The passage in Herodotus, to which I before referred, appears to throw some light on the intricate subject which we are now pursuing. In lib. ii. p. 124, etc., “the father of historians” tells us that the two kings, who succeeded each other on the throne of Egypt, after the happy reign of Rhampsinitus and his predecessors, and to whom the building of those pyramids was reputedly ascribed, had shown themselves indeed _brothers_, not more by affinity of blood than by the similar outlines of their cruelty and intolerance. No species of oppression was by them left unattempted; no extreme of rigour or rapacious plunder by them unenforced: but what peculiarly characterised the hardship of their tyranny was the restraint they put upon the _religion_ and pious exercises of their subjects; closing the portals of the _temples_ where they were wont to adore, and preventing the oblation of their usual sacrifices. Though Herodotus has been justly honoured with the designation of “Father of Historians,” he has also, perhaps, not so very justly been called “the Father of Errors”; and, as he himself admitted his incapability of obtaining any satisfactory insight into the original of those structures, may we not fairly conclude that, in the extract now cited, he either confounds those princes with the _foreign dynasty_ which we have already established, or else, from the ignorance _superinduced_ to obliterate their memory, mistakes the erection of some of the _minor_ and _later_ ones, which this “par nobile fratrum” may, indeed, have devised, in imitation of the three “_mountains_” built by the Uksi. What he states, however, is of value, as it points to a _previous form of worship_, and a _system of government_ by an alien house. The prohibition of sacrifices and the closing the temple doors make this as clear as words can delineate anything. All we want, then, is to be informed what the particular temples alluded to were: and that they were the _pyramids_, will, I think, be conceded by everyone who has carefully perused the arguments here set down, and who has not his judgment warped by favourite plans of literary systems and speculative hypotheses. This conclusion receives additional force from the conversation which Wilford, in his “Dissertation upon Egypt and the Nile,”[191] tells us he had with several learned Brahmins, when, upon describing to them the form and bearings of the great Egyptian pyramid, one of them asked if _it had not a communication under ground with the river Cali_? Being answered that such communication was spoken of as having once existed, and that a _well_ was still to be seen, they unanimously agreed that it was a _temple_ appropriated to the worship of _Padma-devi_, and that the supposed _tomb_ was a _trough_, which, on certain festivals, her priests used to fill with the sacred water and lotos-flowers.