It is essential to the right understanding of any age that we have a general knowledge of its monetary and economical condition. This, which in ordinary histories is passed over with little or no notice, does, in truth, largely affect the character of men’s works and deeds, their manners and customs, and even their thoughts and feelings. It had much influence on the history of the old world: we see it distinctly at work in that of the Roman Empire. And we are now beginning to understand how largely it is influencing the course of events amongst ourselves at the present moment. With respect to the Pyramids, who was to build them, the means by which they were to be built, and that they were to be built at all, depended on the monetary and economical condition of the Egypt of that day. To elucidate this is to advance a step in the reconstruction and revivifying of the period.

Herodotus tells us that he saw inscribed on the Great Pyramid how many talents of silver (1,600 was the number) had been expended in supplying the hands employed on the work with radishes, onions, and garlic. He says he had a distinct recollection of what the interpreter told him on the subject. We believe this, because he was no inventor of fables, but an accurate and veracious recorder of what he saw and heard. The idea of history—that is, of what is properly called history, which is exclusive of intentional deception and misrepresentation—was the uppermost idea in his mind. The internal evidence of his great, varied, and precious work demonstrates this.

There is, however, another reason for our believing this particular piece of information he gives us about the Great Pyramid, which is, that it is in strict accord with what we know of the period to which his statement belongs. Silver was at that time not coined but weighed, and therefore, necessarily, the inscription would speak of such a weight of silver, and not of so many coins of a certain denomination. At that time there were not in existence any coins of any denomination. In the history of Joseph we have frequent mention of money without any qualifying terms; but on the one occasion in the narrative, where it becomes necessary to speak precisely on the subject, Joseph’s brethren do so by saying that their money was in full weight. Money then, we may suppose, as late as the time of the Pentateuch, was silver that was weighed, and not coined. This is in accordance with another statement of Herodotus, that the Lydians, the most mercantile neighbours of the Greeks, were the people who first coined money.

Now that the Egyptians had at this time no coined money, proves that their taxes—as is very much the case at this day with their chief tax, that on land—were paid in kind. In an age when silver was so scarce that the idea of coining it, for the purpose of giving to it easy and general circulation, had not occurred, and it was passing from hand to hand of the few who possessed it by weight, the actual tillers of the soil, always in the East, and not less so in Egypt than elsewhere, a poor and oppressed class, could not have had silver to pay their rents and taxes. The wealth, therefore, of Pharaoh must have consisted mainly of produce.

The next point is, that no profitable investments for what silver, or precious things, a few might have possessed, were known, or possible then. It was not only that there were no Government stocks, and no shares paying dividends, but that there was nothing at all that could be resorted to for such purposes. If a man had invested money in anything he would have stood out before the world as a rich man, and so as a man to be squeezed. Doubtless there was less of this in Egypt than elsewhere in the East, but in those early and arbitrary days there must have been, at times, even in Egypt, somewhat of it. People, therefore, would not, as a general rule, have invested had it been possible. But it was utterly impossible, for the double reason that there was nothing to invest, and nothing to invest in.

What people invest is capital. Capital is bottled-up labour, convertible again, at pleasure, into labour, or the produce of labour. But in those days labour could not be bottled up, except by a very few in the form of silver ingots. In these days every kitchen-maid can bottle up labour in the shape of coin, which is barren bottling-up, and invest it in a saving’s bank account, or in some other way, which is fruitful bottling-up. I ask permission to use these incongruous metaphors, one on the top of the other. Every grown-up person in the kingdom can bottle up labour, and invest it; and, as a matter of fact, there are few who, at one time or other of their lives, do not. Some have succeeded in doing it to such an enormous amount that they might with the accumulated store build a Pyramid greater than that of Cheops. It is, indeed, with the labour that has been bottled up by private individuals that we have constructed all our railways, docks, and gas works, and with which we carry out all our undertakings, great and small, in this country. There is no limit to our capacity for bottling up labour. It is one of our greatest exports; we send it all over the world, to Russia, to America, to India, and to Egypt itself. It is estimated that we store up somewhere about 150,000,000 pounds worth every year.

But in the time of Cheops nothing of this kind was done, nor could it have been. It is true that the nation could then produce a great deal more food than it needed for consumption, but, at the end of the year, it was none the richer. Its surplus labour had not been fixed and preserved in a reconvertible form for future needs. Its surplus production had not been thus stored up for future uses. To repeat ourselves there were, speaking generally, no ways open to them for bottling up this surplusage either in the temporarily barren, or in the continuously fruitful fashion. But there were ways open to them by which they might squander, or consume, their imperfect chances. They might, for instance, throw away their surplus food, and capacity for surplus labour, by doing no productive work for a portion of the year. They were engaged in this way in the long and numerous festivals of their gods, in their funeral processions, and other matters of this kind. The effect was the same when they made military raids on their neighbours. To this method also of using up their surplus labour and food they had frequent recourse. To these matters they were disposed more than ourselves, because, unlike ourselves, they could not save what they were thus squandering. Or they might spend much of it in excavating, sculpturing, and painting acres of tombs; or in piling up Pyramids; or in building incredible numbers of magnificent temples. This explains the magnitude and costliness of many of the works, and undertakings, of the old world elsewhere, as well as in Egypt. The point which it is essential to see is, that they could not bottle up their surplus labour of any kind in the time of Cheops; while with us every form of surplus labour, even every odd half-hour of every form of it, may be bottled up, and the interest on what has been secured in this way may itself also be secured in like manner. The only approach to this among them was made by the king when he built a treasury, which we know was sometimes done by the Pharaohs, and locked up in it his ingots of silver, and what gold, precious stones, and costly stuffs he had acquired.

But this form of bottling up labour, and which only one man in the kingdom could practise, had two objections. It was of the utterly barren sort: it paid no dividends. He had no enjoyment of any kind from it. This was the first objection; and the other was, that if it was continued too long—and this might be the result at any moment—the man who was thus hoarding up his treasures would prove to have been hoarding them up for others, and not for himself; and so he would get no particle of advantage from them.

What, then, was he to do? How was what he had to be spent in such a manner as that he might himself get something from it? How was he to have himself the spending of it? A Pyramid is utterly unproductive, and all but utterly useless. It is a building that does not give shelter to any living thing, in which nothing can be stored up, excepting a corpse, and that cannot even be entered. Still it was of as much benefit to the man who built it as leaving the surplus labour, and food he had at his disposal, and the valuables he had in his treasury, unused would be. And those who built Pyramids had at their absolute command any amount of labour, and any amount of food. Here, then, was a great temptation to raise monuments of this kind to themselves. What treasure they had might as well be sunk in stones, as remain bottled up barrenly. They would, at all events, spend it themselves, and get for it an eternal monument. They would have the pleasure of raising themselves their own monuments. They would have the satisfaction of providing a safe and magnificent abode for their own mummies.

If they had had at home Egyptian Three per Cent. Government Consols, or could have bought Chinese, Hindoo, or Assyrian Five per Cent. Stocks; or if the thought had occurred to them, which not long afterwards did occur to their successors, of reclaiming from the Desert, by irrigation, the district of the Faioum; or if they had foreseen that in times to come the Hyksos and the Persians might invade Egypt, and that possibly a rampart from Pelusium to the metropolis, such as was afterwards constructed, might assist in keeping them in check in the Desert, where there would be a chance of their perishing from thirst; or if Egypt had been, like Ceylon, a country in which mountain streams could be dammed up in the wet season for irrigating the land in the dry; or, like Yucatan, where enormous tanks for the storage of the rainfall are indispensable; then it is evident that the surplus labour and food, and the silver ingots in the King’s treasury, would have been spent in some one or other of these ways. But some of these things were not possible in Egypt, and the time for thinking of the others had not yet come. There was, therefore, no alternative. It must be something as unproductive as a Pyramid, or a temple. The intense selfishness of man, such as he was in those early days, prevented his having any repugnance to the idea of a Pyramid all for himself: it rather, on the contrary, commended the idea to his mind. And so it came about that the Pyramids were built. The whole process is as clear to us as it would be, had we ourselves, in some well-remembered stage of a previous existence, been the builders, and not Cheops and Chephren. We see the conditions under which they acted, and the mental process by which they were brought to the only conclusion possible to them.

The question may be propounded—Why was there given to these structures that particular form which from them has been called the pyramidal? Mathematics and astronomy have been summoned to answer the question; and lately the Astronomer Royal for Scotland has, in a large and learned work, endeavoured to prove that the Great Pyramid of Gizeh was intended to perpetuate for ever a knowledge of scientifically-ascertained natural standards of weight, measure, and capacity. If this was the purpose of the Great Pyramid, will he allow an old friend to ask him—what, then, was the purpose of each one of those scores of other Pyramids that were constructed before and after it? No two, probably, of the whole series were precisely of the same dimensions, except, perhaps, accidentally. All suppositions of this kind have their origin in the unhistorical, or rather anti-historical practice of attributing to early ages the ideas of our own times. The first requirement for enabling one to answer this question rightly is the power of, in some degree, thinking with the thoughts of the men who themselves built the Pyramids. Though, of course, there is no more reason for doubting that every Pyramid in Egypt was intended for a tomb and sepulchral monument, just for that and for nothing else, than there is for doubting that the Coliseum was built for the spectacles of the amphitheatre, and London Bridge for enabling people to cross the Thames.

Sir John Mandeville, the greatest English traveller of the Middle Ages, and who, during his thirty-three years of wandering in the East, had served in the armies both of the Sultan of Egypt and of the Emperor of China, writing between 1360-70, of what he had seen about twenty-five years previously, tells us the Pyramids were the granaries Joseph built for the storage of the corn of the years of plenty. This is instructive: it shows how readily in ages of ignorance—the same cause still has, where it remains, the same effect—men connect old traditions, particularly if there be anything of religion about them, with existing objects: being prompted to do this by a craving to give distinctness, and a local habitation, to such traditions.

He anticipates and bars the objection that neither he, nor anyone else, had inspected the interior of the Pyramids, for the purpose of ascertaining whether they were adapted for granaries, by telling us that they were full of serpents. This is set down apparently without any other design than that of recording a curious fact, which it would be as well to mention. And, doubtless, as far as the knight knew himself, he had no other object. But in matters of this kind, experience teaches us that such people do not know themselves.

Here, then, we have an instance of the way in which extremes meet. The old knight accepts his theory without one jot or tittle of evidence in its favour, and directly in the teeth of all that had ever been recorded of the Pyramids. It is a theory which allows at most seven years for their construction; and which supposes them to have been designed for a purpose which is flatly contradicted by their form, and by all that is seen of their exterior, and known of their interior; and, too, by the history itself. One grain of science of any kind in the old knight would have lost us the lesson to be drawn from his theory.

What he did was to yield to what was to him a temptation. And this, and I say it with all due deference, is precisely what the Astronomer Royal for Scotland appears to have done. He, too, has yielded to a temptation. The old knight, five centuries and an half back, was tempted to find in these mighty monuments the Biblical narrative; and he found it. The modern Astronomer is tempted to find in them most unexpected and surprising indications, facts, and conclusions of profoundest science; and he finds them. Each was tempted after his kind.

History, which had only an embryonic and potential existence in the time of the old knight, and which even now is only beginning to assume its proper form and lineaments, and to become a living thing with power to teach, to guide, and to save from error—formerly what was taken for history often only misled—would readily have enabled each of them to have escaped the temptation that was besetting him.

It is worth noticing, by the way, that Mandeville was one of the last who saw the original inscriptions on the Great Pyramid. The construction of Sultan Hassan’s Mosk, the materials for which were supplied by the outer flakes of this Pyramid, was completed about the middle of the fourteenth century. Mandeville was in Egypt immediately before its commencement, and mentions the inscriptions. Notices of them are also to be found in several Arabian and other writers of earlier date. These were what Herodotus saw, and refers to. Some others, both in Greek and Latin, had been added during the period of Ptolemaic and Cæsarian domination. When the Father of History saw, and had them interpreted to him, they were more than 2,000 years old. The knight of St. Albans, 1,700 years later, looked upon them in blank ignorance. Here we have brought together, as it were, in a single canvas, the primæval Egyptian, the inquisitive Greek, and the adventurous Englishman. What would not one now give to behold such inscriptions, on such a building, and with such a history? They had stood for nearly 4,000 years; and were capable, probably, of standing 4,000 years more: at all events, at this day, we might, certainly, be reading what Cheops had inscribed, and Herodotus and Mandeville had seen, if (we need not say anything about Sultan Hassan) Mohamed had been less of an ignorant barbarian. What destroyed these inscriptions, just as it had overthrown a civilization it was incapable of reconstructing, was the grand and luminous formula that ‘God is God, and Mohamed his Prophet.’ This, which the true believer takes for a summary of all knowledge, is, in fact, nothing but the profession and apotheosis of all ignorance. It does excellently well for Mecca, and still better for Timbuctoo. But, however, as it is the summary of all knowledge, those who utter it have attained (how easy then is the achievement) the highest point man can reach. They can have on intellectual sympathy, or moral connexion with the ages that preceded its announcement. So also the ages that are to come (why there should be such ages does not appear) can never be, in anything, one step in advance of them. God can never be anything but God, and he never can have any prophet but Mohamed: that is to say, men must never conceive the idea of God otherwise than as Mohamed conceived it. This was what destroyed the inscriptions Cheops had placed on the Great Pyramid, and turned it into a quarry for Mosks and palaces at Cairo.

Religion, however, sooner or later, has its revenge on the theology which endeavours to confine it within narrow and inexpansive limits of this kind. The day comes when ‘the engineer is hoist with his own petard,’ that is, when the theology is strangled with its own formularies. History, too, which theologies generally ignore, has its revenge in pointing, as a warning, to the indications, scattered throughout all lands, of their former existence, and of the causes of their decay and extinction. Religion is a living thing that, from time to time, advances into a higher form. Theologies are often only fossils of forms of religion that have passed away.

But to return to our question: why was this particular form given to these tombs and sepulchral monuments? Of course, it was because this was the form which presented itself to the minds of the men of those times as the natural and proper form. But why did a thought, which does not appear obvious and appropriate to us, appear to them natural and proper? It was because in the ages that had preceded the times of the Pyramid builders, and which had left some of the ideas that had belonged to them still impressed on men’s minds, tools for quarrying and squaring stones had been scarce; and it had resulted from this scarcity of tools (sometimes it was an entire absence of them) and from the corresponding embryonic condition of the primitive ideas of art, that the tombs and sepulchral monuments of those ages had consisted merely of a shallow grave covered over with a pile of inartificially heaped-up stones, or earth. That was all that the natural desire in the survivors to perpetuate the memory of the dead had found possible. Such was, with the Aryan race, the primæval idea of a tomb and sepulchral monument, throughout the whole Aryan world. Cheops and Chephren, and their predecessors for many generations on the throne of Egypt, had acquired tools, and an unlimited supply of labour; but they had not acquired new ideas about tombs and sepulchral monuments. So when, with the vigour of thought, and boldness of conception, that belonged to a young world, conscious of its strength, they resolved to construct such tombs and sepulchral monuments as should endure while the world endured, no other form occurred to them, excepting that of the simple antique Aryan cairn. They wanted a tomb, and a sepulchral monument, and nothing but a cairn could be that. And so they built the cairns of Gizeh.

Solomon’s Temple indicated that it had been preceded by a time during which the House of God had been a tent; the marble Parthenon that it had been preceded by a time during which the ancestors of its architects had built with wood.

Suppose that it were discovered that in the language of old Egypt the word for a sepulchral monument meant literally a heap of stones, should we not be justified by the known history of the power words have over thought, in feeling certain that in those early times there could not have been a man in Egypt capable of forming any other conception of a sepulchral monument? We have some little ground for presuming that something of the kind was at work in the minds of the builders of the Pyramids. The force, that is to say, of words, as well as the force of tradition, may have constrained them to adopt the pyramidal form. At all events, we know that the word pyramid may mean the mountain, perhaps the mound, perhaps really the cairn, the heap of stones.