It was reached by an ingenious system of passages, strongly barricaded.  Yet all these precautions were ineffectual to save King Cheops from the hand of the spoiler.  Chephren’s pyramid (Fig. 1, at the left) is not much smaller than that of Cheops, its present height being about 450 feet, while the height of the third of this group, that of Mycerinus, is about 210 feet.  No wonder that the pyramids came to be reckoned among the seven wonders of the world.

While kings erected pyramids to serve as their tombs, officials of high rank were buried in, or rather under, structures of a different type, now commonly known under the Arabic name of mastabas.  The mastaba may be described as a block of masonry of limestone or sun-dried brick, oblong in plan, with the sides built “battering,” i.e., sloping inward, and with a flat top.  It had no architectural merits to speak of, and therefore need not detain us.  It is worth remarking, however, that some of these mastabas contain genuine arches, formed of unbaked bricks.  The knowledge and use of the arch in Egypt go back then to at least the period of the Old Empire.  But the chief interest of the mastabas lies in the fact that they have preserved to us most of what we possess of early Egyptian sculpture.  For in a small, inaccessible chamber (serdab) reserved in the mass of masonry were placed one or more portrait statues of the owner, and often of his wife and other members of his household, while the walls of another and larger chamber, which served as a chapel for the celebration of funeral rites, were often covered with painted bas-reliefs, representing scenes from the owner’s life or whatever in the way of funeral offering and human activity could minister to his happiness.

One of the best of the portrait statues of this period is the famous “Sheikh-el-Beled” (Chief of the Village), attributed to the Fourth or Fifth Dynasty (Fig. 2).  The name was given by the Arab workmen, who, when the figure was first brought to light in the cemetery of Sakkarah, thought they saw in it the likeness of their own sheikh.  The man’s real name, if he was the owner of the mastaba from whose serdab he was taken, was Ra-em-ka.  The figure is less than life-sized, being a little over three and one half feet in height.  It is of wood, a common material for sculpture in Egypt.  The arms were made separately (the left of two pieces) and attached at the shoulders.  The feet, which had decayed, have been restored.  Originally the figure was covered with a coating of linen, and this with stucco, painted.  “The eyeballs are of opaque white quartz, set in a bronze sheath, which forms the eyelids; in the center of each there is a bit of rock-crystal, and behind this a shining nail” [Footnote:  Musee de Gizeh:  Notice Sommaire (1892).]—­a contrivance which produces a marvelously realistic effect.  The same thing, or something like it, is to be seen in other statues of the period.  The attitude of Ra-em-ka is the usual one of Egyptian