stone-dressers.  Sometimes as many as two or three thousand men poured suddenly into the peninsula, and remained there one or two months; the work went briskly forward, and advantage was taken of the occasion to extract and transport to Egypt beautiful blocks of diorite, serpentine or granite, to be afterwards manufactured there into sarcophagi or statues.  Engraved stelae, to be seen on the sides of the mountains, recorded the names of the principal chiefs, the different bodies of handicraftsmen who had participated in the campaign, the name of the sovereign who had ordered it and often the year of his reign.

It was not one tomb only which Snofrui had caused to be built, but two.  He called them “Kha,” the Rising, the place where the dead Pharaoh, identified with the sun, is raised above the world for ever.  One of these was probably situated near Dahshur; the other, the “Kha risi,” the Southern Rising, appears to be identical with the monument of Medum.

[Illustration:  167.jpg THE PYRAMID OF MEDUM]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the plans of Flinders Petrie,
     Medum, pl. ii.

The pyramid, like the mastaba,* represents a tumulus with four sides, in which the earthwork is replaced by a structure of stone or brick.  It indicates the place in which lies a prince, chief, or person of rank in his tribe or province.  It was built on a base of varying area, and was raised to a greater or less elevation according to the fortune of the deceased or of his family.**

* No satisfactory etymon for the word pyramid, has as yet been proposed:  the least far-fetched is that put forward by Cantor-Eisenlohr, according to which pyramid is the Greek form, irupauc, of the compound term “piri-m-uisi,” which in Egyptian mathematical phraseology designates the salient angle, the ridge or height of the pyramid.

** The brick pyramids of Abydos were all built for private persons.  The word “mirit,” which designates a pyramid in the texts, is elsewhere applied to the tombs of nobles and commoners as well as to those of kings.

The fashion of burying in a pyramid was not adopted in the environs of Memphis until tolerably late times, and the Pharaohs of the primitive dynasties were interred, as their subjects were, in sepulchral chambers of mastabas.  Zosiri was the only exception, if the step-pyramid of Saqqara, as is probable, served for his tomb.*

* It is difficult to admit that a pyramid of considerable dimensions could have disappeared without leaving any traces behind, especially when we see the enormous masses of masonry which still mark the sites of those which have been most injured; besides, the inscriptions connect none of the predecessors of Snofrui with a pyramid, unless it be Zosiri.  The step-pyramid of Saqqara, which is attributed to the latter, belongs to the same type as that of Medum; so does also