his estimation, scarcely less stupendous than the pyramids themselves, "not to mention the time employed in the vaults of the hill upon which the pyramids are erected;" that this was only the beginning of their labours, compared with the rearing of the enormous mass of the great pyramid, which was a work of twenty years; that the supplies for building the second pyramid were procured by the daughter of the shepherd tyrant Cheops prostituting her person, and demanding a single stone from each of her lovers, an idle story, which has been generally treated as a fable; and that the tyranny ended in the brother or son of Cheops, who built the third pyramid, for he was succeeded by a king whom Herodotus calls Mycerinus, and says that he was the son of Cheops, a mistake on the part of the historian, who has confounded him with the shepherd kings, while it is evident that he was a descendant of the ancient dynasty. This king was just and merciful, and the oppressed Mizraim were relieved from the tyranny of their former masters, who were finally extirpated or expelled. Herodotus informs us that the diet of the toiling Mizraim consisted of radishes, onions, and garlic, the various sums expended for which were inscribed in Egyptian characters on the outside of the great pyramid. "This, as I well remember my interpreter informed me, amounted to no less a sum than 1600 talents," exclusive of the "necessary cost for iron, tools, food, and clothes for the workmen." Moses likewise represents the diet of the Israelites as consisting of "fish, cucumbers, and melons, leeks, onions, and garlic," Numb. xi. 5. Herodotus and Manetho agree in asserting that this second tyranny of the fierce herdsmen did not overtake the Mizraim unexpectedly, but had been expressly foretold by an oracle. Moses records a similar prediction connected with the Israelites. The oppression under which they laboured, in common with the native Mizraim, could not have come upon them unexpectedly, for it had been expressly foretold to their great ancestor Abraham by an immediate communication from God:"And when the sun was gone down, a deep sleep fell upon Abraham, and lo, an horror of great darkness fell upon him; and he said unto Abraham, Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger they shall afflict them four hundred years; and also that nation whom they shall serve will I judge, and afterwards shall they come out with great substance," Gen. xv. 12, 13, 14. Such is the account of Herodotus; and in a simi lar manner Moses says that the tyranny exercised over the Israelites was of the same description. They were compelled to labour, and were the builders, as many think, of at least one of the pyramids. They set over them taskmasters," says Moses, "to afflict them with their burdens: and they built for Pharaoh treasure-cities, Pithom and Raamses (Rameses); and the Egyptians made the children of Israel to serve with rigour; and they made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar, and in brick, and in all manner of service in the field; all their service wherein they made them serve was with rigour." Josephus also, after observing that the Egyp-in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them, and tians became "very ill affected towards the Hebrews, as touched with envy at their prosperity," and "having at length forgotten the benefits they had received from Joseph," proceeds to state that, "particularly the crown being now come into another family, they became very abusive to the Egyptians, and contrived many ways of afflicting them, for they enjoined them to cut a great number of channels in the river, and to build walls for their cities, and ramparts that they might restrain the river, and hinder its waters from stagnating upon its running over its own banks; they set them also to build pyramids, and by all this wore them out, and forced them to learn all sorts of mechanical arts, and to accustom themselves to hard labour. Four hundred years did they spend under these afflictions, for they strove one against the other which should get the mastery-the Egyptians desiring to destroy the Israelites by these labours, and the Israelites desiring to hold out to the end under them." The Egyptian monuments too, as in the representation copied in the following woodcut, contain full memorials of the Israelites' "hard bondage in mortar, and in brick, and in all manner of service in the field." The scriptures, indeed, mention the oppression of the Israelites only, but it is evident that both they and the native Mizraim were treated in the same manner by a foreigner, and that foreigner was the "new king," who was not acquainted with Joseph's services. The scriptures not only seem to imply this, but even to exculpate the Mizraim from tyrannizing over the Israelites. On this subject Mr Faber offers some very conclusive and most satisfactory observations. "One of the precepts of Moses is, 'Thou shalt not abhor an Egyptian,' and the alleged reason is, Because thou wast a stranger in his land.' Now this must appear not a little extraordinary to any one who understands the Egyptian history as it has been commonly received. The chosen people might indeed be forbidden to abhor an Egyptian, on the broad principle of forgiveness of injuries, but it seems very strange that the prohibition should be made to rest upon such a basis as the present-that they should be charged not to hate an Egyptian, because they had suffered from him a most iniquitous oppression. The matter, however, becomes perfectly intelligible when the real state of the case is known. So far from being ill treated by the friendly Mizraim, the Israelites, from first to last, had experienced nothing but kindness from them, for instead of being the oppressors of God's people, they had themselves groaned under the very same intolerable yoke. Accordingly, we find another precept of the law specially built upon this which we have just seen elucidated; and it may be observed, that without such elucidation the additional precept involves a glaring contradiction. An Ammonite and a Moabite were never to enter the congregation of the Lord; even the lapse of ten generations could not render them admissible. Do we inquire the reason of this rigorous exclusion? It was professedly the evil treatment which the Israelites received at their hands. But the children of an Egyptian might freely enter into the Lord's congregation so early as the third descent. And why? Because Israel was a stranger in his land, when yet oppression was accumulated upon oppression. Here it is plain that, according to the usual mode of understanding the history of God's people in Egypt, the identical reason which is alleged for the eternal exclusion of an Ammonite or a Moabite is adduced for the admission of an Egyptian in the third generation. The former were to be abominated, and for ever shut out, because they maltreated the Israelites; the latter was to be cherished and received as a brother, after a short prescribed interval, still because he also had maltreated the chosen race! But let the history be rightly explained, and every contradiction vanishes. Under an imperfect dispensation, which required an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, the injuries of Moab and Ammon were never to be forgotten; while the fostering friendship of the ever kind and hospitable Mizraim was eternally to be remembered and requited." The inspired historian informs us that the lives of the Israelites were made "bitter" unto them with "hard bondage," in "mortar, and in brick, and in all manner of service." There are many suppositions and theories as to the works on which the Israelites were employed in Egypt. Josephus says that they assisted to erect the pyramids. It is likely, as Dr. Hales conjectures, that the principal brick pyramids are their works. The "treasure cities," Exod. i. 11, and the “bricks made of straw," Exod. v. 7, imply that they were employed in the public works, and this explains what Josephus says as to their being compelled to labour at all kinds of mechanical employments, such as cutting canals, erecting ramparts, raising the walls of cities, and building pyramids. Old writers often objected to the statement of Josephus respecting the pyramids, alleging that they are built of stone, but it is now ascertained that all the pyramids are not of stone, and even if they were it by no means follows that the Hebrews did not work in stone as well as in brick. It is true that when Moses commenced his important mission, they were chiefly employed in making bricks like those of which the walls of Babylon were built; yet there is no reason to conclude that because they were making bricks when Moses returned from Midian, they had been so employed for nearly one hundred years, as the oppression of the Israelites commenced before Moses was born, he being eighty years of age when he stood before Pharaoh. There is a large pyramid of sun-dried bricks at Faioum, the ancient Arsinoë. The bricks of which it is formed are made of black loamy friable earth, or mud from the Nile, compacted with chopped straw, like the bricks made in Egypt and in the East to this day. "At one place," says Mr. Jowett of the Church Missionary Society, "the people were making bricks with straw cut into small pieces, and mingled with the clay to bind it. Hence it is that when villages built of these bricks fall into rubbish, which is often the case, the roads are full of small particles of straws, extremely offensive to the eyes in a high wind. They were, in short, engaged exactly as the Israelites used to be, making bricks with straw, and for a similar purpose-to build extensive granaries for the Pacha-treasure cities for Pharaoh.” The pyramid at Faioum stands on an elevated sandy plain; its base is one hundred and twenty-two yards, and its height about one hundred and ninety-seven feet. There are other brick pyramids at Dashour and Saccara, which differ little from the one at Faioum except in size and preservation. The latter is described as having lost much of its pyramidal form, and as now resembling the ruined mounds of Babylon, constructed of similar materials; and it is curious that Herodotus, who describes the tower of Babel as a pyramid, having graduated storeys diminishing the ascent, mentions the pyramids of Egypt as having storeys or platforms, also diminishing in size as they rose in height, and that they were afterwards smoothed in surface by being coated with blocks of stone, which filled up the interstices between the different storeys, so as to obliterate the graduated by a sloping appearance. We are farther informed that the pyramids of the Nile may be considered as identical with similar structures on the banks of the Euphrates, the Indus, and the Ganges. If, then, the Israelites were employed on the pyramids by the shepherd tyrants, those celebrated piles now existing in Egypt were not native Egyptian structures, but the work of a foreign people, reared on the soil of Egypt. It is a very remarkable circumstance that the pyramids are confined to that district of Egypt which the shepherds occupied, and that none are in the vicinity of Thebes, the ancient seat of Egyptian literature and religion. Some Arabian writers mention that they were built by a people from Arabia, who after a long tyranny were expelled from Egypt. But although the shepherd kings probably came immediately from Arabia, their original migration was certainl from more easteru rights, and as an act of the grossest oppression, that the founders of the pyramids reduced the Egyptians to servile labour. It was indeed the boast of one of the Pharaohs that no Egyptian hand had ever been employed in the proudest and most stupendous of their works; prisoners and slaves must consequently have been the builders, and hence the prisoners were the Israelites, whose rights as a free and even naturalized people the shepherd tyrants had violated, and the slaves were the native Mizraim. If Egypt, therefore, was governed by the shepherd kings during the bondage of the Israelites, which we think may be inferred from sacred and is asserted by profane history, and if the pyramids were erected by those shepherd kings, there is almost a certainty that the enslaved Israelites would be compelled to assist the equally enslaved Mizraim, although there is no reason to suppose that the former were exclusively engaged in any public work. Voltaire considers the construction of the pyramids as a proof of the slavery of the lower orders of the Egyptians; and he rightly observes that it would not be possible We can easily calculate the waste of human life to compel the English, who are far more powerful under the shepherd tyranny from another fact in the than the Egyptians were at that time, to erect Egyptian history, that Pharaoh-Necho employed similar masses. But this remark can only apply to 100,000 men in an attempt to cut a canal from the the condition of the lower orders at the time the Nile to the Red sea. Nor are matters greatly pyramids were erected. Egypt, while under its own changed in modern times, as the following account native princes, enjoyed very excellent laws from the of Mehemet Ali's proceedings sufficiently prove :earliest times. The civil liberties of the Mizraim "The great canal of Cleopatra," says Mr. Carne, in were restricted to a certain extent; but it is nowhere his interesting Letters from the East,' 1826, asserted that they were liable to compulsory labour" which he (Mehemet) has lately made, or rather reat the public works, otherwise it would never have vived, forty miles in length, connecting the Nile with been mentioned, as a tyrannical violation of their the sea at Alexandria, is an extraordinary work |