of the casing of the Great Pyramid, says, “The joints are scarcely perceptible, and not wider than the thickness of silver-paper, and the cement so tenacious that fragments of the casing-stones still remain in their original position, notwithstanding the lapse of so many centuries, and the violence by which they were detached.”  Look at the ruins of the Labyrinth, which aroused the astonishment of Herodotus; it had three thousand chambers, half of them above ground and half below—­a combination of courts, chambers, colonnades, statues, and pyramids.  Look at the Temple of Karnac, covering a square each side of which is eighteen hundred feet.  Says a recent writer, “Travellers one and all appear to have been unable to find words to express the feelings with which these sublime remains inspired them.  They have been astounded and overcome by the magnificence and the prodigality of workmanship here to be admired.  Courts, halls, gate-ways, pillars, obelisks, monolithic figures, sculptures, rows of sphinxes, are massed in such profusion that the sight is too much for modern comprehension.”  Denon says, “It is hardly possible to believe, after having seen it, in the reality of the existence of so many buildings collected on a single point—­in their dimensions, in the resolute perseverance which their construction required, and in the incalculable expense of so much magnificence.”  And again, “It is necessary that the reader should fancy what is before him to be a dream, as he who views the objects themselves occasionally yields to the doubt whether he be perfectly awake.”  There were lakes and mountains within the periphery of the sanctuary.  “The cathedral of Notre Dame at Paris could be set inside one of the halls of Karnac, and not touch the walls! . . .  The whole valley and delta of the Nile, from the Catacombs to the sea, was covered with temples, palaces, tombs, pyramids, and pillars.”  Every stone was covered with inscriptions.

The state of society in the early days of Egypt approximated very closely to our modern civilization.  Religion consisted in the worship of one God and the practice of virtue; forty-two commandments prescribed the duties of men to themselves, their neighbors, their country, and the Deity; a heaven awaited the good and a hell the vicious; there was a judgment-day when the hearts of men were weighed: 

     “He is sifting out the hearts of men
     Before his judgment-seat.”

Monogamy was the strict rule; not even the kings, in the early days, were allowed to have more than one wife.  The wife’s rights of separate property and her dower were protected by law; she was “the lady of the house;” she could “buy, sell, and trade on her own account;” in case of divorce her dowry was to be repaid to her, with interest at a high rate.  The marriage-ceremony embraced an oath not to contract any other matrimonial alliance.  The wife’s status was as high in the earliest days of Egypt as it is now in the most civilized nations of Europe or America.