Mykerinos

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.

It was part of the punishment of Mykerinos that he should lose his daughter, and the dragomen thus managed to connect the pyramid at Gizeh with a gilded wooden image of a cow in the palace at Sais, which, since the reign of Psammetikhos, must have been well-known to them.

His next visit, accordingly, was to the pyramids of Gizeh, and the pyramidal builders—Kheops, Khephren, and Mykerinos of the fourth dynasty—are made to follow Ramses iii. of the twentieth, who lived more than two thousand years after them.

Though they knew that at the festival of Osiris the cow was carried out into the open air, they said this was because the daughter of Mykerinos when dying had asked her father that she might once a year see the sun.

Khufu, Khaf-Ra and Men-ka-Ra, the Kheops, Khephrên and Mykerinos of Herodotos, were the builders of the three vast sepulchres which, by their size and nearness to Cairo, have so long been an object of pilgrimage to the traveller.