It was urged against them that they had arrested the whole life of their people for more than a century for the erection of their tombs.  Kheops began by closing the temples and by prohibiting the offering of sacrifices:  he then compelled all the Egyptians to work for him.  To some he assigned the task of dragging the blocks from the quarries of the Arabian chain to the Nile:  once shipped, the duty was incumbent on others of transporting them as far as the Libyan chain.  A hundred thousand men worked at a time, and were relieved every three months.*

* Professor Petrie thinks that this detail rests upon an authentic tradition.  The inundation, he says, lasts three months, during which the mass of the people have nothing to do; it was during these three months that Kheops raised the 100,000 men to work at the transport of the stone.  The explanation is very ingenious, but it is not supported by the text:  Herodotus does not relate that 100,000 men were called by the corvee for three months every year; but from three months to three months, possibly four times a year, bodies of 100,000 men relieved each other at the work.  The figures which he quotes are well-known legendary numbers, and we must leave the responsibility for them to the popular imagination (Wiedemann, Herodots Zweites Buck, p. 465).

The period of the people’s suffering was divided as follows:  ten years in making the causeway along which the blocks were dragged—­a work, in my opinion, very little less onerous than that of erecting the pyramid, for its length was five stadia, its breadth ten orgyio, its greatest height eight, and it was made of cut stone and covered with figures.* Ten years, therefore, were consumed in constructing this causeway and the subterranean chambers hollowed out in the hill....  As for the pyramid itself, twenty years were employed in the making of it....  There are recorded on it, in Egyptian characters, the value of the sums paid in turnips, onions, and garlic, for the labourers attached to the works; if I remember aright, the interpreter who deciphered the inscription told me that the total amounted to sixteen hundred talents of silver.  If this were the case, how much must have been expended for iron to make tools, and for provisions and clothing for the workmen?**

     * Diodorus Siculus declares that there were no causeways to
     be seen in his 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