* The similarity of the materials and technicalities of construction and decoration seem to me to prove that the majority of the tombs were built by a small number of contractors or corporations, lay or ecclesiastical, both at Memphis, under the Ancient, as well as at Thebes, under the New Empire.

** Speaking of the Great Pyramid and of its casing, Professor Petrie says:  “Though the stones were brought as close as [—­] inch, or, in fact, into contact, and the mean opening of the joint was but [—­] inch, yet the builders managed to fill the joint with cement, despite the great area of it, and the weight of the stone to be moved—­some 16 tons.  To merely place such stones in exact contact at the sides would be careful work; but to do so with cement in the joint seems almost impossible.”

The long low flat mass which the finished tomb presented to the eye is wanting in grace, but it has the characteristics of strength and indestructibility well suited to an “eternal house.”  The facade, however, was not wanting in a certain graceful severity:  the play of light and shade distributed over its surface by the stelae, niches, and deep-set doorways, varied its aspect in the course of the day, without lessening the impression of its majesty and serenity which nothing could disturb.  The pyramids themselves are not, as we might imagine, the coarse and ill-considered reproduction of a mathematical figure disproportionately enlarged.  The architect who made an estimate for that of Kheops, must have carefully thought out the relative value of the elements contained in the problem which had to be solved—­the vertical height of the summit, the length of the sides on the ground line, the angle of pitch, the inclination of the lateral faces to one another—­before he discovered the exact proportions and the arrangement of lines which render his monument a true work of art, and not merely a costly and mechanical arrangement of stones.*

* Cf.  Borchardt’s article, Wie wurden die Boschungen der Pyramiden bestimmt? in which the author—­an architect by profession as well as an Egyptologist—­interprets the theories and problems of the Rhind mathematical Papyrus in a new manner, comparing the result with his own calculations, made from measurements of pyramids still standing, and in which he shows, by an examination of the diagrams discovered on the wall of a mastaba at Medum, that the Egyptian contractors of the Memphite period were, at that early date, applying the rules and methods of procedure which we find set forth in the Papyri of Theban times.

The impressions which he desired to excite, have been felt by all who came after him when brought face to face with the pyramids.  From a great distance they appear like mountain-peaks, breaking the monotony of the Libyan horizon; as we approach them they apparently decrease in size, and seem to be merely unimportant inequalities of ground on the surface of the plain.