Khufu, "Cheops" The Great Pyramid Builder
Fourth Dynasty was the most important in Egyptian history
We do not know what concourse of circumstance made the Fourth Dynasty the most important in Egyptian history before the Eighteenth.
Perhaps it was the lucrative mining operations in the last reign of the Third, perhaps the ascendancy of Egyptian merchants in Mediterranean trade, perhaps the brutal energy of Khufu, first Pharaoh of the new house.
Herodotus has passed on to us the traditions of the Egyptian priests concerning this Pyramid builder of the first of Gizeh's pyramids:
"Now they tell me that to the reign of Rhampsinitus there was a perfect distribution of justice and that all Egypt was in a high state of prosperity; but that after him Khufu, coming to reign over them, plunged into every kind of wickedness, for that, having shut up all the temples, ... he ordered all the Egyptians to work for himself.
Some, accordingly, were appointed to draw stones from the quarries in the Arabian mountains down to the Nile, others he ordered to receive the stones when transported in vessels across the river. . . . And they worked to the number of a hundred thousand men at a time, each party during three months.
The time during which the people were thus harassed by toil lasted ten years on the road which they constructed, and along which they drew the stones; a work, in my opinion, not much less than the Pyramid."
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