show that the inscriptions were engraved, not “in the pyramid,” but in an adjoining tomb. In fact, this seems the simplest explanation of what Herodotos says about them; like many another traveller, he forgot to note where exactly the inscriptions were inscribed, and when he came to write his book assumed that they were in the pyramid itself. According to the dragoman’s legend, Kheops and Khephren were cruel and impious tyrants, while their successor Mykerinos (Men-ka-Ra) was a good and merciful ruler. The key to this description of them is probably to be found in the statement of Diodorus Siculus that the people threatened to drag their bodies from their tombs after death and tear them in pieces, so that through fear of such a fate the Pharaohs took care to have themselves buried in a secret place. This secret place is the subterranean island, with its chambers, which Herodotos says was made under the great pyramid by means of a canal in order that the king might be entombed there. The myth must have originated in the fact that in the days of Herodotos the mummies of Kheops and Khephren were not to be found in their pyramids, which had been rifled centuries before, and the story of the cruelty and impiety of the two kings accordingly grew up to account for the fact. The righteousness of Mykerinos was visited with the anger and punishment of the gods, since it had been destined that the Egyptians should be evil-entreated for one hundred and fifty years, and his piety and justice had averted from them part of their doom. This view of destiny and the action of the gods was as essentially Greek as it was foreign to the Egyptian mind, and it is not surprising therefore that the decree of heaven was announced to the unhappy Pharaoh through that thoroughly Greek institution, an oracle. We are reading in the story a Greek tragedy rather than a history of Egypt.