when or by whom the pyramids were built, they had perhaps less knowledge than the present day historian.  The modern Egyptologist, with his patient investigation, assigns the largest of these three pyramids to Khufui or Kheops, a famous ruler of the fourth dynasty, and the others were erected by his immediate successors.  The temple of Phtah, and every other building of Memphis, is now gone, and near the spot stands the great city of Cairo, whose mosques and minarets have been quarried of its ruins, but the pyramids still stand, after fifty-six centuries of broken and changing history, unbroken and unchanged.  They have outlived any portion of time that their builders could have dreamed of, but their worn surface no longer declares to us their builders’ names and history.  Their sloping sides, formed to withstand attacks, have not saved the inscriptions which they once held; and the builders, in thus overlooking the reed which was growing in their marshes, the papyrus, to which the great minds of Greece afterwards trusted their undying names, have only taught us how much safer it would have been, in their wish to be thought of and talked of in after ages, to have leaned upon the poet and historian.

The beautiful temples of Dendera and Latopolis, which were raised by the untiring industry of ages and finished, under the Roman emperors, were begun about this reign.  Though some of the temples of Lower Egypt had fallen into decay; and though the throne was then tottering to its fall, the priests in Upper Egypt were still building for immortality.  The religion of the Kopts was still flourishing.

The Egyptian’s opinion of the creation was the growth of his own river’s bank.  The thoughtful man, who saw the Nile every year lay a body of solid manure upon his field, was able to measure against the walls of the old temples that the ground was slowly but certainly rising.  An increase of the earth was being brought about by the river.  Hence he readily believed that the world itself had of old been formed out of water, and by means of water.  The philosophers were nearly of the same opinion.  They held that matter was itself eternal, like the other gods, and that our world, in the beginning, before it took any shape upon itself, was like thin mud, or a mass of water containing all things that were afterwards to be brought forth out of it.  When the water had by its divine will separated itself from the earth, then the great Ra, the sun, sent down his quickening heat, and plants and animals came forth out of the wet-land, as the insects are spawned out of the fields, before the eyes of the husbandman, every autumn after the Nile’s overflow has retreated.  The crafty priests of the Nile declared that they had themselves visited and dwelt in the caverns beneath the river, where these treasures, while yet unshaped, were kept in store and waiting to come into being.

[Illustration:  287.jpg HORUS ON THE CROCODILES.  BULAK MUSEUM.]