If we sum up the effects of these causes, we cannot expect that the contemporaries of the Ptolemies should have found in Egypt any buildings dating from the first period of the Old Monarchy, that is nearly four thousand years old. They had before them the Pyramids, which were then certainly more than three thousand years old, and which, it is evident, had defied all the destructive causes we have enumerated, simply on account of their exceptional form and mass, and because the enormous stones of which they were constructed had been so nicely fitted together as to exclude moisture and air; and so, because they found no earlier buildings, and because the stones of these had been so carefully and truly wrought, they assigned, as the commencement of the practice of building with wrought-stone, the reign of Sesortosis, that is, they carried it back two hundred years beyond the date of the commencement of the Great Pyramid. This is altogether inadmissible. Men could not pass in two hundred years from the first essays in cutting stone to the grandest stone structure, and, in nicety of workmanship, one of the most perfect instances of stone joinery that has ever been erected. There were great builders long anterior to this date of two hundred years before the commencement of the Great Pyramid. Some of the Pyramids themselves, and many of the tombs, are older than the Pyramids of Gizeh, and even than the time of Sesortosis. A Pyramid had been built in the Faioum as far back as the first dynasty of all, that of Menes himself. Their system of religion, and their system of writing, had both arrived at their perfected condition in the time of Menes; and each of these two facts imply considerable advance in the art of building, of course building with stone, of which there were such ample materials everywhere throughout the valley of Egypt. They could not have had a perfected religion, such as was theirs, without temples. Nor is it possible that they could have advanced to the art of writing without having advanced previously as far as the art of cutting and dressing stone. And this is more obvious when we consider that the very peculiarity of Egyptian writing grew partly out of the idea that its characters were to be sculptured and incised on stone: this is what is implied in its very name of hieroglyphics.