The kings of Egypt were despots who were regarded by the people as gods. They were the head not only of the state but of the religious system, and consequently through this double headship were enabled to rule with absolute sway. The priesthood, together with a few nobles, represented the intellectual and social aristocracy of the country. Next to them were the warriors, who were an exclusive class. Below these came the shepherds and farmers, and finally the slaves. While the caste system did not prevail with as much rigidity here as in India, all groups of people were bound by the influence of class environment, from which they were unable to extricate themselves. Poorer classes became so degraded that in times of famine they were obliged to sell their liberty, their lives, or {159} their labor to kings for food. They became merely toiling animals, forced for the want of bread to build the monuments of kings. The records of Egyptian civilization through art, writing, painting, sculpture, architecture, and the great pyramids, obelisks, and sphinxes were but the records of the glory of kings, built upon the shame of humanity. True, indeed, there was some advance in the art of writing, in the science of astronomy and geometry, and the manufacture of glass, pottery, linens, and silk in the industrial arts. The revelations brought forth in recent years from the tombs of these kings, where were stored the art treasures representing the civilization of the time, exhibit something of the splendors of royalty and give some idea of the luxuries of the civilization of the higher classes. Here were stored the finest products of the art of the times. The wonders of Egypt were manifested in the structure of the pyramids, which were merely tombs of kings, which millions of laborers spent their lives in building. They represent the most stupendous structures of ancient civilization whose records remain. Old as they appear, as we look backward to the beginning of history, they represent a culminating period of Egyptian art. Sixty-seven of these great structures extended for about sixty miles above the city of Cairo, along the edge of the Libyan Desert. They are placed along the great Egyptian natural burying place in the western side of the Nile valley, as a sort of boulevard of the tombs of kings and nobles. Most of them are constructed of stone, although several are of adobe or sun-dried brick. The latter have crumbled into great conical mountains, like those of the pyramid temples of Babylon.