In the Boulak Museum is also a statue in diorite, one of the hardest kinds of stone, carefully executed and beautifully polished, of Chephren, the builder of the second Pyramid, with his name inscribed upon it. The features are uninjured, and are seen by us at this day just as they were seen by Chephren and his Court 5,000 years ago. It was discovered by M. Mariette at the bottom of the well, which supplied the water used for sacred purposes in the sepulchral temple attached to Chephren’s Pyramid. This statue must have been, originally, erected in the temple; and we can imagine that it was thrown into the well by the barbarous Hyksos, or iconoclastic Persians, where it lay undisturbed till brought again to light by M. Mariette. Probably the well had been filled up with the rubbish of demolitions contemporary with the overthrow of the statue, and, having been thus forthwith obliterated, had been lost to sight and memory to our day. CHAPTER X. DATE OF BUILDING WITH STONE. When time is old and hath forgot itself, And blind oblivion swallowed cities up, And mighty states characterless are grated To dusty nothing.—SHAKSPEARE. Manetho tells us that in the reign of Sesortosis, a king of the third dynasty, the method of building with hewn stone was introduced. He reigned about 3,600 B.C. It will be observed that this date is about thirteen centuries earlier than that assigned to the flood on Archbishop Ushers authority, and which is placed on the margin of our Bibles; and only between three and four centuries subsequent to the date assigned, on the same authority, to the creation of the world. To examine, however, this date of Manetho’s for the hewing and dressing of building stone, is now our immediate object. A little investigation of the subject will, I am disposed to think, show that it is inadmissible, and that it must be thrown back to a very much more remote antiquity. Manetho made this statement in the time of the Ptolemies. We are therefore, under the circumstances, justified in supposing that the author of the date, whether Manetho himself, or some earlier chronographer to whom he was indebted for it, meant by it little more than an acknowledgment, that he was not acquainted with any stone buildings earlier than the reign of Sesortosis. A question of this kind was then very much what it is now, one of antiquarian research; it being necessary then, as now, to collect the evidence for its decision from the monuments. But if our acquaintance with the monuments of the primæval period is as extensive and profound as Manetho’s was, or even more so; and if in addition, we have advanced far beyond what was possible in his day in the direction of universal history, we may be able to show that there is some error in his date; or at all events may be able to explain it in such a way, that it may be brought into closer conformity with what is now known, than it would seem to admit of, if taken literally.