By means of the inscriptions in tombs and in temples in Egypt, the modern scholar is now able to walk about among the builders of those costly structures, and to almost raise from the dead the men in whose honor they were constructed. In some instances, however, the servant is made more famous than his lord, because what he wrote about his lord has perished, while what he wrote of himself has been preserved. This is especially the case with one eminent man who lived under three kings of the sixth dynasty. His name was Una, and he was [126] a statesman, a warrior and an architect. He excavated a costly tomb for himself, and on its walls, according to the custom of the times, he wrote an account of his own career. Brugsch, from whom our information is derived, says of this account:

      This narrative of the life and actions of a single man among the contemporaries of the kings Teta, Pepi and Mer-en-Ra, exhausts all that we know of their history (P. 49).

      A brief sketch of his work in the single line of tomb-building will throw much light upon the mystery which, until late years, hung around the pyramids, the tombs and the coffins of that remote period--a period more remote than the time of Abraham. I collate from "Egypt Under the Pharaohs."

      Una tells us that he received from Pepi, the second king under whom he lived, "orders to quarry a sarcophagus out of the mountain of Turah." This was to be the king's coffin when he died. We know from many that have been preserved how a sarcophagus was made. A huge block of granite was cut from the quarry with hammer and chisel, usually about seven feet long by three and a half feet wide and high. This was finely polished on three sides and the ends, and an excavation was made in the other side of sufficient dimensions to receive the mummy of the king. A lid of the same stone was quarried to cover the sarcophagus, usually about six inches thick. This was also polished, and after the mummy had been interred it was laid in place and fastened on with cement. Then the sarcophagus was moved on rollers to its place within the rock-hewn sepulchre which had been previously excavated. The western bluff of the Nile valley, which is a limestone formation extending along the western border of Egypt, was honey-combed with these excavations. [127]

      Una proceeds to tell us that the sarcophagus which he was ordered to prepare, after being quarried, "was conveyed down the river on one of the king's vessels with its cover and many other hewn stones for the building of the royal pyramid." This last remark shows that he was, at the same time, engaged in erecting the pyramid in which the sarcophagus, with its contents, was to be laid away.

      When Mer-en-Ra, the next king, came to the throne, we are told that he "was at once mindful of the eternal dwelling, which, after his death, should contain his mummy," and that "Una immediately received the command to prepare everything for the work, and to quarry the hardest stone on the southern border of Egypt." He says: "His Majesty sent me to the country of Abhat to bring back a sarcophagus with its cover; also a small pyramid, and a statue of the King Mer-en-Ra, whose pyramid is called Kha-nefer." The name, Kha-nefer, means the beautiful rising. It was so called, perhaps, because it rose in beautiful proportions.

      Una was next ordered to cut a block of alabaster, which was also quarried far up the Nile. "The gigantic load was to be sent by water on great rafts sixty cubits in length and thirty in breadth, which had been previously specially constructed for this purpose. But the river was found to have fallen so low that it was impossible to make use of such large rafts, so Una was obliged to build smaller ones in all haste. The wood for this purpose had to be felled in the neighboring country inhabited by negroes." It is thus related by Una: "His Majesty sent me to cut down four forests in the South, in order to build three large vessels and four towing vessels out of the acacia wood in the country of Ua-uat. And, behold, the officials of Areret, Aam and Mata [128] caused the wood to be cut down for the purpose. I executed all this in the space of a year. As soon as the waters rose, I loaded the rafts with immense pieces of granite for the pyramid Kha-nefer of the King Meren-Ra."

      Our readers will recognize in the acacia wood here mentioned the same wood which Moses used for the construction of the Tent of Meeting. He found the trees in the Sinaitic peninsula, just across the Red Sea from the region in which Una found the four forests of the same in Africa. Being both light and durable, it was well suited to the purposes of both Moses and Una.

      The reader should not be misled by Una's account of bringing granite from the upper waters of the Nile for the construction of pyramids, and conclude that all of the material for those vast structures was thus transported, or was composed of granite. This hard rock was used only for the interior passages of the pyramids, and in a few instances for the finishing course of the exterior. With these exceptions, the pyramids were built of the limestone quarried from the bluff on which they stood; and the blocks of this stone were used in the rough as they came from the quarry. Many conjectures have been advanced, some of them very wild, as to the date and purpose of the erection of the pyramids; but it remained for the builders themselves, after their lips had been sealed for thousands of years, to settle all these questions; and they have settled them by a "still small voice" which comes from the inscriptions in their tombs and on their monuments. It is now a well-established fact that the pyramids were familiar objects to the eyes of Abraham and Joseph, and that their ages were already counted by centuries when Moses was born. [129]

[SEBC 126-129]