 CHAPTER I. THE POLITICAL CONSTITUTION OF EGYPT PART IX Their lot was a hard one, if we are to believe the description which ancient writers have handed down to us. I have never seen a blacksmith on an embassy, nor a smelter sent on a mission. But what I have seen is the metal-worker at his toil, at the mouth of the furnace of his forge, his fingers as rugged as the crocodile, and stinking more than fish-spawn. The artisan of any kind who handles the chisel does not employ so much movement as he who handles the hoe. But for him his fields are the timber, his business is the metal, and at night, when the other is free, he, he works with his hands over and above what he has already done, for at night he works at home by the lamp. The stone-cutter who seeks his living by working in all kinds of durable stone, when at last he has earned something, and his two arms are worn out, he stops. But if at sunrise he remains sitting, his legs are tied to his back. The barber who shaves until the evening when he falls to and eats, it is without sitting down, while running from street to street to seek custom. If he is constant at work his two arms fill his belly, as the bee eats in proportion to its toil. Shall I tell thee of the mason how he endures misery, exposed to all the winds, while he builds without any garment but a belt, and while the bunch of lotus-flowers which is fixed on the completed houses is still far out of his reach? His two arms are worn out with work, his provisions are placed higgily-piggily amongst his refuse. He consumes himself, for he has no other bread than his fingers, and he becomes wearied all at once. He is much and dreadfully exhausted, for there is always a block to be dragged in this or that building, a block of ten cubits by six. There is always a block to be dragged in this or that month, as far as the scaffolding poles to which is fixed the bunch of lotus-flowers on the completed houses. When the work is quite finished, if he has bread he returns home, and his children have been beaten unmercifully during his absence. The weaver within doors is worse off there than a woman, squatting his knees against his chest, he does not breathe. If during the day he slackens weaving he is bound fast as the lotuses of the lake, and it is by giving bread to the doorkeeper that the latter permits him to see the light. The dire, his fingers reeking, and their smell is that of fish-spawn. His two eyes are oppressed with fatigue, his hand does not stop, and as he spends his time in cutting out rags he has a hatred of garments. The shoemaker is very unfortunate, he moans ceaselessly, his health is the health of the spawning fish, and he gnaws the leather. The baker makes dough, subjects the loaves to the fire, while his head is inside the oven his son holds him by the legs. If he slips from the hands of his son he falls there into the flames. These are the miseries inherent to the trades themselves. The levying of the tax added to the catalogue a long sequel of vexations and annoyances, which were renewed several times in the year at regular intervals. Even at the present day the fellow does not pay his contributions except under protest and by compulsion, but the determination not to meet obligations except beneath the stick was proverbial from ancient times. Whoever paid his dues before he had received a merciless beating would be overwhelmed with reproaches by his family and jeered at without pity by his neighbors. The time when the tax fell due came upon the nomes is a terrible crisis which affected the whole population. For several days there was nothing to be heard but protestations, threats, beatings, cries of pain from the taxpayers, and piercing lamentations from women and children. The performance over calm was reestablished and the good people, binding up their wounds, resumed their round of daily life until the next tax-gathering. The towns of this period presented nearly the same confined and mysterious appearance as those of the present day. They were grouped around one or more temples, each of which was surrounded by its own brick and closing wall with its enormous gateways. The gods dwelt there in real castles, or if this word appears too ambitious, redoubts, in which the population could take refuge in cases of sudden attack and where they could be in safety. The towns, which had all been built at one period by some king or prince, were on a tolerably long, regular ground. The streets were paved and fairly wide, they crossed each other at right angles, and were bordered with buildings on the same line of frontage. The cities of ancient origin, which had increased with the chance growth of centuries, presented a totally different aspect. A network of lanes and blind alleys, narrow, dark, damp, and badly built, spread itself out between the houses, apparently at random. Here and there was the arm of a canal, all but dried up, or a muddy pool where the cattle came to drink, and from which the women fetched the water for their households. Then followed an open space of irregular shape, shaded by acacias or sycamores, where the country folk of the suburbs held their market on certain days, twice or thrice a month. Then came waste ground covered with filth and refuse, over which the dogs of the neighborhood fought with hawks and vultures. The residents of the Prince or Royal Governor, and the houses of rich private persons, covered a considerable area, and generally presented to the street a long extent of bare walls, crenellated like those of a fortress. The only ornament admitted on them consisted of angular grooves, each surmounted by two open lotus flowers having their stems intertwined. Within these walls domestic life was entirely secluded, and, as it were, confined to its own resources. The pleasure of watching passers by was sacrificed to the advantage of not being seen from outside. The entrance alone denoted at times the importance of the great man who concealed himself within the enclosure. Two or three steps led up to the door, which sometimes had a column to portico, ornamented with statues, lending an air of importance to the building. The houses of the citizens were small and built of brick. They contained, however, some half-dozen rooms, either vaulted or having flat roofs, and communicating with each other by arched doorways. A few houses boasted of two or three stories, all possessed a terrace on which the Egyptians of old, like those of today, passed most of their time, attending to household cares or gossiping with their neighbors over the party wall or across the street. The hearth was hollowed out in the ground, usually against a wall, and the smoke escaped through a hole in the ceiling. They made their fires of sticks, wood charcoal, and the dung of oxen and asses. In the houses of the rich we meet with state apartments, lighted in the center by a square opening and supported by rows of wooden columns. The shafts, which were octagonal, measured ten inches in diameter and were fixed into flat circular stone bases. The family crowded themselves together into two or three rooms in winter and slept on the roof in the open air in summer, in spite of the risk from infections of the stomach and eyes. The remainder of the dwelling was used for stables or warehouses. The store chambers were often built in pairs. They were a brick, carefully lime-washed internally and usually assumed to the form of an elongated cone in imitation of the government storehouses. For the valuables which constituted the wealth of each household, wedges of gold or silver, precious stones, ornaments for men or women, there were places of concealment in which the possessors attempted to hide them from robbers or from tax collectors. But the latter, accustomed to the craft of the citizens, evinced a peculiar aptitude for ferreting out the hoard. They tapped the walls, lifted and pierced the roofs, dug down into the soil below the foundations, and often brought to light, not only the treasure of the owner, but all the surroundings of the grave and human corruption. It was actually the custom, among the lower and middle classes, to bury in the middle of the house children who had died at the breast. The little body was placed in an old tool or linen box, without any attempt at embalming, and its favorite playthings and amulets were buried with it. Two or three infants are often found occupying the same coffin. The playthings were of an artless but varied character, dolls of limestone, enameled pottery or wood, with movable arms and wigs of artificial hair, pigs, crocodiles, ducks and pigeons on wheels, pottery boats, miniature sets of household furniture, skin balls filled with hay, marbles and stone bowls. However strange it may appear, we have to fancy the small boys of ancient Egypt as playing at bowls like ours, or impudently whipping their tops along the streets without respect for the legs of the passers-by. Some care was employed upon the decoration of the chambers. The rough casting of mud often preserves its original gray color. Sometimes, however, it was lime-washed and colored red or yellow or decorated with pictures of jars, provisions, and the interiors as well as the exteriors of houses. The bed was not on legs, but consisted of a low framework like the angarebs of the modern Nubians, or of mats which were folded up in the daytime, but upon which they lay in their clothes during the night, the head being supported by a headrest of pottery, limestone or wood. The remaining articles of furniture consisted of one or two roughly-hewn seats of stone, a few lion-legged chairs or stools, boxes and trunks of varying sizes for linen and implements, coal or perfume, pots of alabaster or porcelain, and lastly, the fire-stick with the bow by which it was set in motion, and some roughly-made pots and pans of clay or bronze. Men rarely entered their houses except to eat and sleep. Their employments or handicrafts were such as to require them for the most part to work out of doors. The middle-class families owned, almost always, one or two slaves, either purchased or born in the house, who did all the hard work. They looked after the cattle, watched over the children, acted as cooks, and fetched water from the nearest pool or well. Among the poor the drudgery of the household fell entirely upon the woman. She spun, wove, cut out and mended garments, fetched fresh water and provisions, cooked the dinner, and made the daily bread. She spread some handfuls of grain upon an oblong slab of stone, slightly hollowed on its upper surface, and proceeded to crush them with a smaller stone like a painter's muller, which she moistened from time to time. For an hour and more she labored with her arms, shoulders, loins, in fact all her body, but an indifferent result followed from the great exertion. The flour, made to undergo several grindings in this rustic mortar, was coarse, uneven, mixed with bran or whole grains, which had escaped the pestle, and contaminated with dust and abraded particles of the stone. She kneaded it with a little water, blended with it, as a sort of yeast, a piece of stale dough of the day before, and made from the mass round cakes, about half an inch thick, and some four inches in diameter, which she placed upon a flat flint, covering them with hot ashes. The bread, imperfectly raised, often badly cooked, borrowed from the organic fuel under which it was buried, a special odor, and a taste of which strangers did not readily accustom themselves. The impurities which it contained were sufficient in the long run to ruin the strongest teeth. Eating it was an action of grinding rather than chewing, and old men were not infrequently met with whose teeth had been gradually worn away to the level of the gums, like those of an aged ass or ox. Movement and animation were not lacking at certain hours of the day, particularly during the morning, in the markets and in the neighbourhood of the temples and government buildings. There was but little traffic anywhere else. The streets were silent and the town dull and sleepy. It woke up completely only three or four times a year, at seasons of solemn assemblies of heaven and earth. The houses were then opened and their inhabitants streamed forth, the lively crowd thronging the squares and crossways. To begin with, there was New Year's Day, quickly followed by the Festival of the Bead, the Oogate. On the night of the seventeenth of thought the priests kindled before the statues in the sanctuaries and sepulchre chapels the fire for the use of the gods and the doubles during the twelve ensuing months. Almost at the same moment the whole country was lit up from one end to the other. There was scarcely a family, however poor, who did not place in front of their door a new lamp in which burned an oil saturated with salt, and who did not spend the whole night in feasting and gossiping. CHAPTER I. THE POLITICAL CONSTITUTION OF EGYPT PART X The festivals of the living gods attracted considerable crowds, who came not only from the nearest nomes, but also from great distances in caravans and in boats laden with merchandise, for religious sentiment did not exclude commercial interests, and the pilgrimage ended in a fair. For several days the people occupied, mentioned by Herodotus, the religious ceremony was accompanied by a general illumination which lasted all the night. The object of this probably was to facilitate the visit which the souls of the dead were supposed to pay at this time to the family residents themselves solely in prayers, sacrifices and processions, in which the faithful clad in white, with palms in their hands, chanted hymns as they escorted the priests on their way. The gods of heaven exclaim, ah, ah, in satisfaction! The inhabitants of the earth are full of gladness. The hathors beat their tabers. The great ladies waved their mystic whips. All those who are gathered together in the town are drunk with wine and crowned with flowers. The tradespeople of the place walk joyously about. Their heads scented with perfumed oils. All the children rejoice in honour of the goddess, from the rising to the setting of the sun. The nights were as noisy as the days. For a few hours they made up energetically for long months of torpor and monotonous existence. The god having re-entered the temple and the pilgrims taken their departure, the regular routine was resumed and dragged on its tedious course, interrupted only by the weekly market. At an early hour on that day the peasant folk came in from the surrounding country in an interminable stream, and installed themselves in some open space, reserved from time immemorial for their use. The sheep, geese, goats, and large horned cattle were grouped in the centre, awaiting purchasers. Market gardeners, fishermen, fowlers, and gazelle hunters, potters, and small tradesmen, squatted on road sides or against the houses, and offered their wares for the inspection of their customers. Heaped up in reed baskets or piled on low round tables, vegetables and fruits, loaves or cakes baked in the night, meat either raw or cooked in various ways, stuffs, perfumes, ornaments, all the necessities and luxuries of daily life. It was a good opportunity for the work people, as well as for the townsfolk, to lay in a store provisions at a cheaper rate than from the ordinary shops. And they took advantage of it, each according to his means. Business was mostly carried on by barter. The purchasers brought with them the product of their toil, a new tool, a pair of shoes, a reed mat, pots of ungluents or cordials, often two rows of cowries and a small box full of rings, each weighing a tabneau, made of copper, silver, or even gold, all destined to be bartered for such things as they needed. When it came to be a question of some large animal or of objects of considerable value, the discussions which arose were keen and stormy. It was necessary to be agreed not only as to the amount, but as to the nature of the payment to be made, and to draw up a sort of invoice, or in fact an inventory, in which beds, sticks, honey, oil, pick-axes, and garments, all figure as equivalents for a bull or a she-ass. Smaller retail bargains did not demand so many or such complicated calculations. Two townsfolk stopped for a moment in front of a fella who offers onions and corn in a basket for sale. The first appears to possess no other circulating medium than two necklaces made of glass beads, or many-colored enameled terracotta. The other flourishes about a circular fan with a wooden handle, and one of those triangular contrivances used by cooks for blowing up the fire. Here is a fine necklace which will suit you, cries the former. It is just what you are wanting. While the other breaks in with, here is a fan and a ventilator. The fella, however, does not let himself be disconcerted by this double attack, and proceeding methodically he takes one of the necklaces to examine it at his leisure. Give it to me to look at, that I may fix the price. The one asks too much, the other offers too little. After many concessions they at last come to an agreement and settle on the number of onions or the quantity of grain which corresponds exactly with the value of the necklace or the fan. A little further on, a customer wishes to get some perfumes in exchange for a pair of sandals, and conscientiously praises his wares. Here, says he, is a strong pair of shoes. But the merchant has no wish to be shod just then, and demands a row of calories for his little pots. You have merely to take a few drops of this to see how delicious it is, he urges in a persuasive tone. A seated customer has two jars thrust under his nose by a woman. They probably contain some kind of unjuint. Here is something which smells good enough to tempt you. Behind this group two men are discussing the relative merits of a bracelet and a bundle of fish hooks. A woman, with a small box in her hand, is having an argument with a merchant selling necklaces. Another woman seeks to obtain a reduction in the price of a fish which is being scraped in front of her. Having commodities for metal necessitated two or three operations not required an ordinary barter. The rings or thin bent strips of metal which formed the tabnou and its multiples did not always contain the regulation amount of gold or silver, and were often of light weight. They had to be weighed at every fresh transaction in order to estimate their true value, and the interested parties never missed this excellent opportunity for a heated discussion. After having declared for a quarter of an hour that the scales were out of order, that the weighing had been carelessly performed, and that it should be done over again, they at last came to terms, exhausted with wrangling, and then went their way fairly satisfied with one another. It sometimes happened that a clever and unscrupulous dealer would alloy the rings and mix with the precious metal as much of a baser sort as would be possible without danger of detection. The honest merchant who thought he was receiving in payment for some article, say, eight tabnou of fine gold, and who had handed to him eight tabnou of some alloy resembling gold, but containing one-third of silver, lost in a single transaction without suspecting it almost one-third of his goods. The fear of such counterfeits was instrumental in restraining the use of tabnou for a long time among the people, and restricted the buying and selling in markets to exchange in natural products or manufactured objects. We must perhaps agree with Lennermont, in his conclusion that the only kind of national medal of exchange in use in Egypt was a copper wire or plate, this being the sign invariably used in the hieroglyphics in writing the word tabnou. The present rural population of Egypt scarcely ever live in isolated and scattered farms. They are almost all concentrated in hamlets and villages of considerable extent, divided into quarters often at some distance from each other. The same state of things existed in ancient times, and those who would realize what a village in the past was like have only to visit any one of the modern market towns scattered at intervals along the valley of the Nile. Half a dozen fairly-built houses inhabited by the principal people of the place, groups of brick or clay cottages thatched with durastalks, so low that a man standing upright almost touches the roof with his head, courtyards filled with tall circular mud-built sheds in which the corn and dura for the household is carefully stored, and wherever we turn, pigeons, ducks, geese, and animals, all living higgledy-piggledy with the family. The majority of the peasantry were of the lower class, but they were not everywhere subjected to the same degree of servitude. The slaves, properly so-called, came from other countries. They had been bought from foreign merchants, or they had been seized in a raid and had lost their liberty by the fortune of war. Their master removed them from place to place, sold them, used them as he pleased, pursued them if they succeeded in escaping, and had the right of recapturing them as soon as he received information of their whereabouts. They worked for him under his overseer's orders, receiving no regular wages, and with no hope of recovering their liberty. Many chose concubines from their own class, or intermarried with the natives, and had families. At the end of two or three generations their descendants became assimilated with the indigenous race, and were neither more nor less than actual serfs attached to the soil, who were made over or exchanged with it. The landed proprietors, lords, kings, or gods, accommodated this population either in the outbuildings belonging to their residences, or in villages built for the purpose, where everything belonged to them, both houses and people. The condition of the free agricultural laborer was in many respects analogous to that of the modern fella. Some of them possessed no other property than a mud cabin, just large enough for a man and his wife, and hired themselves out by the day or the year as farm servants. Others were emboldened to lease land from the Lord or from a soldier in the neighborhood. The most fortunate acquired some domain of which they were supposed to receive only the product, the freehold of the property, remaining primarily in the hands of the pharaoh, and secondarily in that of lay or religious feudatories who held it of the sovereign. They could, moreover, bequeath, give or sell these lands and buy fresh ones without any opposition. They paid, besides the capitation tax, a ground rent proportionate to the extent of their property, and to the kind of land of which it consisted. CHAPTER I It was not without reason that all the ancients attributed the invention of geometry to the Egyptians. The perpetual encroachments of the Nile, and the displacements it occasioned, the facility with which it effaced the boundaries of the fields, and in one summer modified the whole face of a Nome, had forced them from early times to measure with the greatest exactitude the ground to which they owed their sustenance. The territory belonging to each town in Nome was subjected to repeated surveys made and coordinated by the royal administration, thus enabling pharaoh to know the exact area of his estates. The unit of measurement was the aurora, that is to say, a square of a hundred cubits, comprising in round numbers twenty-eight acres. A considerable staff of scribes and surveyors was continually occupied in verifying the old measurements or in making fresh ones, and in recording in the state registers any changes which might have taken place. Each estate had its boundaries marked out by a line of stela, which frequently bore the name of the tenant at the time, and the date when the landmarks were last fixed. Once set up the stelae received a name which gave it, as it were, a living and independent personality. It sometimes recorded the nature of the soil, its situation, or some characteristic which made it remarkable. The Lake of the South, the Eastern Meadow, the Green Island, the Fisher's Pool, the Willow Plot, the Vineyard, the Vine Arbor, the Sycamore. Sometimes it also bore the name of the first master or the pharaoh under whom it had been erected, the Nurse Patahapu, the Verdeur Chaops, the Meadow de Defri, the Abundance Sahuri, Caferi great among the doubles. Once given the name clung to it for centuries, and neither sales nor redistributions nor revolutions nor changes of dynasty could cause it to be forgotten. The officers of the survey inscribed it in their books, there with the name of the proprietor, those of the owners of adjoining lands, and the area and nature of the ground. They noted down, to within a few cubits, the extent of the sand, marshland, pools, canals, groups of palms, gardens or orchards, vineyards and cornfields which it contained. The cornland in its turn was divided into several classes, according to whether it was regularly inundated or situated above the highest rise of the water, and consequently dependent on a more or less costly system of artificial irrigation. All this was so much information of which the scribes took advantage in regulating the assessment of the land tax. Everything tends to make us believe that this tax represented one tenth of the gross produce, but the amount of the latter varied. It depended on the annual rise of the Nile, and it followed the course of it with almost mathematical exactitude. If there were too much or too little water, it was immediately lessened, and might even be reduced to nothing in extreme cases. The king and his capital and the great lords in their fives had set up Nilo-meters, by means of which, in the critical weeks, the height of the rising or subsiding flood was taken daily. Messengers carried the news of it over the country. The people, kept regularly informed of what was happening, soon knew what kind of season to expect, and they could calculate to within very little what they would have to pay. In theory the collecting of the tax was based on the actual amount of land covered by the water, and the produce of it was constantly varying. In practice it was regulated by taking the average of preceding years and deducting from that a fixed sum, which was never departed from except in extraordinary circumstances. The year would have to be a very bad one before the authorities would lower the ordinary rate. The state, in ancient times, was not more willing to deduct anything from its revenue than the modern state would be. The payment of taxes was exacted in wheat, dura, beans, and field produce, which were stored in the granaries of the Nome. It would seem that the previous deduction of one-tenth of the gross amount of the harvest could not be a heavy burden, and that the wretched fellow ought to have been in a position, on land, at a permanent figure, based on the average of good and bad harvests. It was not so, however, and the same riders who have given us such a lamentable picture of the condition of the workmen in the towns have painted for us, in even darker colors, the miseries which overwhelmed the country people. Thus thou not recall the picture of the farmer when the tenth of his grain is levied, worms have destroyed half the wheat, and the hippopotamia have eaten the rest. There are swarms of rats in the fields, the grasshoppers alight there, the cattle devour, the little birds pilfer, and if the farmer lose sight for an instant of what remains upon the ground it is carried off by robbers. The throngs, moreover, which bind the iron and the hoe are worn out, and the team has died at the plow. It is then that the scribe steps out of the boat at the landing place to levy the tithe, and there come the keepers of the doors of the granary with cudgels, and the negroes with ribs of palm leaves, who come crying, come now, corn. There is none, and they throw the cultivator full length upon the ground. Bound, dragged to the canal, they fling him in head first. His wife is bound with him, his children are put into chains, the neighbors in the meantime leave him and fly to save their grain. One might be tempted to declare that the picture is too dark a one to be true. Did one not know from other sources of the brutal ways of filling the treasury which Egypt has retained even to the present day? In the same way as in the town, the stick facilitated the operations of the tax collector in the country. It quickly opened the granaries of the rich. It revealed resources to the poor of which he had been ignorant, and it only failed in the case of those who had really nothing to give. Those who were insolvent were not let off even when they had been more than half-killed. They and their families were sent to prison, and they had to work out in forced labor the amount which they had failed to pay in current merchandise. The collection of the taxes was usually terminated by a rapid revision of the survey. The scribe once more recorded the dimensions and character of the domain lands in order to determine afresh the amount of the tax which should be imposed upon them. It often happened, indeed, that owing to some freak of the Nile, attractive land which had been fertile enough the preceding year would be buried under a gravel bed or transformed into a marsh. The owners who thus suffered were allowed an equivalent deduction. As for the farmers, no deductions of the burden were permitted in their case, but attract equaling and value to that of the part they had lost was granted to them out of their royal or seniorial domain, and their property was thus made up to its original worth. What the collection of the taxes had begun was almost always brought to a climax by the Corvées. However numerous the royal and seniorial slaves might have been, they were insufficient for the cultivation of all the lands of the domains, and a part of Egypt must always have lain and fallow, had not the number of workers been augmented by the addition of those who were in the position of free men. This excess of cultivable land was subdivided into portions of equal dimensions, which were distributed among the inhabitants of neighboring villages by the officers of a regent nominated for that purpose. Those dispensed from the agricultural service were the destitute, soldiers on service and their families, certain employees of the public works, and servitors of the temple. All other country folk without exception had to submit to it, and one or more portions were allotted to each, according to his capabilities. Orders issued at fixed periods called them together, themselves, their servants and their beasts of burden, to dig, sew, keep watch in the fields while the harvest was proceeding, to cut and carry the crops, the whole work being done at their own expense and to the detriment of their own interests. As a sort of indemnity, a few allotments were left uncultivated for their benefit. To these they sent their flocks after the subsidence of the inundation, for the pastureage on them was so rich that the sheep were doubly productive in wool and offspring. This was a mere apology for a wage. The forced labor for the irrigation brought them no compensation. The dykes which separate the basins, and the network of canals for distributing the water and irrigating the land, demand continual attention. Every year some need strengthening, others re-excavating or cleaning out. The men employed in this work pass whole days standing in the water, scraping up the mud with both hands in order to fill the baskets of platted leaves, which boys and girls lift onto their heads and carry to the top of the bank. The semi-liquid contents ooze through the basket, trickle over their faces, and soon coat their bodies with a black, shining mess, disgusting even to look at. Shakes preside over the work, and urge it on with abuse and blows. When the gangs of workmen had toiled all day, with only an interval of two hours about noon for a siesta and a meager pittance of food, the poor wretches slept on the spot, in the open air, huddled one against another and but ill-protected by their rags from the chilly nights. The task was so hard a one that malifactors, bankrupts, and prisoners of war were condemned to it. It wore out so many hands that the free peasantry were scarcely ever exempt. Having returned to their homes, they were not called until the next year to any established or periodic corvée. But many an irregular one came and surprised them in the midst of their work, and forced them to abandon all else to attend to the affairs of king or lord. Was a new chamber to be added to some neighboring temple? Were materials wanted to strengthen or rebuild some piece of wall which had been undermined by the inundation? Orders were issued to the engineers to go and fetch a stated quantity of limestone or sandstone, and the peasants were commanded to assemble at the nearest quarry to cut the blocks from it, and if needful, to ship and convey them to their destination. Or perhaps the sovereign had caused a gigantic statue of himself to be carved, and a few hundred men were requisitioned to haul it to the place where he wished it to be set up. The undertaking ended in a gala, and doubtless in a distribution of food and drink. The unfortunate creatures who had been got together to execute the work could not always have felt fitly compensated for the precious time they had lost by one day of drunkenness and rejoicing. We may ask if all these corvées were equally legal. Even if some of them were illegal, the peasant on whom they fell could not have found the means to escape from them, nor could he have demanded legal reparation for the injury which they caused him. This in Egypt, and in the whole Oriental world, necessarily emanates from political authority, and is only one branch of the administration amongst others, in the hands of the Lord and his representatives. Professional magistrates were unknown. Men brought up to the study of law, whose duty it was to ensure the observance of it, apart from any other calling, but the same men who commanded armies offered sacrifices and assessed or received taxes, investigated the disputes of ordinary citizens, or settled the differences which arose between them and the representatives or the lords of the Pharaoh. In every town and village, those who held by birth or favor the position of Governor were ex officio invested with the right of administering justice. For a certain number of days in the month they sat at the gate of the town or of the building which served as their residence, and all those in the town or neighborhood possessed of any title, position, or property, the superior priesthood of the temples, scribes who had advanced or grown old in office, those in command of the militia or the police, the heads of divisions or corporations, the quan betui, the people of the angle, might, if they thought fit, take their place beside them and help them to decide ordinary lawsuits. The police were mostly recruited from foreigners or Negroes, or Bedouin belonging to the Nubian tribe of the Mazayu. The litigants appeared at the tribunal and waited under the superintendents of the police until their turn came to speak. The majority of the questions were decided in a few minutes by a judgment by which there was no appeal. Only the more serious cases necessitated across examination and prolonged discussion. All else was carried on before this patriarchal jury as in our own courts of justice, except that the inevitable stick too often elucidated the truth in cut short discussions. The depositions of the witnesses, the speeches on both sides, the examination of the documents, could not proceed without the frequent taking of oaths by the life of the king or by the favor of the gods, in which the truth often suffered severely. Penalties were varied somewhat, the bastinato, imprisonment, normal days of work for the Corvée, and for grave offenses, forced labor in the Ethiopian mines, the loss of nose and ears, and finally death by strangulation, by beheading, by impalement, and at the stake. CHAPTER I. THE POLITICAL CONSTITUTION OF EGYPT PART XII. Criminals of high rank obtained permission to carry out on themselves the sentence passed upon them, and thus avoided by suicide the shame of public execution. Before tribunals thus constituted, the fellow who came to appeal against the exactions of which he was the victim had little chance of obtaining a hearing, had not the scribe who had overtaxed him, or had imposed a fresh Corvée upon him the right to appear among the judges to whom he addressed himself? Nothing indeed prevented him from appealing from the latter to his feudal lord, and from him to Pharaoh, but such an appeal would be for him a mere delusion. When he had left his village and presented his petition, he had many delays to encounter before a solution could be arrived at. And if the adverse party were at all in favouring court, or could command any influence, the sovereign decision would confirm, even if it did not aggravate, the sentence of the previous judges. In the meanwhile the peasant's land remained uncultivated, his wife and children bewailed their wretchedness, and the last resources of the family were consumed in proceedings and delays. It would have been better for him at the outset to have made up his mind to submit without resistance, to a fate from which he could not escape. In spite of taxes, requisitions, and forced labour, the fellow came off fairly well, when the chief to whom they belong proved a kind master, and did not add the exactions of his own personal caprice to those of the state. The inscriptions which princes caused to be devoted to their own glorification are so many enthusiastic panagyrics dealing only with their uprightness and kindness towards the poor and lowly. Every one of them represents himself as faultless. The staff of support to the aged, the foster father of the children, the counselor of the unfortunate, the refuge in which those who suffer from the cold and thieves may warn themselves, the bread of the afflicted which never failed in the city of the South. Their solicitude embraced everybody and everything. I have caused no child of tender age to mourn, I have despoiled no widow, I have driven away no tiller of the soil, I have taken no workmen away from their foremen for the public works. None have been unfortunate about me, nor starving in my time. When years of scarcity arose, as I had cultivated all the lands of the Nome of the Gazelle to its northern and southern boundaries, causing its inhabitants to live, and creating provisions, none who were hungry were found there, for I gave to the widow as well as to the woman who had a husband, and I made no distinction between high and low in all that I gave. If on the contrary there were high Niles, the possessors of lands became rich in all things, for I did not raise the rate of the tax upon his fields. The canals engrossed all the prince's attention, he cleared them out, enlarged them, and dug them fresh ones, which were the means of bringing fertility and plenty to the most remote corners of his property. His serfs had a constant supply of clean water at their door, and were no longer content with such food as Dura. They ate wheat and bread daily. His vigilance and severity were such that the brigands dared no longer appear within reach of his arm, and his soldiers kept strict discipline. When night fell, whoever slept by the roadside blessed me, and was in safety as a man in his own house. The fear of my police protected him, the cattle remained in the fields as in the stable, the thief was as the abomination of the God, and he no more fell upon the vassal, so that the latter no more complained, but paid exactly the dues of his domain for love of the master who had procured for him this freedom from care. This theme might be pursued at length, for the composers of epitaphs varied it with remarkable cleverness and versatility of imagination. The very zeal which they display in describing the Lord's virtues betrays how precarious was the condition of his subjects. There was nothing to hinder the unjust prince or the prevaricating officer from ruining and ill-treating as he chose the people who were under his authority. He only had to give an order, and the corvée fell upon the proprietors of a village, carried off their slaves, and obliged them to leave their lands uncultivated. Should they declare that they were incapable of paying the contributions laid on them, the prison opened for them and their families. If a dyke were cut, or the course of a channel altered, the nome was deprived of water. Prompt and inevitable ruin came upon the unfortunate inhabitants and their property, confiscated by the treasury and payment of the tax, passed for a small consideration into the hands of the scribe or of the dishonest administrator. Two or three years of neglect were almost enough to destroy a system of irrigation. The canals became filled with mud, the banks crumbled, the inundation either failed to reach the ground or spread over it too quickly and lay upon it too long. Famine soon followed with its attendant sicknesses. Men and animals died by the hundred, and it was the work of nearly a whole generation to restore prosperity to the district. The lot of the fella of old was, as we have seen, as hard as that of the fella of today. He himself felt the bitterness of it, and complained at times, or rather the scribes complained for him, when with selfish complacency they contrasted their calling with his. He had to toil the whole year round, digging, sewing, working the chadouf from morning to night for weeks, hastening at the first requisition to the corvée, paying a heavy and cruel tax, all without even the certainty of enjoying what remained him in peace, or of seeing his wife and children brought by it. So great, however, was the elasticity of his temperament that his misery was not sufficient to depress him. Those monuments upon which his life is portrayed in all its minutias represent him as animated with inexhaustible cheerfulness. The summer months ended, the ground again becomes visible, the river retires into its bed, the time of sewing is at hand, the peasant takes his team and his implements with him and goes off to the fields. In many places the soil, softened by the water, offers no resistance, and the hoe easily turns it up. Elsewhere it is hard and only yields to the plough. While one of the farm servants, almost bent double, leans his whole weight on the handles to force the plough share deep into the soil, his comrade drives the oxen and encourages them by his songs. These are only two or three short sentences, set to an unvarying chant, and with the time beaten on the back of the nearest animal. Now and again he turns round toward his comrade and encourages him, lean hard, hold fast. The sower follows behind and throws handfuls of grain into the furrow, a flock of sheep or goats brings up the rear, and as they walk they tread the seed into the ground. The herdsmen crack their whips and sing some country song at the top of their voices, based on the complaint of some fella seized by the corvée to clean out a canal. The digger is in the water with the fish. He talks to the Siliris and exchanges greetings with the oxy-rincus. West, your digger is a digger from the west. All this takes place under the vigilant eye of the master. As soon as his attention is relaxed the work slackens, corals arise, and the spirit of idleness and theft gains ascendancy. Two men have unharnessed their team. One of them quickly milks one of the cows, the other holds the animal and impatiently awaits his turn. Be quick while the farmer is not there. They run the risk of a beating for a pot full of milk. The weeks pass, the corn has ripened, the harvest begins. The fellow heen, armed with a short sickle, cut or rather saw the stalks, a handful at a time. As they advance in line a flute player plays them a captivating tunes. A man joins in with his voice marking the rhythm by clapping his hands, the foreman throwing in now and then a few words of exhortation. What lad among you, when the season is over, can say, It is I who say it, to thee and to my comrades, you are all of you but idlers. Who among you can say, an active lad for the job am I? A servant moves among the gang with a tall jar of beer, offering it to those who wish for it. Is it not good, says he, and the one who drinks answers politely, to his true, the master's beer is better than a cake of dura. The sheaves, once bound, are carried to the singing of fresh songs addressed to the donkeys who bear them. Those who quit the ranks will be tied, those who roll on the ground will be beaten, gie ho, then. And thus threatened the ass trots forward. Even when a tragic element enters the scene, and the bastinato is represented, the sculptor, catching the bantering spirit of the people among whom he lives, manages to institute a vein of comedy. A peasant, summarily condemned for some misdeed, lies flat upon the ground with bared back. Two friends take hold of his arms and two weathers his legs to keep him in the proper position. His wife or son intercedes for him to the man with the stick. For mercy's sake strike on the ground. And as a fact the bastinato was commonly rather a mere form of chastisement than an actual punishment. The blows, dealt with apparent ferocity, missed their aim and fell upon the earth. The culprit howled loudly but was let off with only a few bruises. An Arab writer of the Middle Ages remarks, not without irony, that the Egyptians were perhaps the only people in the world who never kept any stores of provisions by them. But each one went daily to the market to buy the pittance for his family. The improvidence which he laments over in his contemporaries had been handed down from their most remote ancestors. Workmen, Felaen, employees, small townsfolk, all lived from hand to mouth in the Egypt of the Pharaohs. Pay days were almost everywhere days of rejoicing and extra-eating. No one spared either the grain, oil, or beer of the treasury, and copious feasting continued unsparingly as long as anything was left of their wages. As their resources were almost always exhausted before the day of distribution once more came round, beggaries succeeded to the fullness of living, and a part of the population was literally starving for several days. This almost constant alternation of abundance and dearth had a reactionary influence on daily work. There were scarcely any seniorial workshops or undertakings which did not come to a standstill every month on account of the exhaustion of the workmen, and help had to be provided for the starving in order to avoid popular seditions. Their improvidence, like their cheerfulness, was perhaps an innate trait in the national character. It was certainly fostered and developed by the system of government adopted by Egypt from the earliest times. What incentive was there for a man of the people to calculate his resources and to lay up for the future, when he knew that his wife, his children, his cattle, his goods, all that belonged to him and himself to boot, might be carried off at any moment without his having the right or power to resent it? He was born, he lived, and he died in the possession of a master. The lands or houses which his father had left him were his merely on sufferance, and he enjoyed them only by permission of his Lord. Those which he acquired by his own labor went to swell his master's domain. If he married and had sons, they were but servants for the master from the moment they were brought into the world. Whatever he might enjoy today, would his master allow him possession of it to-morrow? Even life in the world beyond did not offer him much more security or liberty. He only entered it in his master's service and to do his bidding. He existed in it on tolerance as he had lived upon the earth, and he found there no rest or freedom unless he provided himself abundantly with respondents and charmed statuettes. He therefore concentrated his mind and energies on the present moment to make the most of it as of almost the only thing which belonged to him. He left to his master the task of anticipating a providing for the future. In truth his master's were often changed. Now the Lord of one town, now that of another. Now a pharaoh of the Memphite or Theban dynasties. Now a stranger installed by chance upon the thrown horns. The condition of the people never changed. The burden which crushed them was never lightened, and whatever hand happened to hold a stick it never fell the less heavy upon their backs. CHAPTER II. THE MAGISTY OF KING HUNI DIED, AND THE MAGISTY OF KING SNOWFREW ARROWS TO BE A SOVERAN BENEFACTOR OVER THIS WHOLE EARTH. All that we know of him is contained in one sentence. He fought against the nomads of Sinai, constructed fortresses to protect the eastern frontier of the Delta, and made for himself a tomb in the form of a pyramid. The almost uninhabited country which connects Africa with Asia is flanked towards the south by two chains of hills, which unite at right angles and together form the so-called Gebel et Ti. This country is a table- land, gently inclined from south to north, bare, somber, covered with flint-shingle and salacious rocks, and breaking out at frequent intervals into low, chalky hills, seamed with waddies, the largest of which, that of El-Arish, having drained all the others into itself, opens into the Mediterranean half-way between Pelusium and Gaza. Torrents of rain are not infrequent in winter and spring, but the small quantity of water which they furnish is quickly evaporated, and barely keeps alive the meeker vegetation in the bottom of the valleys. Sometimes, after months of absolute drought, a tempest breaks over the more elevated parts of the desert. The wind rises suddenly in squall-like blasts. Thick clouds, born one not knows whence, are riven by lightning to the incessant accompaniment of thunder. It would seem as if the heavens had broken up and were crashing down upon the mountains. In a few moments streams of muddy water rushing down the ravines, through the gullies and along the slightest depressions, hurry to the low grounds, and meeting there in a foaming concourse, follow the fall of the land. A few minutes later, and the space between one hillside and the other is occupied by a deep river, flowing with terrible velocity and irresistible force. At the end of eight or ten hours the air becomes clear, the wind falls, the rain ceases, the hastily formed river dwindles, and for lack of supply is exhausted. The inundation comes to an end almost as quickly as it began. In a short time nothing remains of it but some shallow pools scattered in the hollows, or here and there small streamlets which rapidly dry up. The flood, however, accelerated by its acquired velocity, continues to descend towards the sea. The devastated flanks of the hills, their torn and corroded bases, the accumulated masses of shingle left by the eddies, the long lines of rocks and sand, mark its route and bear evidence everywhere of its power. The inhabitants, taught by experience, avoid a sojourn in places where tempests have once occurred. It is in vain that the sky is serene above them and the sun shines overhead. They always fear that at the moment in which danger seems least likely to threaten them, the torrent, taking its origin some twenty leagues off, may be on its headlong way to surprise them. And indeed, it comes so suddenly and so violently that nothing in its course can escape it. Men and beasts, before there is time to fly, often even before they are aware of its approach, are swept away impidulously destroyed. The Egyptians applied to the entire country the characteristic epithet of Toshuit, the land of emptiness, the land of aridity. They divided it into various districts, the upper and lower Tonu, Aya, Kaduma. They called its inhabitants Hiru-Shaitu, the Lords of the Sands, Nomiyu-Shaitu, the Rovers of the Sands, and they associated them with the Amu, that is to say, with a race which we recognize as Semetic. The type of these barbarians indeed reminds one of the Semetic mass of head, aquiline nose, retreating forehead, long beard, thick and not infrequently crisp hair. They went barefoot, and the monuments represent them as Gert with a short kilt, though they also wore the Abaya. Their arms were those commonly used by the Egyptians, the bow, lance, club, knife, battle axe, and shield. They possessed great flocks of goats or sheep, but the horse and camel were unknown to them, as well as to their African neighbors. They lived chiefly upon the milk of their flocks and the fruit of the date palm. A section of them tilled the soil. Settled around springs or wells they managed by industrious labor to cultivate moderately sized but fertile fields, flourishing orchards, groups of palms, fig and olive trees, and vines. In spite of all this their resources were insufficient, and their position would have been precarious if they had not been able to supplement their stock of provisions from Egypt or southern Syria. They bartered at the frontier markets their honey, wool, gums, manna, and small quantities of charcoal for the products of local manufacture, but especially for wheat, or the cereals of which they stood in need. The side of the riches gathered together in the eastern plain, from Tannis to Bubastis, excited their pillaging instincts, and awoke in them an irrepressible covetousness. The Egyptian annals make mention of their incursions at the very commencement of history, and they maintained that even the gods had to take steps to protect themselves from them. The Gulf of Suez and the mountainous rampart of Gebel Genefa in the south, and the marshes of Pelusium on the north, protected almost completely the eastern boundary of the delta. But the Wadi Tumulat laid open the heart of the country to the invaders. The pharaohs of the divine dynasties in the first place, and then those of the human dynasties, had fortified this natural opening. Some say, by a continuous wall, others by a line of military posts, flanked on the one side by the waters of the Gulf. Snowfru restored or constructed several castles in this district, which perpetuated his name for a long time after his death. These had the square or rectangular form of the towers, whose ruins are still to be seen on the banks of the Nile. Standing night and day upon the battlements, the sentinels kept a strict lookout over the desert, ready to give alarm at the slightest suspicious movement. The marauders took advantage of any inequality in the ground to approach unperceived, and they were often successful in getting through the lines. They scattered themselves over the country, surprised a village or two, bore off such women and children as they could lay their hands on, took possession of herds of animals, and without carrying their depredations further, hastened to regain their solitudes before information of their exploits could have reached the garrison. If their expeditions became numerous, the general of the eastern marshes, or the pharaoh himself, at the head of a small army, started on a campaign of reprisals against them. The marauders did not wait to be attacked, but betook themselves to refuges constructed by them beforehand at certain points in their territory. They erected here and there, on the crest of some steep hill, or at the confluence of several waddies, stone towers put together without mortar, and rounded at the top like so many beehives, in unequal groups of three, ten, or thirty. Here they masked themselves as well as they could, and defended the position with the greatest obstinacy, in the hope that their assailants, from the lack of water and provisions, would soon be forced to retreat. Elsewhere they possessed fortified doers, where not only their families but also their herds could find a refuge, circular or oval enclosures, surrounded by low walls of massive rough stones crowned by a thick rampart, made of branches of acacia interlaced with thorny bushes, the tents or huts being ranged behind, while in the center was an empty space for the cattle. These primitive fortresses were strong enough to over-on nomads. Regular troops made short work of them. The Egyptians took them by assault, overturned them, cut down the fruit trees, burned the crops, and retreated in security, after having destroyed everything in their march. Each of their campaigns, which hardly lasted more than a few days, secured the tranquillity of the frontier for some years. To the south of Gebel at T., and cut off from it almost completely by a moat of wadis, a triangular group of mountains known as Sinai thrusts a wedge-shaped spur into the Red Sea, forcing back its waters to the right and left into two narrow gulfs, that of Akaba and that of Suez. Gebel-Katarine stands up from the center and overlooks the whole peninsula. A sinuous chain detaches itself from it and ends at Gebel-Serbel, at some distance to the northwest, another trend to the south, and after attaining in Gebel-Om Shomer an elevation equal to that of Gebel-Katarine, gradually diminishes in height, and plunges into the sea at Ras-Mohammed. A complicated system of gorges and valleys, Wadi Nazba, Wadi Kid, Wadi Hebron, Wadi Baba furrows the country and holds it as in a network of unequal meshes. Wadi Fareen contains the most fertile oasis in the peninsula. A never-failing stream waters it for about two or three miles of its length. Quite a little forest of palms enlivens both banks. Somewhat meager and thin it is true, but intermingled with acacias, tamarisks, nebecas, carob trees, and willows. Birds sing amid their branches, sheep wander in the pastures, while the huts of the inhabitants peep out at intervals from among the trees. Valleys and plains, even in some places the slopes of the hills, are sparsely covered with those delicate aromatic herbs which affect a stony soil. Their life is a perpetual struggle against the sun, scorched, dried up, to all appearance dead, and so friable that they crumble to pieces in the fingers when one attempts to gather them. The spring rains annually infuse into them new life, and bestow upon them, almost before one's eyes, a green and perfumed youth of some day's duration. The summits of the hills remain always naked, and no vegetation softens the ruggedness of their outlines, or the glare of their coloring. The core of the peninsula is hewn, as it were, out of a block of granite, in which white, rose color, brown, or black predominate, according to the quantities of felsbar, quartz, or oxides of iron, which the rocks contain. Towards the north, the masses of sandstone which join on to gable a tea assume all possible shades of red and gray, from a delicate lilac-neutral tint to dark purple. The tones of color, although placed crudely side by side, represent nothing jarring nor offensive to the eye. The sun floods all and blends them in his light. The cyanatic peninsula is at intervals swept, like the desert to the east of Egypt, by terrible tempests, which denude its mountains and transform its waddies into so many ephemeral torrents. The Manitu, who frequented this region from the dawn of history, did not differ much from the lords of the sands. They were of the same type, had the same costume, the same arms, the same nomadic instincts, and, in districts where soil permitted it, made similar brief efforts to cultivate it. They worshipped a god and a goddess whom the Egyptians identified with Horus and Hathor. One of these appeared to represent the light, perhaps the sun, the other the heavens. They had discovered at an early period, in the sides of the hills, rich metalliferous veins, and strata, bearing precious stones. From these they learned to extract iron, oxides of copper and manganese, and turquoises, which they exported to the delta. The fame of their riches, carried to the banks of the Nile, excited the cupidity of the pharaohs. Expeditions started from different points of the valley, swept down upon the peninsula, and established themselves by main force in the midst of the districts where the mines lay. These were situated to the northwest, in the region of Sandstone, between the western branch of Gebel at T and the Gulf of Suez. They were collectively called Mof Qait, the country of turquoises, a fact which accounts for the application of the local epithet, Lady of Mof Qait, to Hathor. The earliest district explored, that which the Egyptians first attacked, was separated from the coast by a narrow plain and a single range of hills. The produce of the mines could be then transported to the sea in a few hours without difficulty. Those laborers called this region the district of Baifq, the mine par excellence, or of Bebit, the country of gratos, from the numerous tunnels which their predecessors had made there. The name Wadi Magara, valley of the cavern, by which the site is now designated, is simply an Arabic translation of the old Egyptian word. The monitou did not accept this usurpation of their rights without a struggle, and the Egyptians who came to work among them had either to purchase their forbearance by a tribute, or to hold themselves always in readiness to repulse the assaults of the monitou by force of arms. Those theory had already taken steps to ensure the safety of the turquoise seekers at their work. Snowfru was not, therefore, the first pharaoh who passed that way, but none of his predecessors had left so many traces of his presence as he did in this out-of-the-way corner of the empire. There may still be seen, on the northwest slope of the Wadi Magara, the Ba relief which one of his lieutenants engraved there in memory of a victory gained over the monitou. A Bedouin's shake, fallen on his knees, praised for mercy with suppliant gesture, but the pharaoh has already seized him by his long hair, and brandishes above his head a white-stone mace to fell him with a single blow. CHAPTER II The workman, partly recruited from the country itself, partly dispatched from the banks of the Nile, dwelt in an entrenched camp upon an isolated peak at the confluence of Wadi Gena and Wadi Magara. A zig-zag pathway on its smoothest slope ends, about seventeen feet below the summit, at the extremity of a small and slightly inclined table-land, upon which are found the ruins of a large village. This is the High Castle. HATE, CATE of the ancient inscriptions. Two hundred habitations can still be made out here, some round, some rectangular, constructed of sandstone blocks without mortar, and not larger than the huts of the fellahine. In former times a flat roof of wicker work and puddled clay extended over each. The entrance was not so much a door as a narrow opening, through which a fat man would find it difficult to pass. The interior consisted of a single chamber, except in the case of the chief of the works, whose dwelling contained two. A rough stone bench from two to two and a half feet high surrounds the plateau on which the village stands. A cheval de frise, made of thorny brushwood, probably completed the defense, as in the duors of the desert. The position was very strong and easily defended. Watchmen scattered over the neighboring summits kept an outlook over the distant plain and the defiles of the mountains. Whenever the cries of those sentinels announced the approach of the foe, the workmen immediately deserted the mine and took refuge in their citadel, which a handful of Resolute Men could successfully hold, as long as hunger and thirst did not enter into the question. As the ordinary springs and wells would not have been sufficient to supply the needs of the colony, they had transformed the bottom of the valley into an artificial lake. A dam thrown across it prevented the escape of the waters, which filled the reservoir more or less completely according to the season. It never became empty, and several species of shellfish flourished in it, among others a kind of large muscle which the inhabitants generally used as food, which with dates, milk, oil, coarse bread, a few vegetables, and from time to time a fowl or a joint of meat, made up their scanty fare. Other things were of the same primitive character. The tools found in the village are all a flint, knives, scrapers, saws, hammers, and heads of lances and arrows. A few vases brought from Egypt are distinguished by the fineness of the material and the purity of the design. But the pottery in common use was made on the spot from coarse clay without care and regardless of beauty. As for jewelry, the villagers had beads of glass or blue enamel and necklaces of strung calorie shells. In the mines, as in their own houses, the workmen employed stone tools only, with handles of wood or of plated willow twigs, but their chisels or hammers were more than sufficient to cut the yellow sandstone, coarse grained and very friable as it was in the midst of which they worked. The tunnels running straight into the mountain were low and wide and were supported at intervals by pillars of sandstone left in situ. These tunnels led into chambers of various sizes, whence they followed the lead of the veins of precious mineral. The turquoise sparkled on every side, on the ceiling and on the walls, and the miners, profiting by the slightest fissures, cut round it and then with forcible blows detached the blocks and reduced them to small fragments, which they crushed and carefully sifted so as not to lose a particle of the gem. The oxides of copper and of manganese which they met with here and elsewhere in moderate quantities were used in the manufacture of those beautiful blue enamels of various shades which the Egyptians esteemed so highly. The few hundreds of men of which the permanent population was composed provided for the daily exonuities of industry and commerce. Royal inspectors arrived from time to examine into their condition, to rekindle their zeal and to collect the product of their toil. When Faro had need of a greater quantity than usual of minerals or turquoises, he sent thither one of his officers, with a select body of carriers, mining experts and stone-dressers. Sometimes as many as two or three thousand men poured suddenly into the peninsula and remained there one or two months. The work went briskly forward and advantage was taken of the occasion to extract and transport to Egypt beautiful blocks of diorite, serpentine, or granite, to be afterwards manufactured there into sarcophagi or statues. Engraved stelae, to be seen on the sides of the mountains, recorded the names of the principal chiefs, the different bodies of handicraftsmen who had participated in the campaign, the name of the sovereign who had ordered it and often the year of his reign. It was not one tomb only which Snowfru had caused to be built, but two. He called him Ka, the rising, the place where the dead Faro, identified with the sun, is raised above the world forever. One of these was probably situated near Dashur. The other, the Ka-Risi, the southern rising, appears to be identical with the monument of Medem. The pyramid, like the mastaba, represents a tumulus with four sides, in which the earthwork is replaced by a structure of stone or brick. It indicates the place in which lies a prince, chief, or person of rank, in his tribe or province. It was built on a base of varying area, and was raised to a greater or less elevation according to the fortune of the deceased or of his family. The fashion of varying in a pyramid was not adopted in the environs of Memphis until tolerably late times, and the pharaohs of the primitive dynasties were interred, as their subjects were, in sepulchre chambers of mastabas. Zosiri was the only exception, if the step pyramid of Sakara, as is probable, served for his tomb. The mode of which determined Snowfer's choice of Medem as a site is unknown to us. Perhaps he dwelt in that city of Heracleopolis, which in course of time frequently became the favorite residence of the kings. Perhaps he improvised for himself a city in the plain between El-Wasta and Khafer El Ayat. His pyramid, at the present time, is composed of three large unequal cubes, with slightly inclined sides, arranged in steps one above the other. Some centuries ago five could still be determined, and in ancient times before ruin had set in as many as seven. Each block marked a progressive increase of the total mass, and had its external face polished, a fact which we can still determine by examining the slabs one behind another, a facing of large blocks, of which many of the courses still exist towards the base, covered the hole, at one angle from the apex to the foot, and brought it into conformity with the type of the classic pyramid. The passage had its orifice in the middle of the north face at about sixty feet above the ground. It is five feet high, and dips at a tolerably steep angle through the solid masonry. At a depth of a hundred and ninety-seven feet it becomes level, without increasing in aperture, runs for forty feet on this plane, traversing into two low and narrow chambers, then making a sharp turn it ascends perpendicularly until it reaches the floor of the vault. The ladder is hewn out of the mountain rock, and is small, rough, and devoid of ornament. The ceiling appears to be in three heavy horizontal courses of masonry, which predict one behind the other corbel-wise, and give the impression of a sort of acutely pointed arch. Snowfruits slept there for ages, then robbers found a way to him, despoiled and broke up his mummy, scattered the fragments of his coffin upon the ground, and carried off the stone sarcophagus. The apparatus of beams and cords of which they made use for the descent hung in their place above the mouth of the shaft until ten years ago. The rifling of the tomb took place at a remote date, for from the twentieth dynasty onwards the curious were accustomed to penetrate into the passage. Two scribes have scrawled their names in ink on the back of the framework on which the stone cover was originally inserted. The sepulcher chapel was built a little in front of the east face. It consisted of two small-sized rooms with bare surfaces, a court whose walls abutted on the pyramid, and in the court, facing the door, a massive table of offerings flanked by two large stella without inscriptions, as if the death of the king had put a stop to the decoration before the period determined on by the architects. It was still accessible to any one during the twentieth dynasty, and people came there to render homage to the memory of Snowfru or his wife Mirisonku. Visitors recorded in ink on the walls their enthusiastic but stereotyped impressions. They compared the castle of Snowfru with the firmament. When the sun arises in it, the heaven rains incense there and pours out perfumes on the roof. Romasees II, who had little respect for the works of his predecessors, demolished a part of the pyramid in order to procure cheaply the materials necessary for the buildings which he restored to Herakliophilus. His workmen threw down the stone waste and mortar beneath the place where they were working, without troubling themselves as to what might be beneath. The court became choked up, the sand borne by the wind gradually invaded the chambers, the chapel disappeared, and remained buried for more than three thousand years. The officers of Snowfru, his servants and the people of his city wished, according to custom, to arrest beside him, and thus to form a court for him in the other world as they had done in this. The menials were buried in roughly made trenches, frequently in the ground merely, without coffins or sarcophagi. The body was not laid out its whole length on its back in the attitude of repose. It more frequently rested on its left side, the head to the north, the face to the east, the legs bent, the right arm brought up against the breast, the left following the outline of the chest and legs. The people who were interred in a posture so different from that which we are familiar in the case of ordinary mummies belonged to a foreign race, who had retained in the treatment of their dead the customs of their native country. The pharaohs often peopled their royal cities with prisoners of war, captured on the field of battle, or picked up in an expedition through an enemy's country. Snowfru peopled his cities with men from Libyan tribes living on the borders of the western desert, or Manitou captives. The body having been placed in the grave, the relatives who had taken part in the mourning keep together in a neighboring whole the funiary furniture, flint implements, copper needles, miniature pots and pans made of rough and badly burnt clay, bread, dates, and eatables in dishes wrapped up in linen. The nobles ranged their mastabas in a single line to the north of the pyramid. These form fine looking masses of considerable size, but they are for the most part unfinished and empty. Snowfru, having disappeared from the scene, Keops, who succeeded him, forsook the place, and his courtiers, abandoning their unfinished tombs, went off to construct for themselves others around that of the new king. We rarely find at metham finished and occupied sepulchres except that of individuals who had died before or shortly after Snowfru. The mummy of Yennefer, found in one of them, shows how far the Egyptians had carried the art of embalming in this period. His body, though much shrunken, is well preserved. It had been clothed in some fine stuff, then covered over with a layer of resin, which a clever sculptor had modeled in such a manner as to present an image resembling the deceased. It was then rolled in three or four folds of thin and almost transparent gauze. Of these tombs, the most important belong to the prince Nofremayet and his wife Atiti. It is decorated with ball reliefs of a peculiar composition. The figures have been cut in outline on the limestone, and the hollows, thus made, are filled in with the mosaic of tinted pastes, which show the molding and color of the parts. Everywhere else the ordinary methods of sculpture have been employed, the ball reliefs being enhanced by brilliant coloring in a simple and delicate manner. The figures of men and animals are portrayed with the vivacity of manner which is astonishing, and the other objects, even the hieroglyphs, are rendered with an accuracy which does not neglect the smallest detail. The statues of Eohutpu and of the Lady Nofret, discovered in a half-ruined mastaba, have fortunately reached us without having suffered the least damage, almost without losing anything of their original freshness. They are to be seen in the Giza Museum just as they were when they left the hands of the workmen. Eohutpu was the son of a king, perhaps of Snowfru, but in spite of his high origin I find something humble and retiring in his physiognomy. Nofret, on the contrary, has an imposing appearance. An indescribable air of resolution and command invests her whole person, and the sculptor has cleverly given expression to it. She is represented in a robe with a pointed opening in the front. The shoulders, the bosom, the waist, and hips are shown under the material of the dress with a purity and delicate grace which one does not always find in more modern works of art. The wig, secured on the forehead by a richly embroidered band, frames with its somewhat heavy masses the firm and rather plump face. The eyes are living, the nostrils breathe, the mouth smiles and is about to speak. The art of Egypt has at times been as fully inspired. It has never been more so than on the day on which it produced the statue of Nofret. The Worship of Snowfru was perpetuated from century to century. After the fall of the Memphite Empire it passed through periods of intermittence, during which it ceased to be observed, or was observed only in an irregular way. It reappeared under the Ptolemies for the last time before becoming extinct forever. Snowfru was probably therefore one of the most popular kings of the good old times, but his fame, however great it may have been among the Egyptians, has been eclipsed in our eyes by that of the pharaohs who immediately followed him, Keops, Kefren, and Mycorinus. Not that we are really better acquainted with their history. All we know of them is made up of two or three series of facts, always the same, which the contemporaneous monuments teach us concerning these rulers. Kanumu Kufi, abbreviated into Kufu, the Keops of the Greeks, was probably the son of Snowfru. He ranged twenty-three years and successfully defended the minds of the Sinitic Peninsula against the Bedouin. He may still be seen on the face of the rocks in the Wadi Magara sacrificing his Asiatic prisoners, now before the Jackal Anubis, now before the Ibis-headed thought. The gods reaped advantage from his activity in riches. He restored the temple of Hathor at Dendera, embellished that of Bobastus, built a stone sanctuary to the Isis of the Sphinx, and consecrated their gold, silver, bronze, and wooden statues of Horus, Nepthus, Selchit, Ptah, Sochit, Osiris, Thot, and Hopis. Scores of other pharaohs had done as much or more on whom no one bestowed a thought century after their death, and Keops would have succumbed to the same indifference had he not forcibly attracted the continuous attention of posterity by the immensity of his tomb. The Egyptians of the Theban period were compelled to form their opinions of the pharaohs of the Memphite dynasties in the same way as we do, less by the positive evidence of their acts than by the size and number of their monuments. They measured the magnificence of Keops by the dimensions of his pyramid, and all nations, having followed this example, Keops has continued to be one of the three or four names of former times which sound familiar to our ears. The hills of Giza in his time terminated in a bare, windswept table-land. A few solitary mastabas were scattered here and there on its surface, similar to those whose ruins still crown the hill of Dashur. The Sphinx, buried even in ancient times to its shoulders, raised its head half-way down the eastern slope, at its southern angle. Beside him the temple of Osiris, Lord of the Necropolis, was fast disappearing under the sand, and still further back, old abandoned tombs honey-combed the rock. Keops chose a site for his pyramid on the northern edge of the plateau, whence a view of the city of the white wall, and at the same time of the holy city of Hythiopolis, could be obtained. A small mound which commanded this prospect was roughly squared and incorporated into the masonry. The rest of the site was leveled to receive the first course of stones. The pyramid, when completed, had a height of 476 feet on a base 764 feet square, but the decaying influence of time has reduced these dimensions to 450 and 730 feet, respectively. It possessed, up to the Arab conquest, its polished facing, colored by age, and so subtly jointed that one would have said that it was a single slab from top to bottom. The work of facing the pyramid began at the top. That of the point was first placed in position, then the courses were successfully covered until the bottom was reached. In the interior every device had been employed to conceal the exact position of the sarcophagus, and to discourage the excavators whom chance or persistent search might have put upon the right track. Their first difficulty would have been to discover the entrance under the limestone casing. It lay hidden, almost in the middle of the northern face, on the level of the eighteenth course, at about 45 feet above the ground. A movable flagstone, working on a stone pivot, disguised it so effectively that no one except the priests and the custodians could have distinguished this stone from its neighbors. When it was tilted up, a yawning passage was revealed, three and a half feet in height, with a breadth of four feet. The passage is an inclined plain, extending partly through the masonry and partly through the solid rock for a distance of 318 feet. It passes through an unfinished chamber and ends in a cul-de-sac, 59 feet further on. The blocks are so nicely adjusted, and the surface so finely polished, that the joints can be determined only with difficulty. The corridor which leads to the sepulchre chamber meets the roof at an angle of 120 degrees to the descending passage, and at a distance of 62 feet from the entrance. It ascends for 108 feet to a wide landing-place, where it divides into two branches. One of these penetrates straight towards the center and terminates in a granite chamber with a high-pitched roof. This is called, but without reason, the Chamber of the Queen. The other passage continues to ascend, but its form and appearance are altered. It now becomes a gallery 148 feet long and some 28 feet high, constructed of beautiful Makatam stone. The lower courses are placed perpendicularly one on top of the other. Each of the upper courses projects above the one beneath, and the last two, which support the ceiling, are only about one foot eight inches distant from each other. The small horizontal passage which separates the upper landing from the sarcophagus chamber itself presents features imperfectly explained. It is intersected almost in the middle by a kind of depressed hall, whose walls are channeled at equal intervals on each side by four longitudinal grooves. The first of these still supports a fine flagstone of granite, which seems to hang three feet seven inches above the ground, and the three others were probably intended to receive similar slabs. The latter is a kind of rectangular granite box, with a flat roof, 19 feet ten inches high, one foot five inches deep, and 17 feet broad. No figures or hieroglyphs are to be seen, but merely immutilated granite sarcophagus without a cover. Such were the precautions taken against man. The result witnessed to their efficacy, for the pyramid preserves its contents intact for more than four thousand years. But a more serious danger threatened them in the great weight of the materials above. In order to prevent the vault from being crushed under the burden of the hundred meters of limestone which surmounted it, they ranged above it five low chambers place exactly one above the other, in order to relieve the super incumbent stress. The highest of these was protected by a pointed roof, consisting of enormous blocks made to lean against each other at the top. This ingenious device served to transfer the perpendicular thrust almost entirely to the lateral faces of the blocks. Although an earthquake has to some extent dislocated the massive masonry, not one of the stones which encase the chamber of the king has been crushed, not one has yielded by a hare's breath since the day when the workmen fixed it in its place. Four barriers, in all, were thus interposed between the external world and the vault. The great pyramid was called Kuyt, the horizon, in which Khufu had to be swallowed up, as his father the son was engulfed every evening in the horizon of the west. It contained only the chambers of the deceased, without a word of inscription, and we should not know to whom it belonged, if the masons, during its construction, had not dobb'd here and there in red paint, among their private marks, the name of the king, and the dates of his reign. Worship was rendered to this pharaoh in a temple constructed a little in front of the eastern side of the pyramid, but of which nothing remains but a mass of ruins. Pharaoh had no need to wait until he was mummified before he became a god. Religious rites in his honor were established on his accession, and many of the individuals who made up his core attached themselves to his double, long before his double had become disembodied. They served him faithfully during their life, to oppose, finally, in his shadow, in the little pyramids and mastabas which clustered around him. Avda Dufri, his immediate successor, we can probably say that he reigned eight years, but Kefren, the next son who succeeded to the throne, erected the temples and a gigantic pyramid like his father. He placed it some three hundred and ninety-four feet to the southwest of that of Keops, and called it Iru the Great. It is, however, smaller than its neighbor, and attains a height of only four hundred and forty-three feet, but at a distance the difference in height disappears, and many travelers have thus been led to attribute the same elevation to the two. The facing, of which about one-fourth exists from the summit downwards, is of pneumolite limestone, compact, hard, and more homogenous than that of the courses, with rusty patches here and there due to masses of reddish lichen, but gray elsewhere, and with a low polish which, at a distance, reflects the sun's rays. Thick walls of unwrought stone enclose the monument on three sides, and there may be seen behind the west front, in an oblong enclosure, a row of stone sheds hastily constructed of limestone and nile mud. Here the laborers employed on the works came every evening to huddle together, and the refuse of their occupation still encumbers the ruins of their dwellings, pot-shirts, chips of various kinds of hard stone which they had been cutting, granite, alabaster, diorite, fragments of statues broken in the process of sculpture, and blocks of smooth granite ready for use. The chapel commands a view of the eastern front of the pyramid, and communicated by a paved causeway with the temple of the Sphinx, to which it must have borne a striking resemblance. The plan of it can be still clearly traced on the ground, and the rubbish cannot be disturbed without bringing to light portions of statues, vases, and tables of offerings, some of them covered with hieroglyphs, like the macehead of white stone which belonged in its day to Kefren himself. The internal arrangements of the pyramid are of the simplest character. They consist of a granite-built passage carefully concealed in the north face, running at first at an angle of twenty-five degrees, and then horizontally, until stopped by a granite barrier at a point which indicates a change of direction. A second passage, which begins on the outside, at a distance of some yards in advance of the base of the pyramid, and proceeds at a distance of some yards in advance of the base of the pyramid, and proceeds after passing through an unfinished chamber to rejoin the first. Finally, a chamber hollowed in the rock but surmounted by a pointed roof of fine limestone slabs. The sarcophagus was of granite, and like that of Kyops, bore neither the name of a king nor the representation of a god. The cover was fitted so firmly to the trough that the Arabs could not succeed in detaching it when they rifled the tomb in the year twelve hundred of our era. They were therefore compelled to break through one of the sides with a hammer before they could reach the coffin and take from it the mummy of the Pharaoh. His Pyramid, the supreme hero, barely attained an elevation of two hundred and sixteen feet, and was exceeded in height by those which were built at a later date. Up to one-fourth of its height it was faced with cyanide, and the remainder up to the summit with limestone. For lack of time, doubtless, the dressing of the granite was not completed, but the limestone received all the polish it was capable of taking. The enclosing wall was extended to the north so as to meet, and become one with that of the Second Pyramid. The temple was connected with the plain by a long and almost straight causeway which ran for the greater part of its course upon an embankment raised above the neighboring ground. This temple was in fair condition in the early years of the eighteenth century, and so much of it has escaped the ravages of the Mamluks, bears witness to the scrupulous care and refined art employed in its construction. Starting from the plain we first meet with an immense halting-place measuring one hundred feet by forty-six feet, and afterwards enter a large court with an egress on each side. Beyond this we can distinguish the ground-plan of only five chambers, the central one, which is in continuation with the hall, terminating at a distance of some forty-two feet from the pyramid, exactly opposite the middle point of the eastern face. The whole mass of the building covers a rectangular area one hundred and eighty-four feet long by a little over one hundred and seventy-seven feet broad. Its walls, like those of the temple of the Sphinx, contain a core of limestone seven feet ten inches thick, of which the blocks have been so ingeniously put together as to suggest the idea that the hole is cut out of the rock. This core was covered with a casing of granite and alabaster, of which there remains preserved no trace of hieroglyphs or of wall-scenes. The founder had caused his name to be inscribed on the statues, which received on his behalf the offerings, and also on the northern face of the pyramid, where it was still shown to the curious towards the first century of our era. The arrangement of the interior of the pyramid is somewhat complicated, and Bear's witness to changes brought unexpectedly about in the course of construction. The original central mass probably did not exceed one hundred and eighty feet in breadth at the base, with a vertical height of one hundred and fifty-four feet. It contained a sloping passage cut into the hill itself, and an oblong, low-roofed cell devoid of ornament. The main bulk of the work had been already completed, and the casing not yet begun, when it was decided to alter the proportions of the hole. My Carinos was not, it appears, the eldest son in a pointed air of Kefren, while still a mere prince he was preparing for himself a pyramid, similar to those which lie near the horizon, when the deaths of his father and brother called him to the throne. What was sufficient for him as a child was no longer suitable for him as a pharaoh. The mass of the structure was increased to its present dimensions, and a new inclined passage was affected in it, at the end of which a hall paneled with granite gave access to a kind of antechamber. The ladder communicated by a horizontal corridor with the first vault, which was deepened for the occasion. The old entrance, now no longer of use, was roughly filled up. My Carinos did not find his last resting place in this upper level of the interior of the pyramid. A narrow passage, hidden behind the slabbing of the second chamber, descended into a secret crypt, lined with granite and covered with a barrel-vaulted roof. The sarcophagus was a single block of blue-black basalt, polished and carved into the form of a house, with a façade having three doors and three openings in the form of windows. The hole framed in a rounded molding and surmounted by a projecting cornice, such as we are accustomed to see on the temples. The mummy case of cedar wood had a man's head, and was shaped to the form of the human body. It was neither painted nor gilt, but an inscription in two columns, cut on its front, contained the name of the Pharaoh, and a prayer on his behalf. Osiris, king of the two Egypts, Menchari, living eternally, given birth to by heaven, conceived by Nuit, flesh of Sibi'i. Thy mother Nuit has spread herself out over thee in her name of mystery of the heavens, and she has granted that thou shouldst be a God, and that thou shouldst repulse thine enemies, O king of the two Egypts, Menchari, living eternally. The Arabs opened the mummy to see if it contained any precious jewels, but found within it only some leaves of gold, probably a mask or pectoral covered with hieroglyphs. When vice reopened the vault in 1837, the bones lay scattered about in confusion on the dusty floor, mingled with bundles of dirty rags and wrappings of yellowish woollen cloth. The worship of the three great pyramid-building kings continued in Memphis down to the time of the Greeks and Romans. Their statues, in granite, limestone, and alabaster, were preserved also in the building's annex to the temple of Ptah, where visitors could contemplate these pharaohs as they were when alive. Those of Kefrens show us the king at different ages, when young, mature, or already in his decadence. They are in most cases cut out of abretia of green diorite, with long, irregular yellowish veins, and of such hardness that it is difficult to determine the tool with which they were worked. The pharaoh sits squarely on his royal throne, his hands on his lap, his body firm and upright, and his head thrown back with a look of self-satisfaction. A sparrow-hawk perched on the back of his seat covers his head with its wings, an image of the god Horace protecting his son. The modeling of the torso and legs of the largest of these statues, the dignity of its pose and the animation of its expression, make of it a unique work of art, which may be compared with the most perfect products of antiquity. Even if the cartouches which tell us the name of the king had been hammered away, and the insignia of his rank destroyed, we should still be able to determine the pharaoh by his bearing. His whole appearance indicates a man accustomed, from his infancy, to feel himself invested with limitless authority. Mycorino stands out less impassive and haughty. He does not appear so far removed from humanity as his predecessor, and the expression of his countenance agrees, somewhat singularly, with the account of his piety and good nature preserved by the legends. The Egyptians of the Theban dynasties, when comparing the two great pyramids with the third, imagined that the disproportion in their size corresponded with the difference of character between their royal occupants. Accustomed as they were from infancy to gigantic structures, they did not experience before the horizon and the great the feeling of wonder and awe which impresses the beholder of today. They were not the less apt on this account to estimate the amount of labor and effort required to complete them from top to bottom. This labor seemed to them to surpass the most excessive corvée which a just ruler had a right to impose upon his subjects, and the reputation of Kyops and Kefren suffered much in consequence. They were accused of sacrilege, of cruelty, and profligacy. It was urged against them that they had arrested the whole life of their people for more than a century for the erection of their tombs. Kyops began by closing the temples and by prohibiting the offering of sacrifices. He then compelled all Egyptians to work for him. To some he assigned the task of dragging the blocks from the quarries of the Arabian chain to the Nile. Once shipped the duty was incumbent on others of transporting them as far as the Libyan chain. A hundred thousand men worked at a time and were relieved every three months. The period of the people's suffering was divided as follows. Ten years in making the causeway along which the blocks were dragged, a work, in my opinion, very little less onerous than that of erecting the pyramid. For its length was five stadia, its breadth ten orgio, its greatest height eight, and it was made of cut stone and covered with figures. Ten years therefore were consumed in erecting this causeway and the subterranean chambers hollowed out in the hill. As for the pyramid itself, twenty years were employed in the making of it. There are recorded on it, in Egyptian characters, the value of the sums paid in turnips, onions, and garlic, for the laborers attached to the works. If I remember a rite, the interpreter who deciphered the inscription told me that the total amounted to sixteen hundred talons of silver. If this were the case, how much must have been expended for iron to make tools, and for provisions and clothing for the workmen? The whole resources of the royal treasure were not sufficient for such necessaries. A tradition represents key-ups as at the end of his means, and as selling his daughter to any one that offered in order to procure money. Another legend, less disrespectful to the royal dignity and to paternal authority, assures us that he repented in his old age, and that he wrote a sacred book much esteemed by the Defout. Kefren had imitated and thus shared with him the hatred of posterity. The Egyptians avoided naming these wretches. Their work was attributed to a shepherd called Philitus, who in ancient times pastured his flocks in the mountain, and even those who did not refuse to them the glory of having built the most enormous sepulchres in the world, related that they had not the satisfaction of reposing in them after their death. The people, exasperated at the tyranny to which they had been subject, swore that they would tear the bodies of these pharaohs from their tombs, and scatter their fragments to the winds. They had to be buried in crypts so securely placed that no one has succeeded in finding them. Like the two older pyramids, the Supreme had its anecdotal history, in which the Egyptians gave free reign to their imagination. We know that its plan had been rearranged in the course of building, that it contained two sepulcher chambers, two sarcophagi and two mummies. These modifications, it was said, belonged to two distinct reigns, for Mycorrinos had left his two men finished, and a woman had finished it at a later date. According to some, Nitochris, the last queen of the Sixth Dynasty, according to others, Rhodopis, the Ionian who was the mistress of Sumeticus I, or of Aeneasus. The beauty and richness of the granite casing dazzled all eyes, and induced many visitors to prefer the least of the pyramids to its two imposing sisters. Its comparatively small size is excused on the ground that its founder had returned to that moderation in Piety which ought to characterize a good king. The actions of his father were not pleasing to him. He reopened the temples and sent the people, reduced to the extreme of misery, back to their religious observances and their occupations. Finally, he administered justice more equitably than all other kings. On this head he has praised above those who have at any time reigned in Egypt. For not only did he administer good justice, but if any one complained of his decision he gratified him with some present in order to appease his wrath. There was one point, however, which excited the anxiety of many in a country where the mystic virtue of numbers was an article of faith. In order that the laws of celestial arithmetic should be observed in the construction of the pyramids, it was necessary that three of them should be of the same size. End of Section 16. Read by Professor Heatheran Bye. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section 17 of History of Egypt Volume 2 by Gaston Maspero. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Chapter 2. The Memphite Empire Part 5. The anomaly of a third pyramid out of proportion to the two others could be explained only on the hypothesis that Mycenaeiros, having broken with paternal usage, had ignorantly infringed a decree of destiny, a deed for which he was mercilessly punished. He first lost his only daughter, a short time after he learned from an oracle that he had only six more years to remain upon the earth. He enclosed the corpse of his child in a hollow wooden heifer, which he sent to Sais, where it was honored with divine worship. He then communicated his reproaches to the god, complaining that his father and uncle, after having closed the temples, forgotten the gods and oppressed mankind, had enjoyed a good life, while he, devout as he was, was so soon about to perish. The oracle answered that it was for this very reason that his days were shortened, for he had not done that which he ought to have done. Egypt had to suffer for a hundred and fifty years, and the two kings, his predecessors, had known this, while he had not. On receiving the sanser, Mycenaeiros, feeling himself condemned, manufactured a number of lamps, lit them every evening at dusk, began to drink and to leave a life of jollity, without ceasing for a moment night and day, wandering by the lakes and in the woods wherever he thought to find an occasion of pleasure. He had planned this in order to convince the oracle of having spoken falsely, and to live twelve years, the nights counting as so many days. Legend places him after Asacus, or Sassacus, a later builder of pyramids, but of a different kind. The latter preferred brick as a building material, except in one place, where he introduced a stone bearing the following inscription. Do not despise me on account of the stone pyramids. I surpass them as much as Zeus the other gods. Because a pole being plunged into a lake and the clay which stuck to it being collected, the brick out of which I was constructed was molded from it. The virtues of Asacus and Mycorinos helped to counteract the bad impression which Keops and Kefren had left behind them. Among the five legislators of Egypt, Asacus stood out as one of the best. He regulated, to minute details, their ceremonies of worship. He invented geometry in the art of observing the heavens. He put forth a law on lending, in which he authorized the borrower to pledge in forfeit the mummy of his father, while the creditor had the right of treating as his own the tomb of the debtor, so that if the debt was not met, the latter could not obtain a resting place for himself or his family, either in his paternal or any other tomb. History knows nothing either of this judicious sovereign or of many other pharaohs of the same type, which the dregomans of the Greek period assiduously enforced upon the respectful attention of travelers. It merely affirms that the example given by Keops, Kefren, and Mycorinos were by no means lost in later times. From the beginning of the fourth to the end of the fourteenth dynasty, during more than fifteen hundred years, the construction of pyramids was a common state affair, provided for by the administration secured by special services. Not only did the pharaohs build them for themselves, but the princes and princesses belonging to the family of the pharaohs constructed theirs, each one according to his resources. Three of the secondary mausoleums are ranged opposite the eastern side of the horizon, three opposite the southern face of the supreme, and everywhere else, near Abusir, at Sakara, at Dashor, or in the Fayum. The majority of the royal pyramids attracted around them a more or less numerous cortege of pyramids of princely foundation, often debased in shape and faulty in proportion. The materials for them were brought from the Arabian chain. A spur of the latter, projecting in a straight line towards the Nile, as far as the village of Troyu, is nothing but a mass of the finest and widest limestone. The Egyptians had quarries here from the earliest times. By cutting off the stone in every direction they lowered the point of this spur for a depth of some hundreds of meters. The appearance of these quarries is almost as astonishing as that of the monuments made out of their material. The extraction of the stone was carried on with a skill and regularity which denoted ages of experience. The tunnels were so made as to exhaust the finest and widest seams without waste, and the chambers were of an enormous extent. The walls were dressed, the pillars and roofs neatly finished, the passages and doorways made of a regular width, so that the whole presented more the appearance of a subterranean temple than of a place for the extraction of building materials. Hastily written graffiti in red and black ink preserved the names of workmen, overseers, and engineers who had labored here at certain dates, calculations of pay or rations, diagrams of interesting details, as well as capitals and shafts of columns which were shaped out on the spot to reduce their weight for transport. Here and there true official stela's are to be found set apart in a suitable place, recording that after a long interruption such or such an illustrious sovereign had resumed the excavations and opened fresh chambers. Alabaster was met with not far from here in the Wadi Garay. The pharaohs of very early times established a regular colony here, in the very middle of the desert, to cut the material into small blocks for transport, a strongly built dam thrown across the valley, served to store up the winter and spring rains, and formed a pond once the workers could always supply themselves with water. Keops and his successors drew their alabaster from Hat Nubu, in the neighborhood of Hermopolis, their granite from Sain, their diorite and other hard rocks, the favorite material for their sarcophagi, from the volcanic valleys which separate the Nile from the Red Sea, especially from the Wadi Hamamat. As these were the only materials of which the quantity required could not be determined in advance, and which had to be brought from a distance, every king was accustomed to send the principal persons of his court to the quarries of Upper Egypt, and the rapidity with which they brought back the stone constituted a high claim on the favor of their master. If the building was to be of brick, the bricks were made on the spot, in the plain at the foot of the hills. If it was to be a limestone structure, the neighboring parts of the plateau furnished the rough material in abundance. For the construction of chambers and for casing walls, the rose granite of Elephantine and the limestone of Troyou were commonly employed, but they were spared the labor of procuring these specially for the occasion. The city of the white wall had always at hand a supply of them in its stores, and they might be drawn upon freely for public buildings and consequently for the royal tomb. The blocks chosen from this reserve, and conveyed in boats close under the mountainside, were drawn up slightly inclined causeways by oxen to the place selected by the architect. The internal arrangements, the length of the passages and the height of the pyramids, varied much. The least of them had a height of some thirty-three feet merely. As it is difficult to determine the motives which influence the pharaohs in building them of different sizes, some riders have thought that the mass of each increased in proportion to the time bestowed upon its construction. That is to say, the length of each reign. As soon as a prince mounted the throne he would probably begin by roughly sketching out a pyramid sufficiently capacious to contain the essential elements of the tomb. He would then, from year to year, have added fresh layers to the original nucleus, until the day of his death put an end for ever to the growth of the monument. This hypothesis is not borne out by facts. Such a small pyramid as that of Sakara belonged to a pharaoh who reigned thirty years, while the horizon of Giza is the work of Kyops, whose rule lasted only twenty-three years. The plan of each pyramid was arranged once for all by the architect, according to the instructions he had received, and the resources at his command. Once set on foot, the work was continued until its completion, without addition or diminution, unless something unforeseen occurred. The pyramids, like the mastabas, ought to present their faces to the four cardinal points. But owing to unskillfulness or negligence the majority of them are not very accurately orientated, and several of them very sensibly from the true north. The great pyramid of Sakara does not describe a perfect square at its base, but is an oblong rectangle, with its longest sides east and west. It is stepped, that is to say, the six sloping-sided cubes of which it is composed are placed one upon another so as to form a series of treads and risers, the former being about two yards wide and the latter of unequal heights. The highest of the stone pyramids of Dashur makes at its lower part an angle of fifty-four degrees forty-one minutes with the horizon, but at half its height the angle becomes suddenly more acute, and is reduced to forty-two degrees fifty-nine minutes. It reminds one of a mastaba with a sort of huge attic on the top. Each of these monuments had its enclosing wall, its chapel, and its College of Priests, who performed there for ages sacred rites in honor of the deceased prince, while its property in Mortmain was administered by the chief of the priests of the double. Each one received a name, such as the Fresh, the Beautiful, the Divine in its places, which conferred upon it a personality, and as it were a living soul. These pyramids formed to the west of the white wall a long, serrated line whose extremities were lost towards the south and north in the distant horizon. Pharaoh could see them from the terraces of his palace, from the gardens of his villa, and from every point in the plain in which he might reside between Heliopolis and Medum, as a constant reminder of the lot which awaited him in spite of his divine origin. The people, awed and inspired by the number of them, and by the variety of their form and appearance, were accustomed to tell stories of them one to another, in which the supernatural played a predominant part. They were able to estimate within a few ounces the heaps of gold and silver the jewels and precious stones which adorned the royal mummies, or filled the sepulchre chambers. They were acquainted with every precaution taken by the architects to ensure the safety of all these riches from robbers, and were convinced that magic had added to such safeguards the more effective protection of talismans and genie. There was no pyramid so insignificant that it had not its mysterious protectors, associated with some amulet. In most cases with a statue, animated by the double of the founder. The Arabs of today are still well acquainted with these protectors, and possess a traditional respect for them. The great pyramid concealed a black and white image, seated on a throne and invested with the kingly scepter. He who looked upon this statue heard a terrible noise proceeding from it which almost caused his heart to stop beating, and he who heard this noise would die. An image of rose-colored granite watched over the pyramid of Kefren, standing upright, a scepter in its hand and the euros on its brow, which serpent threw himself upon him who approached it, coiled itself around his neck and killed him. A sorcerer had invested these protectors of the ancient pharaohs with their powers, but another equally potent magician could elude their vigilance, paralyze their energies, if not forever, at least for a sufficient length of time to ferret out the treasure and rifle of mummy. The cupidity of the Felaen, highly inflamed by the stories which they were accustomed to hear, gained the mastery over their terror, and emboldened them to risk their lives in these well-guarded tombs. How many pyramids had been already rifled at the beginning of the Second Theban Empire? The Fourth Dynasty had become extinct in the person of Shapsiska, the successor and probably the son of Mycorinos. The learned of the time of Ramses II regarded the family which replaced this dynasty as merely a secondary branch of the line of Snowfru, raised to power by the Capricious Laws which settled hereditary questions. Nothing on the contemporary monuments, it is true, gives indication of a violent change attended by civil war, or resulting from a revolution at court. The construction and decoration of the tombs continued without interruption and without indication of haste. The sons-in-law of Shapsiska and of Mycorinos, their daughters and grandchildren, possess under the new kings the same favor, the same property, the same privileges, which they had enjoyed previously. End of Section 17, read by Professor Heather Mby. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org.