[Footnote 238: In mentioning the great numbers of sepulchral barrows spread over the world, Sir John Lubbock observes--"In our own island they may be seen on almost every down; in the Orkneys alone it is estimated that two thousand still remain; and in Denmark they are even more abundant; they are found all over Europe from the shores of the Atlantic to the Oural Mountains; in Asia they are scattered over the great steppes from the borders of Russia to the Pacific Ocean, and from the plains of Siberia to those of Hindostan; in America we are told that they are numbered by thousands and tens of thousands; nor are they wanting in Africa, where the pyramids themselves exhibit the most magnificent development of the same idea; so that the whole world is studded with these burial-places of the dead."--_Prehistoric Times_, p. 85. See similar remarks in Dr. Clarke's _Travels_, 4th edition, vol. i. p. 276, vol. ii. p. 75, etc.] [Footnote 239: Sir J. Gardner Wilkinson thinks that the pyramids of Sakkara are probably older than the other groups of these structures, as those of Gizeh or the Great Pyramid erected during the fourth dynasty of kings.--See Rawlinson's _Herodotus_, vol. ii. chap. viii. Manetho assigns to Uenophes, one of the monarchs in the first dynasty, the erection of the Pyramids of Cochome. See Kenrick's _Ancient Egypt_, ii. p. 112, 122, 123; Bunsen's _Egypt_, ii. 99, etc.] [Footnote 240: On these Archaic forms of sculpture, see APPENDIX, No. II. In many barrows the gallery in its course--and in some as it enters the crypt--is contracted, and more or less occluded by obstructions of stone, etc., which Mr. Kenrick likens to the granite portcullises in the Great Pyramid. See his _Ancient Egypt_, vol. i. p. 121.] [Footnote 241: Mr. Birch, however--and it is impossible to cite a higher authority in such a question--holds the cartouches of Shufu and Nu Shufu to refer only to one personage--namely, the Cheops of Herodotus; and, believing with Mr. Wilde and Professor Lepsius, that the pyramids were as royal sepulchres built and methodically extended and enlarged as the reigns of their intended occupants lengthened out, he ascribes the unusual size of the Great Pyramid to the unusual length--as testified by Manetho, etc.--of the reign of Cheops; the erection of a sepulchral chamber in its built portion above being, perhaps, a step adopted in consequence of some ascertained deficiency in the rock chamber or gallery below. Indeed, the subterranean chamber under the Great Pyramid has, to use Professor Smyth's words, only been "begun to be cut out of the rock from the ceiling downwards, and left in that _unfinished_ state." (Vol. i. 156.) Mr. Perring, who--as engineer--measured, worked, and excavated so very much at the Pyramids of Gizeh, under Colonel Howard Vyse, held, at the end of his researches, that "the principal chamber" in the Second Pyramid is still undetected. See Vyse's _Pyramid of Gizeh_, vol. i. 99.]