Note 363 — Chapter VI
Reading edition
“Do not despise me, for when compared to the stone pyramids, I am as superior as Jupiter to the other gods. For men, plunging poles into a lake, and collecting the mud thus extracted, formed it into bricks, of which they made me.”
There is here a contempt apprehended, and the highest estimation expressed. The shepherd-king deprecates Egyptian censure, in following his country’s fashion. Sir G. Wilkinson says:—
“Dr. Richardson justly asks, in what could this superiority over stone pyramids exist? and suggests, that it points to the invention of the arch that roofed its chambers, which, provided Asychis lived prior to the sixteenth and eighteenth dynasties, may possibly be true.”
“The primeval builders of Egyptian stone pyramids must have previously been earth-mound builders elsewhere, probably in Asia.”—Gliddon, Otia Egyptiaca, p. 36.