Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/292

 202 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. in its primitive integrity must have amounted to a total of 3,479,600 cubic yards. Even now, when so much of its sub- stances has been detached and carried away, there still remains the enormous mass of 3,246,600 cubic yards. Supposing that, two or three years after the commencement of a work upon this colossal scale, death had carried off its projector, can we believe that any successor, even a son who was sincerely devoted to the memory of his father, would have burthened himself with the continuation and completion of such an enterprise ? The new sovereign would have enough to do in commencing and carrying on the erection of his own tomb, and, moreover, would be irresistibly tempted to make use, for its construction, of the accumulated material and collected labour of his predecessor. Even four or five thousand years before our era, men were too sagacious to reckon upon the piety or gratitude of an heir. For the closing and final sealing up of the pyramid, its builder and destined inhabitant was obliged to depend upon his survivors, he could not do it himself. Moreover, the external completion, which, in the case of the greater monuments, must have been a long and costly matter, had to be entrusted to the same hands. The reigning king, so long as he was not too sternly reminded of the end by disease or the infirmities of age, must have felt great reluctance to order the cessation of the work which had gone on under his own eye for so many years, or to arrest that course of shown in the annexed woodcut. He concludes that a large part of the material of those pyramids wa^ obtained upon their sites, and quarried above the level at which aoo WADV — rADHI 00 'rump KOM-CL-KASHAB aBU-ROASH '"^'^^^""^^ the stones were finally placed. He cites Herodotus (ii. 125) as conveying in an imperfect form the tradition that the pyramids were "constructed from above."