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.