(2) _The Archaic Period._--The history of united Egypt begins with the reign of Menes or Mena, who in some way, whether by conquest or marriage is uncertain, united the two crowns. He came from the nome of This, of which the city of Abydos, sacred to the worship of Osiris, was the chief town. He and his successors continued to administer the two parts of Egypt as separate countries. Mena founded the first dynasty, and the second dynasty seems to have been connected with his house; it was, at all events, from the nome of This. These two dynasties ruled Egypt for 420 years, from 3400 to 2980 B. C. This is known as the _archaic period_ of Egyptian history. Men were, during this time, gradually developing the art of expressing thought by means of picture-writing. At some time during the first dynasty the Egyptians began to work the turquoise mines in the Wady Maghara in the peninsula of Sinai. The tombs of this period were low, flat houses of brick. The Arabs call them _mastabas_ or “benches.” During the second dynasty the Egyptians began to conceive of their gods in human form. They preserved the continuity of the earlier animal and bird forms by putting the old heads on human bodies. (3) _The Old Kingdom_ embraces dynasties three to six, and extended from 2980 to 2475 B. C., a period of more than 500 years. During the third and fourth dynasties the power of the king was supreme and the first great culmination of Egypt’s civilization occurred. It was in this period that the pyramids developed. Zoser, the first king of the third dynasty, built as his tomb the so-called Step Pyramid; (see Fig. 7). It consists of five stages which vary from 29½ to 36 feet in height. It is not, therefore, a true pyramid. At the base it is 352 × 396 feet. Seneferu, the last king of the third dynasty, built a similar tomb, but, as he made the stages lower and more numerous, it approached more nearly the pyramidal form. Khufu or Cheops, the founder of the fourth dynasty, improving upon the work of his predecessors, constructed the first real pyramid and the greatest of them all. The blocks with which he built were about three feet high, and he made a step with each course of stones. A covering, which has now been removed, was originally placed over the whole, thus securing a perfect pyramidal form. This pyramid is now 750 (originally 768) feet on each side, and 451 (originally 482) feet high. It contains some 2,300,000 blocks of stone, each weighing on the average two and a half tons; (see Fig. 6). The stone was quarried from the Mokattam hills on the other side of the Nile, more than twelve miles away.