosed in a sarcophagus of gazelle form; it is even
possible that the statue shown to Herodotus really contained
what was thought to be a mummy of the goddess.

"He then communicated his reproaches to the god, complaining that his
father and his uncle, after having closed the temples, forgotten the
gods and oppressed mankind, had enjoyed a long life, while he, devout as
he was, was so soon about to perish. The oracle answered that it was for
this very reason that his days were shortened, for he had not done that
which he ought to have done. Egypt had to suffer for a hundred and fifty
years, and the two kings his predecessors had known this, while he had
not. On receiving this answer, Mykerinos, feeling