The whole resources of the royal treasure were not sufficient for such necessaries:  a tradition represents Kheops as at the end of his means, and as selling his daughter to any one that offered, in order to procure money.* Another legend, less disrespectful to the royal dignity and to paternal authority, assures us that he repented in his old age, and that he wrote a sacred book much esteemed by the devout.**

* Herodotus, ii. 126.  She had profited by what she received to build a pyramid for herself in the neighbourhood of the great one—­the middle one of the three small pyramids:  it would appear in fact, that this pyramid contained the mummy of a daughter of Kheops, Honitsonu.

** Manetho, Unger’s edition, p. 91.  The ascription of a book to Kheops, or rather the account of the discovery of a “sacred book” under Kheops, is quite in conformity with Egyptian ideas.  The British Museum possesses two books, which were thus discovered under this king; the one, a medical treatise, in a temple at Coptos; the other comes from Tanis.  Among the works on alchemy published by M. Berthelot, there are two small treatises ascribed to Sophe, possibly Souphis or Kheops:  they are of the same kind as the book mentioned by Manetho, and which Syncellus says was bought in Egypt.

Khephren had imitated, and thus shared with, him, the hatred of posterity.  The Egyptians avoided naming these wretches:  their work was attributed to a shepherd called Philitis, who in ancient times pastured his flocks in the mountain; and even those who did not refuse to them the glory of having built the most enormous sepulchres in the world, related that they had not the satisfaction of reposing in them after their death.  The people, exasperated at the tyranny to which they had been subject, swore that they would tear the bodies of these Pharaohs from their tombs, and scatter their fragments to the winds:  they had to be buried in crypts so securely placed that no one has succeeded in finding them.

Like the two older pyramids, “the Supreme” had its anecdotal history, in which the Egyptians gave free rein to their imagination.  We know that its plan had been rearranged in the course of building, that it contained two sepulchral chambers, two sarcophagi, and two mummies:  these modifications, it was said, belonged to two distinct reigns; for Mykerinos had left his tomb unfinished, and a woman had finished it at a later date—­according to some, Nitokris, the last queen of the VIth dynasty; according to others, Rhodopis, the Ionian who was the mistress of Psammetichus I. or of Ainasis.*