 CHAPTER III. THE FIRST THIEVEN EMPIRE PART XII. A menom Hyatt I had abandoned thieves as a residence in favour of Herakliopolis and Memphis, and had made it over to some personage who probably belonged to the royal household. The nomay of Euseit had relapsed into the condition of a simple fife, and if we are as yet unable to establish the series of the princes, who there succeeded each other contemporaneously with the pharaohs, we at least know that all those whose names have come down to us played an important part in the history of their times. Mantun Sisu, whose stelae was engraved in the twenty-fourth year of a menom Hyatt I, and who died in the joint reign of this pharaoh and his son Euseitassan I, had taken his share in most of the wars conducted against neighbouring peoples. The Anitue of Nubia, the Manitue of Sinai, and the lords of the Sands. He had dismantled their cities and raised their fortresses. The principality retained no doubt the same boundaries which it had acquired under the first Antufs, but thieves itself grew daily larger and gained in importance in proportion as its frontiers extended southward. It had become, after the conquest of Euseitassan III, the very centre of the Egyptian world, a centre from which the power of the pharaoh could equally well extend in a northerly direction towards the Sinai Peninsula and Libya, or towards the Red Sea and the humiliated Kush in the south. The influence of its lords increased accordingly. Under Amenom Hyatt III and Amenom Hyatt IV they were perhaps the most powerful of the great vassals, and when the crown slipped from the grasp of the twelfth dynasty it fell into the hands of one of these feudatories. It is not known how the transition was brought about, which transferred the sovereignty from the elder to the younger branch of the family of Amenom Hyatt I. When Amenom Hyatt IV died, his nearest heir was a woman, his sister, Sov Kanufaruri. She retained the supreme authority for not quite four years, and then resigned her position to a certain Sov Kotpu. Was there a revolution in the palace, or a popular rising, or a civil war? Did the queen become the wife of the new sovereign, and thus bring about the change without a struggle? Sov Kotpu was probably lord of few seat, and the dynasty which he founded is given by the native historians as of Theban origin. His accession entailed no change in the Egyptian constitution. It merely consolidated the Theban supremacy and gave it a recognized position. Thebes became henceforth the head of the entire country. Thus the kings did not at once forsake Heracliopolis and the Fayum, but they made merely passing visits to these royal residences at considerable intervals, and after a few generations even these were given up. Most of these sovereigns resided and built their pyramids at Thebes, and the administration of the kingdom became centralized there. The actual capital of a king was determined not so much by the locality from once he ruled as by the place where he reposed after death. This was the virtual capital of Egypt from the moment that its masters fixed on it as their burying place. Uncertainty again shrouds the history of the country after Sov Kotpu the first. Not that monuments are lacking or the names of kings, but the records of the many Sov Kotpus and Norhotpus found in a dozen places in the valley furnish as yet no authentic means of ascertaining in what order to classify them. The Thirteenth Dynasty contained, so it is said, sixty kings, who reigned for a period of over four hundred and fifty-three years. The succession did not always take place in the direct line from father to son. Several times, when interrupted by default of male heirs, it was renewed without any disturbance, thanks to the transmission of royal rites to their children by princesses, even when their husbands did not belong to the reigning family. Monthotpu, the father of Sov Kotpu the Third, was an ordinary priest, and his name is constantly quoted by his son, but solar blood flowed in the veins of his mother and procured for him the crown. The father of his successor, Nofair Hotpu II, did not belong to the reigning branch, or was only distantly connected with it, but his mother Kameit was the daughter of Pharaoh, and that was sufficient to make her son of royal rank. With careful investigation we should probably find traces of several revolutions which changed the legitimate order of secession without, however, entailing a change of dynasty. The Nofair Hotpu's and Sov Kotpu's continued, both at home and abroad, the work so ably begun by the Amenem Hyats and the Yuzurtassans. They devoted all their efforts to beautifying the principal towns of Egypt, and caused important works to be carried on in most of them, at Karnak, in the Great Temple of Amen, at Luxor, at Bubastus, at Tannas, at Tel Maktam, and in the Sanctuary of Abidos. At the latter place, Koso Shuri Nofair Hotpu restored to contimentate considerable possessions which the God had lost. Nozeri sent Hither one of his officers to restore the edifice built by Yuzurtassan I. Sov Khoom Sov II dedicated his own statue in this temple, and private individuals, following the example set them by their sovereigns, vied with each other in their gifts of votive stelae. The pyramids of this period were of moderate size, and those princes who abandoned the custom of building them were content, like Atabrihoru with a modest tomb, close to the gigantic pyramids of their ancestors. In style the statues of this epoch show a certain inferiority when compared with the beautiful work of the Twelfth Dynasty. The proportions of the human figures are not so good. The modeling of the limbs is not so vigorous. The rendering of the features lacks individuality. The sculptors exhibited tendency, which had been growing since the time of the Yuzurtassans, to represent all their sitters with the same smiling, commonplace type of countenance. There are, however, among the statues of kings and private individuals which have come down to us, a few examples of really fine treatment. The colossal statue of Sofkotpu IV, which is now in the Louvre side by side with an ordinary sized figure of the same pharaoh, must have had a good effect when placed at the entrance to the temple at Tannus. His chest is thrown well forward, his head is erect, and we feel impressed by that noble dignity which the Memphite sculptors knew how to give to the bearing and features of the diorite kephron enthroned at Giza. The sitting Mirmashau of Tannus lacks neither energy nor majesty, and the Sovkum Sof of Abidos, in spite of the roughness of its execution, decidedly holds its own among the other pharaohs. The statuettes found in the tombs and the smaller objects discovered in the ruins are neither less carefully nor less successfully treated. The little scribe at Giza, in the attitude of walking, is a chef dove of delicacy and grace, and might be attributed to one of the best schools of the Twelfth Dynasty, did not the inscriptions oblige us to relegate it to the Theban art of the Thirteenth. The heavy and commonplace figure of the magnet now in the Vienna Museum is treated with a rather coarse realism, but exhibits nevertheless most skillful tooling. It is not exclusively at Thebes or at Tannus or in any of the other great cities of Egypt that we meet with excellent examples of work, or that we can prove that flourishing schools of sculpture existed at this period. Probably there is scarcely any small town which would not furnish us at the present day if careful excavation were carried out, with some monument or object worthy of being placed in a museum. During the Thirteenth Dynasty both art and everything else in Egypt were fairly prosperous. Everything attained a very high standard, but on the other hand nothing fell below a certain level of respectable mediocrity. Wealth exercised, however, an injurious influence upon artistic taste. The funerary statue, for instance, which Atabri Horu ordered for himself was of Ebene, and seems to have been inlaid originally with gold, whereas Kyops and Kefren were content to have theirs of alabaster and diorite. During this dynasty we hear nothing of the inhabitants of the Sionidic Peninsula to the east or of the Libyans to the west. It was in the south, in Ethiopia, that the pharaohs expended all their surplus energy. The most important of them, Sofkatpu I, had continued to register the height of the Nile on the rocks of Semna, but after his time we are unable to say where the Nile-meter was moved to, nor indeed who displaced it. The middle basin of the river as far as Gebel-Barkal was soon incorporated with Egypt, and the population became quickly assimilated. The colonization of the larger islands of Say and Argo took place first, as their isolation protected them from sudden attacks. Certain princes of the Thirteenth Dynasty built temples there, and erected their statues within them, just as they would have done in any of the most peaceful districts of the Syed or the Delta. Argo is still at the present day one of the largest of these Nubian islands. It is said to be twelve miles in length and about two-and-a-half in width towards the middle. It is partly wooded, and vegetation grows there with tropical luxuriance. Creeping plants climb from tree to tree, and form an almost impenetrable undergrowth, which swarms with game secure from the sportsmen. A score of villages are dotted about in the clearings, and are surrounded by carefully cultivated fields, in which Dura predominates. An unknown pharaoh of the Thirteenth Dynasty built, near to the principal village, a temple of considerable size. It covered an area whose limits may still easily be traced, of one hundred and seventy-four feet wide, by two hundred and ninety-two long from east to west. The main body of the building was of sandstone, probably brought from the quarries of Tombos. It has been pitilessly destroyed piece mail by the inhabitants, and only a few insignificant fragments, on which some lines of hieroglyphs may still be deciphered, remain in situ. A small statue of black granite of good workmanship is still standing in the midst of the ruins. It represents Sulf-Khat-Pu, the third sitting, with his hands resting on his knees. The head, which has been mutilated, lies beside the body. The same king erected colossal statues of himself at Tannus, Bubastus, and at Thebes. He was undisputed master of the whole Nile Valley, from near the spot where the river receives its last tributary, to where it empties itself into the sea. The making of Egypt was finally accomplished in his time, and if all its component parts were not as yet equally prosperous, the bond which connected them was strong enough to resist any attempt to break it, whether by civil discord within or invasion from without. The country was not free from revolutions, and if we have no authority for stating that they were the cause of the downfall of the Thirteenth Dynasty, the list of Menetho at least show that after that event the center of Egyptian power was again shifted. Thebes lost its supremacy, and the preponderating influence was passed into the hands of sovereigns who were natives of the Delta. Zeus, situated in the midst of the marshes, between the fatnitic and sevenitic branches of the Nile, was one of those very ancient cities which had played but an insignificant part in shaping the destinies of the country. By what combination of circumstances its princes succeeded in raising themselves to the throne of the pharaohs we know not. They numbered, so it was said, seventy-five kings, who reigned four hundred and eighty-four years, and whose mutilated names darken the pages of the Turin papyrus. The majority of them did little more than appear upon the throne, some reigning three years, others two, others a year, or scarcely more than a few months. Far from being a regularly constituted line of sovereigns, they appear rather to have been a series of pretenders, mutually jealous of and opposing one another. The feudal lords who had been so powerful under the usurtasins had lost none of their prestige under the soft katpus, and the rivalries of usurpers of this kind who seized the crown without being strong enough to keep it, may perhaps explain the long sequence of shadowy pharaohs with curtailed reigns who constitute the fourteenth dynasty. They did not withdraw from Nubia, of that fact we are certain, but what did they achieve in the north and northeast of the empire? The nomad tribes were showing signs of rustlessness on the frontier. The peoples of the Tigris and Euphrates were already pushing the vanguards of their armies into central Syria. While Egypt had been bringing the valley of the Nile and the eastern corner of Africa into subjection, Caldia had imposed both her language and her laws upon the whole of that part of western Asia, which separated her from Egypt. The time was approaching when these two great civilized powers of the ancient world would meet each other face to face and come into fierce collision. End of Section 36, read by Professor Heather Mby in Carrollton, Georgia, in 2009. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibreVox.org.