According to Herodotus:
''Till the time of Rhampsinitus Egypt (so the priests told me) was in all ways well governed and greatly prospered, but Cheops, who was the next king, brought the people to utter misery. For first he shut up all the temples, so that none could sacrifice there; and next, he compelled all the Egyptians to work for him, appointing some to drag stones from the quarries in the Arabian mountains to the Nile: and the stones being carried across the river in boats, others were charged to receive and drag them to the mountains called Libyan.
They worked in gangs of a hundred thousand men, each gang for three months. For ten years the people were afflicted in making the road whereon the stones were dragged, the making of which road was to my thinking a task but a little lighter than the building of the pyramid, for the road is five furlongs long and ten fathoms broad, and raised at its highest to a height of eight fathoms, and it is all of stone polished and carven with figures.
The ten years aforesaid went to the making of this road and of the underground chambers on the hill whereon the pyramids stand; these the king meant to be burial-places for himself, and encompassed them with water, bringing in a channel from the Nile. The pyramid itself was twenty years in the making. Its base was square, each side eight hundred feet long, and its height is the same; the whole is of stone polished and most exactly fitted; there is no block of less than thirty feet in length.
This pyramid was made like a stairway with tiers, or steps. When this, its first form, was completed, the workmen used levers made of short wooden logs to raise the rest of the stones; they heaved up the blocks from the ground on to the first tier of steps; when the stone had been so raised it was set on another lever that stood on the first tier, and a lever again drew it up from this tier to the next.
It may be that there was a new lever on each tier of the steps, or perhaps there was but one lever, and that easily lifted, which they carried up to each tier in turn, when they had taken out the stone; I leave this uncertain, both ways being told me.
But this is certain, that the upper part of the pyramid was the first finished off, then the next below it, and last of all the base and the lowest part. There are writings on the pyramid in Egyptian characters showing how much was spent on purges and onions and garlic for the workmen; and so far as I well remember, the interpreter when he read me the writing said that sixteen hundred talents of silver had been paid.
Now if that is so, how much must needs have been expended on the iron with which they worked, and the workmen's food and clothing? seeing that the time aforesaid was spent in building, and the hewing and carrying of the stone and the digging out of the underground parts was, as I suppose, a business of long duration.
On the age of the Egyptian Kingdom:
''Thus far went the record given me by the Egyptians and their priests; and they showed me that the time from the first king to that priest of Hephaestus, who was the last, covered three hundred and forty‑one generations of men, and that in this time such also had been the number of their kings, and of their high priests.
Now three hundred generations make up ten thousand years, three generations being equal to a century. And over and above the three hundred the remaining forty‑one cover thirteen hundred and forty years. Thus the whole sum is eleven thousand three hundred and forty years; in all which time (they said) they had had no king who was a god in human form, nor had there been any such thing either before or after those years among the rest of the kings of Egypt.
Four times in this period (so they told me) the sun rose contrary to his wont; twice he rose where he now sets, and twice he set where now he rises; yet Egypt at these times underwent no change, neither in the produce of the river and the land, nor in the matter of sickness and death.''
