 CHAPTER III. The final overthrow of the Heraklia-Politan dynasty, and the union of the two kingdoms under the rule of the Theban House, are supposed to have been the work of that Montththapu, whose throne name was Nib-Krory. His, at any rate, was the name which the Egyptians of Ramasside times inscribed in the royal lists as that of the founder and most illustrious representative of the Eleventh Dynasty. The monuments commemorate his victories over the U-A-I-U and the barbarous inhabitants of Nubia. Even after he had conquered the Delta he still continued to reside in Thebes, where he built his Pyramid, and where divine honors were paid to him from the day after his decease. A scene carved on the rocks north of Silsila represents him as standing before his son Antouf. He is of gigantic stature, and one of his wives stands beside him. Three or four kings followed him in rapid succession, the least insignificant among them appearing to have been Amantatpe Nibtoriri. Nothing but the Prenomen, Sankiri, is known of the last of these latter princes, who was also the only one of them ever entered on the official lists. In their hands the sovereignty remained unchanged from what it had been almost uninterruptedly since the end of the Sixth Dynasty. They solemnly proclaimed their supremacy, and their names were inscribed at the head of public documents, but their power scarcely extended beyond the limits of their family domain, and the feudal chiefs never concerned themselves about the sovereign except when he evinced the power or will to oppose them, allowing him the mere semblance of supremacy over the greater part of Egypt. Such a state of affairs could only be reformed by revolution. Aminem Hayat I, the leader of the new dynasty, was of the Theban race. Whether he had any claim to the throne, or by what means he had secured the stability of his rule, we do not know. Whether he had usurped the crown or whether he had inherited it legitimately, he showed himself worthy of the rank to which fortune had raised him, and the nobility saw in him a new incarnation of that type of kingship long known to them by tradition only, namely, that of a pharaoh convinced of his own divinity and determined to assert it. He inspected the valley from one end to another, principality by principality, nome by nome, crushing crime and a rising like Tumu himself, restoring that which he found in ruins, settling the bounds of the towns, and establishing for each its frontiers. The civil wars had disorganized everything. No one knew what ground belonged to the different nomes, what taxes were due from them, nor how questions of irrigation could be equitably decided. Aminem and Hayat set up the boundary stele and restored its dependencies to each nome. He divided the waters among them according to that which was in the cadastral surveys of former times. Hostile nobles, or those whose allegiance was doubtful, lost the whole or part of their fives. Those who had welcomed the new order of kings nobles received accessions of territory as the reward of their zeal and devotion. Depositions and substitutions of princes had begun already in the time of the Eleventh Dynasty. Antuph the Fifth, for instance, finding the Lord of Coptos too lukewarm, had had him removed and promptly replaced. The fife of Seyut accrued to a branch of the family which was less warlike, and above all less devoted to the old dynasty than that of Kiti had been. Part of the nome of the gazelle was added to the dominions of Nuri, Prince of the Heir nome, the eastern part of the same nome, with Monayet Kufu'i, as capital, was granted to his father-in-law, Kanom Hopu I. Expeditions against the U'au'ayu, the Ma'zai'u, and the nomads of Libya and Arabia delivered the Felaheen from their ruinous raids, and ensured to the Egyptians safety from foreign attack. Menom Hyat had, moreover, the wit to recognize that Thebes was not the most suitable place of residence for the Lord of all Egypt. It lay too far to the south, was thinly populated, ill-built, without monuments, without prestige, and almost without history. He gave it into the hands of one of his relations to govern in his name, and proceeded to establish himself in the heart of the country, in imitation of the glorious pharaohs from whom he claimed to be descended. But the ancient royal cities of Qiyops and his children had ceased to exist. Memphis, like Thebes, was now a provincial town, and its associations were with the Sixth and Eighth dynasties only. Anem and Hyat took up his abode a little to the south of Dashur, in the palace of Titawi, which he enlarged and made the seat of his government. Conscious of being in the hands of a strong ruler, Egypt breathed freely after centuries of distress, and her sovereign might in all sincerity congratulate himself on having restored peace to his country. I caused the mourner to mourn no longer, and his lamentation was no longer heard. Perpetual fighting was no longer witnessed, while before my coming they fought together as bulls unmindful of yesterday. And no man's welfare was assured whether he was ignorant or learned. I tilled the land as far as elephantine. I spread joy throughout the country, into the marshes of the Delta. At my prayer the Nile granted the inundation to the fields. No man was unhungered under me. No man was a thirst under me. For everywhere men acted according to my commands, and all that I said was a fresh cause of love. In the court of Amenem Hyat, as about all Oriental sovereigns, there were doubtless men whose vanity or interests suffered by this revival of royal authority. Men who had found it to their profit to intervene between Pharaoh and his subjects, and who were thwarted in their intrigues or exactions by the presence of a prince determined on keeping the government in his own hands. These men devised plots against the new king, and he escaped with difficulty from their conspiracies. It was after the evening meal, as night came on, I gave myself up to pleasure for a time. Then I lay down upon the soft coverlets in my palace. I abandoned myself to repose, and my heart began to be overtaken by slumber when, lo, they gathered together in arms to revolt against me, and I became weak as a serpent of the field. Then I aroused myself to fight with my own hands, and I found that I had but to strike the unresisting. When I took a foe, weapon in hand, I made the wretch to turn and flee, strength for Sukhim even in the night. There were none who contended, and nothing vexatious was affected against me. The conspirators were disconcerted by the promptness with which Amenem Hyet had attacked them, and apparently the rebellion was suppressed on the same night in which it broke out. But the king was growing old, his son Usartesan was very young, and the nobles were besturing themselves in prospect of a secession which they supposed to be at hand. The best means of putting a stop to their evil devices and of ensuring the future of the dynasty was for the king to appoint the heir presumptive, and at once associate him with himself in the exercise of his sovereignty. In the twentieth year of his reign, Amenem Hyet solemnly conferred the titles and prerogatives of royalty upon his son Usartesan. I raised thee from the rank of a subject. I granted thee the free use of thy arm that thou mightest be feared. As for me I apperelled myself in the fine stuffs of my palace until I appeared to the eye as the flowers of my garden, and I perfumed myself with essences as freely as I pour forth the water from my cisterns. Usartesan naturally assumed the act of duties of royalty as his share. He is a hero who wrought with the sword, a mighty man of valor without peer. He beholds the barbarians, he rushes forward and falls upon their predatory hordes. He is the hurler of javelins who makes feeble the hands of the foe, those whom he strikes never more lift the lance. Terrible is he, shattering skulls with the blows of his warmace, and none resisted him in his time. He is a swift runner who smiths the fugitive with the sword, but none who run after him can overtake him. He is a heart alert for battle in his time. He is a lion who strikes with his claws, nor ever lets go his weapon. He is a heart girded in armor at the side of the hosts, and who leaves nothing standing behind him. He is a valiant man rushing forward when he beholds the fight. He is a soldier rejoicing to fall upon the barbarians. He seizes his buckler. He leaps forward and kills without a second blow. None may escape his arrow, before he bends his bow the barbarians flee from his arms like dogs, for the great goddess has charged him to fight against all who know not her name, and whom he strikes he spare not. He leaves nothing alive. The old pharaoh remained in the palace, waiting until his son returned to announce the success of his enterprises, and contributing by his counsel to the prosperity of their common empire. Such was the reputation for wisdom which he thus acquired, that a writer who was almost his contemporary composed a treatise in his name, and in it the king was supposed to address posthumous instructions to his son on the art of governing. He appeared to his son in a dream and thus admonished him. Harken unto my words, thou art king over the two worlds, prince over the three regions. Act still better than did thy predecessors. Let there be harmony between thy subjects and thee, lest they give themselves up to fear. Keep not thy self apart in the midst of them. Make not thy brother solely from the rich and noble. Fill not thy heart with them alone. Yet neither do thou admit to thy intimacy chants comers whose place is unknown. The king confirmed his counsels by examples taken from his own life, and from those we have learned some facts in his history. The little work was widely disseminated and soon became a classic. In the time of the nineteenth dynasty it was still copied in schools and studied by young scribes as an exercise in style. Eustertassan's share in the sovereignty had so accustomed the Egyptians to consider this prince as the king de facto that they had gradually come to write his name alone upon the monuments. When Amenem Hayat died, after a reign of thirty years, Eustertassan was engaged in a war against the Libyans. Dreading an outbreak of popular feeling, or perhaps an attempted usurpation by one of the princes of the blood, the high officers of the crown kept Amenem Hayat's death secret, and dispatched a messenger to the camps to recall the young king. He left his tent by night, unknown to the troops, returned to the capital before anything had transpired among the people, and thus the transition from the founder to his immediate successor, always a delicate crisis for a new dynasty, seemed to come about quite naturally. The precedent of co-regency, having been established, it was scrupulously followed by most of the succeeding sovereigns. In the thirteenth year of his sovereignty, and after having reigned alone for thirty-two years, Eustertassan I shared his throne with Amenem Hayat II, and thirty-two years later Amenem Hayat II acted in a similar way with regard to Eustertassan II. Amenem Hayat III and Amenem Hayat IV were long co-regnant. The only princes of this house, in whose cases any evidence of co-regency is lacking, are Eustertassan III and the queen Snavknav Furi, with whom the dynasty died out. It lasted two hundred and thirteen years, one month, and twenty-seven days, and its history can be ascertained with greater certainty and completeness than that of any other dynasty which ruled over Egypt. CHAPTER III. THE FIRST THEBAN EMPIRE PART IV We are doubtless far from having any adequate idea of its great achievements, for the biographies of its eight sovereigns and the details of their interminable wars are very imperfectly known to us. The development of its foreign and domestic policy we can, however, go without a break. Asia had as little attraction for these kings as for their memphite predecessors, and they seemed to have always had certain dread of its warlike races, and to have merely contented themselves with repelling their attacks. Amenem Hayat I had completed the line of fortresses across the Isthmus, and these were carefully maintained by his successors. The pharaohs were not ambitious of holding direct sway over the tribes of the desert, and scrupulously avoided interfering with their affairs as long as the lords of the sands agreed to respect the Egyptian frontier. Commercial relations were nonetheless frequent and certain on this account. Dwellers by the streams of the delta were accustomed to see the continuous arrival in their towns of isolated individuals, or of whole vans driven from their homes by want or revolution, and begging for refuge under the shadow of pharaoh's throne, and of caravans offering the rarest products of the north and of the east for sale. A celebrated scene in one of the tombs of Benihassan illustrates what usually took place. We do not know what drove the thirty-seven Asiatics, men, women, and children, to cross the Red Sea and the Arabian desert and hills in the sixth year of Yusuf Tassan II. They had, however, suddenly appeared in the Ghazal Nome, and were there received by Qiti, the superintendent of the Huntsman, who, as his duty was, brought them before the prince, Kanom Hotpu. The foreigners presented the prince with green eye paint, and tmoni powder, and two live Ibexes, to conciliate his favour, while he, to preserve the memory of their visit, had them represented in painting upon the walls of his tomb. The Asiatics carry bows and arrows, javelins, axes, and clubs like the Egyptians, and wear long garments or close-fitting loincloths skirted on the thigh. One of them plays, as he goes, on an instrument whose appearance recalls that of the Old Greek Lear. The shape of their arms, the magnificence and good taste of the fringed and patterned stuffs which they are clothed, and the elegance of most of the objects which they have brought with them, testify to a high standard of civilization, equal at least to that of Egypt. Asia had for some time provided the pharaohs with slaves, and perfumes, cedar wood and cedar essences, enameled vases, precious stones, lapis lazuli, and the dyed and embroidered woolen fabrics of which Kaldia kept the monopoly until the time of the Romans. Merchants of the Delta braved the perils of wild beasts and of robbers lurking in every valley, while transporting beyond the isthmus products of Egyptian manufacture, such as fine linens, chased or cloisonnay jewelry, glazed pottery, and glass paste or metal amulets. Adventurous spirits who found life dull on the banks of the Nile, men who had committed crimes or who believed themselves suspected by their lords on political grounds, conspirators, deserters, and exiles, were well received by the Asiatic tribes, and sometimes gained the favor of the shakes. In the time of the Twelfth Dynasty, southern Syria, the country of the lords of the Sands, and the kingdom of Kaduma were full of Egyptians whose eventful career supplied the scribes and storytellers with the themes of many romances. Sinuheet, the hero of one of these stories, was a son of Aminam Hyatt I, and had the misfortune to involuntarily overhear a state secret. He happened to be near the royal tent when news of his father's sudden death was brought to Yusuf Tassan. Fearing summary execution, he fled across the Delta north of Memphis, greeted the frontier posts, and struck into the desert. I pursued my way by night. At dawn I had reached Pateni, and set out for the lake of Komori. Then thirst fell upon me, and the death-rattle was in my throat. My throat cleaved together, and I said, It is the taste of death. When suddenly I lifted up my heart and gathered my strength together, I heard the lowing of the herds. I perceived some Asiatics. Their chief who had been in Egypt knew me. He gave me water, and caused milk to be boiled for me, and I went with him and joined his tribe. But still Sinuheet did not feel himself in safety, and fled into Kaduma, to a prince who had provided an asylum for other Egyptian exiles, and where he could hear men still speak the language of Egypt. Here he soon gained honors and fortune. The chief preferred me before his children, giving me his eldest daughter in marriage, and he granted me that I should choose for myself the best of his land near the frontier of a neighbouring country. It is an excellent land. Aya is its name. Figs are there and grapes. Wine is more plentiful than water. Honey abounds in it. Numerous are its olives and all the produce of its trees. There are corn and flour without end, and cattle of all kinds. Great indeed was that which was bestowed upon me when the prince came to invest me, installing me as a prince of a tribe in the best of his land. I had daily rations of bread and wine, day by day, cooked meat and roasted fowl, besides the mountain game which I took, or which was placed before me in addition to that which was brought me by my hunting dogs. Much butter was made for me, and milk prepared in every kind of way. There I passed many years, and the children which were born to me became strong men, each ruling his own tribe. When a messenger was going to the interior or returning from it, he turned aside from his way to come to me, for I did kindness to all. I gave water to the thirsty. I set again upon his way the traveller who had been stopped on it. I chastised the brigand. The Pitei-Tui, who went on distant campaigns to fight and repel the princes of foreign lands, I commanded them and they marched forth, for the prince of Tanu made me general of his soldiers for long years. When I went forth to war, all countries towards which I set out trembled in their pastures by their wells. I seized their cattle, I took away their vassals and carried off their slaves. I slew the inhabitants. The land was at the mercy of my sword, of my bow, of my marches, of my well-conceived plans glorious to the heart of my prince. Thus when he knew my valor, he loved me, making me chief among his children when he saw the strength of my arms. A valiant man of Tanu came to defy me in my tent. He was a hero beside whom there was none other, for he had overthrown all his adversaries. He said, Let Sinuheed fight with me, for he has not yet conquered me. And he thought to seize my cattle and their width to enrich his tribe. The prince talked of the matter with me. I said, I know him not. Verily I am not his brother. I keep myself far from his dwelling. Have I ever opened his door or crossed his enclosures? Doubtless he is some jealous fellow envious at seeing me, and who believes himself fated to rob me of my cats, my goats, my kind, and to fall on my bulls, my rams, and my oxen to take them. If he has indeed the courage to fight, let him declare the intention of his heart. Shall the God forget him whom he has here to forefavoured? This man who has challenged me to fight is as one of those who lie upon the funeral couch. I bent my bow. I took out my arrows. I loosened my poignard. I furbished my arms. At dawn all the land of Tanu ran forth, its tribes were gathered together, and all the foreign lands which were its dependencies, for they were impatient to see this duel. Each heart was on live coals because of me. Men and women cried, ah, for every heart was disquieted for my sake, and they said, Is there indeed any valiant man who will stand up against him? Lo, the enemy has buckler, battle-axe, and an armful of javelins. When he had come forth and I appeared, I turned aside his shafts from me. When not one of them touched me, he fell upon me, and I drew my bow against him. When my arrow pierced his neck, he cried out and fell to the earth upon his nose. I snatched his lance from him. I shouted my cry of victory upon his back. While the country people rejoiced, I made his vassals whom he had oppressed to give thanks to Mantu. This prince, Amienshi, bestowed upon me all the possessions of the vanquished, and I took away his goods. I carried off his cattle. All that he had desired to do unto me, that did I unto him. I took possession of all that was in his tent. I despoiled his dwelling. Therewith was the abundance of my treasure in the number of my cattle increased. In later times, in Arab romances such as that of Antar or that of Abu Zayt, we find the incident and customs described in this Egyptian tale. There we have the exile arriving at the court of a great shake, whose daughter he ultimately marries, the challenge, the fight, and the raids of one people against another. Even in our own day things go on in much the same way. Seen from afar, these adventures have an air of poetry, and of grandeur which fascinates the reader, and in imagination transports him into a world more heroic and more noble than our own. He who cares to preserve this impression would do well not to look too closely at the men and manners of the desert. Certainly the hero is brave, but he is still more brutal and treacherous. Fighting is one object of his existence, but pillage is a far more important one. How indeed should it be otherwise? The soil is poor, life hard and precarious, and from remotest antiquity the conditions of that life have remained unchanged. Apart from firearms and Islam, the better one of today are the same as the better one of the days of Sinuheet. There are no known documents from which we can derive any certain information as to what became of the mining colonies in Sinai after the reign of Papi II. Unless entirely abandoned, they must have lingered on in comparative idleness, for the last of the Memphites, the Heracleopolitans, and the early Thebans were compelled to neglect them, nor was their active life resumed until the accession of the Twelfth Dynasty. The veins in the Wadi Maghara were much exhausted, but a series of fortunate explorations revealed the existence of untouched deposits in the Sarbut El-Kadim, north of the original workings. From the time of Amenem Hayat II these new veins were worked, and absorbed attention during several generations. Expeditions to the mines were sent out every three or four years, sometimes annually, under the command of such high functionaries as acquaintances of the king, chief lectors, and captains of the archers. As each mine was rapidly worked out, the delegates of the pharaohs were obliged to find new veins in order to meet industrial demands. The task was often arduous, and the commissioners generally took care to inform posterity very fully as to the anxieties which they had felt, the pains which they had taken, and the quantities of turquoise or of oxide of copper which they had brought into Egypt. Thus the captain, Herorus, tells us that, on arriving at Sarbut in the month Fa Menath of an unknown year of Amenem Hayat III, he made a bad beginning in his work of exploration. We are eat of fruitless efforts, the workmen were quite ready to desert him if he had not put a good face on the business, and stoutly promised them support of the local Hathor. And as a matter of fact, fortune did change. When he began to despair, the desert burned like summer, the mountain was on fire, and the vein exhausted. One morning the overseer who was there questioned the miners, the skilled workers who were used to the mine, and they said, There is turquoise for eternity in the mountain. At that very moment the vein appeared. And indeed, the wealth of the deposit which he found so completely indemnified Herorus for his first disappointments, that in the month Pachans, three months after the opening of these workings, he had finished his task and prepared to leave the country, carrying his spoils with him. From time to time Pharaoh sent convoys of cattle and provisions, corn, sixteen oxen, thirty geese, fresh vegetables, live poultry, to his vassals at the mines. CHAPTER III. THE FIRST THEMEN EMPIRE PART V. THE MINDING POPULATION INCREASED SO FAST THAT TWO CHAPELS WERE BUILT, DEDICATED TO HATHOR, AND SERVED BY VOLUNTEER PREISTS. One of these chapels, presumably the oldest, consists of a single rock-cut chamber, upheld by one large square pillar, walls and pillar having been covered with finely sculptured scenes and inscriptions which are now almost effaced. The second chapel included a beautifully proportioned rectangular court, once entered by a portico supported on pillars with hathor-headed capitals, and beyond the court a narrow building divided into many small irregular chambers. The edifice was altered and rebuilt and half destroyed. It is now nothing but a confused heap of ruins of which the original plan cannot be traced. Votive stela of all shapes and sizes, in granite, sandstone, or limestone, were erected here and there at random in the two chambers and in the courts between the columns, and flush with the walls. Some are still in situ, others lie scattered in the midst of the ruins. Towards the middle of the reign of Amenem Haid III, the industrial demand for turquoise and for copper ore became so great that the mines of Saarbrud El-Kadim could no longer meet it, and those in the Wadi Maghara were reopened. The workings of both sets of mines were carried on with unabated vigor under Amenem Haid IV, and were still in full activity when the Thirteenth Dynasty succeeded the Twelfth on the Egyptian throne. Tranquility prevailed in the recesses of the mountains of Sinai as well as in the valley of the Nile, and a small garrison suffice to keep watch over the Bedouin of the neighborhood. Sometimes the latter ventured to attack the miners, and then fled in haste, carrying off their meager booty. But they were vigorously pursued under the command of one of the officers on the spot, and generally caught and compelled to disgorge their plunder before they had reached the shelter of their doers. The old menfight kings prided themselves on these armed pursuits as though they were real victories, and had them recorded in triumphal Ba reliefs. But under the Twelfth Dynasty they were treated as unimportant frontier incidents, almost beneath the notice of the Pharaoh, and the glory of them, such as it was, he left to his captains then in command of those districts. Egypt had always kept up extensive commercial relations with certain northern countries lying beyond the Mediterranean. The reputation for wealth enjoyed by the Delta sometimes attracted bands of the High Nibbou to come prowling in piratical excursions along its shores, but their expeditions seldom turned out successfully, and even if the adventurers escaped summary execution they generally ended their days as slaves in the Fayoum, or in some village of the Said. At first their descendants preserved the customs, religion, manners, and industries of their distant home, and went on making rough pottery for daily use, which was decorated in a style we're calling that of vases found in the most ancient tombs of the Aegean archipelago, but they were gradually assimilated to their surroundings, and their grandchildren became Felaen like the rest, brought up from infancy in the customs and language of Egypt. The relations with the tribes of the Libyan desert, the T'Hunu and the Timihu, were almost invariably peaceful, although occasional raids of one of their bands into Egyptian territory would provoke counter raids into the valleys in which they took refuge with their flocks and herds. Thus in addition to the captive High Nibbou, another heterogeneous element, soon to be lost in the mass of the Egyptian population, was supplied by detachments of Berber women and children. The relations of Egypt with her northern neighbors during the hundred years of the Twelfth Dynasty were chiefly commercial, but occasionally this peaceful intercourse was broken by sudden incursions or piratical expeditions which called for active measures of repression and were the occasion of certain romantic episodes. The foreign policy of the pharaohs in this connection was to remain strictly on the defensive. Ethiopia attracted all their attention and demanded all their strength. The same instinct which had impelled their predecessors to pass successively beyond Gebel Silsila and Elephantine now drove the Twelfth Dynasty beyond the Second Cataract and even further. The nature of the valley compelled them to this course. From the Takaze, or rather from the confluence of the two Niles down to the sea, the whole valley forms as it were a greater Egypt. For although separated by the cataracts into different divisions, it is everywhere subject to the same physical conditions. In the course of centuries it has been more than once forcibly dismembered by the chances of war, but its various parts have always tended to reunite and have coalesced at the first opportunity. The Amami, the Erit, and the Situi, all those nations which wandered west of the river, and whom the pharaohs of the Sixth and subsequently of the Eleventh Dynasty, either enlisted into their service or else conquered, do not seem to have given much trouble to the successors of Amenem Hai at the first. The U'au'ai'u and the Ma'zai'u were more turbulent, and it was necessary to subdue them in order to assure the tranquility of the colonists scattered along the banks of the river from Philo to Khorosko. They were worsted by Amenem Hai at the first in several encounters. Bucertas in the first made repeated campaigns against them, the earlier ones being undertaken in his father's lifetime. Afterwards he pressed on, and straightway raised his frontiers at the rapids of Wadi Halfa, and the country was henceforth the undisputed property of his successors. It was divided into nomes like Egypt itself. The Egyptian language succeeded in driving out the native dialects, and the local deities, including D'dun, the principal god, were associated or assimilated with the gods of Egypt. Kanumu was the favorite deity of the northern nomes, doubtless because the first colonists were natives of Elephantine, and subjects of its princes. In the southern nomes, which had been annexed under the Theban kings and were populated with Theban immigrants, the worship of Kanumu was carried on side by side with the worship of Amen, or Amenra, god of Thebes. In accordance with local affinities, now no longer intelligible, the other gods were also assigned smaller areas in the new territory, thought at Peselchus and Pnubsit, where a gigantic knob-tree was worshipped. Ra, near Der, and Horus, at Mayama and Baoka. The pharaohs who had civilized the country here received divine honors while still alive. Ussertas and the Third was placed in triads along with D'dun, Amen, and Kanumu. Temples were raised to him at Semna, Shataui, and Doshka, and the anniversary of a decisive victory which he had gained over the barbarians was still celebrated on the 21st of Puckins, a thousand years afterwards, under Tutmosis the Third. The feudal system spread over the land lying between the two Keteraks, where hereditary barons held their courts, trained their armies, built their castles, and excavated their superbly decorated tombs in the mountainsides. The only difference between Nubian Egypt and Egypt proper lay in the greater heat and smaller wealth of the former, where the narrower, less fertile, and less well-watered land supported a smaller population and yielded less abundant revenues. The pharaoh kept the charge of the more important strategical points in his own hands. Strongholds placed at bends of the river and at the mouths of over-venes leading into the desert secured freedom of navigation and kept off the pillaging nomads. The fortress of Der, which was often rebuilt, dates in part at least from the early days of the conquest of Nubia. Its rectangular boundary, a dry brick wall, is only broken by easily filled-up gaps, and with some repairs it would still resist an Ababda attack. The most considerable Nubian works of the Twelfth Dynasty were in the three places from which the country can even now be most effectively commanded, namely at the two cataracts, and in the districts extending from Der to Dhaka. Elephantine already possessed an entrenched camp which commands the rapids in the land route from Syene to Philo. Usurtas on the third restored its great wall. He also cleared and widened the passage to Cyriel, as did Papi I to such good effect. That easy and rapid communication between thieves and the new towns was at all times practicable. Some little distance from Filet he established a station for boats, and an emporium which he called Hiru Kakkari, the ways of Kakkari, after his own throne name, Kakkari. Its exact side is unknown, but it appears to have completed on the south side the system of walls and redoubts which protected the cataract provinces against either surprise or regular attacks of the barbarians. Although of no appreciable use for the purposes of general security, the fortifications of Middle Nubia were of great importance in the eyes of the pharaohs. They commanded the desert roads leading to the Red Sea, and to Berber and Gebel Barquel on the upper Nile. The most important fort occupied the site of the present village of Kuban, opposite Dhaka, and commanded the entrance to the Wadi Alaki, which leads to the richest gold deposits known to ancient Egypt. The valleys which furrow the mountains of Etbai, the Wadi Shaniib, the Wadi Um Teir, Gebel Iswad, Gebel Um Cabrita, all have gold deposits of their own. The gold is found in nuggets and in pockets in white quartz, mixed with iron oxides and titanium, for which the ancients had no use. The method of mining practiced from immemorial antiquity by the U'au Ayu of the neighborhood was of the simplest, and traces of the workings may still be seen all over the sides of the ravines. Tunnels followed the direction of the loads to adept the fifty-five to sixty-five yards. The masses of quartz procured from them were broken up in granite mortars, pounded small and afterwards reduced to a powder in querns, similar to those used for crushing grain. The residue was sifted on stone tables and the finely ground parts afterwards washed in bowls of sycamore wood, until the gold dust had settled to the bottom. This was the Nubian gold which was brought into Egypt by nomad tribes, and for which the Egyptians themselves, from the time of the Twelfth Dynasty onwards, went to seek in the land which produced it. They made no attempt to establish permanent colonies for working the mines, as at Sinai, but a detachment of troops was dispatched nearly every year to the spot to receive the amount of precious metal collected since their previous visit. The King Yusur Tassan would send at one time the Prince of the Nome of the Gazelle on such an expedition, with a contingent of four hundred men belonging to his wife. At another time it would be the faithful Sihathor, who would triumphantly scour the country, obliging young and old to work with redoubled efforts for his master Aminam Hyatt II. On his return the Yonvoy would boast of having brought back more gold than any of his predecessors, and of having crossed the desert without losing either a soldier or a baggage animal, not even a donkey. Sometimes a son of the reigning Pharaoh, even the heir presumptive, would condescend to accompany the caravan. Aminam Hyatt III repaired or rebuilt the fortress of Kuban, the starting place of the Little Army, and the spot to which it returned. It is a square enclosure measuring three hundred and twenty-eight feet on each side. The ramparts of crude brick are sloped slightly inwards, and are strengthened at intervals by bastions projecting from the external face of the wall. The river protected one side, the other three were defended by ditches communicating with the Nile. There were four entrances, one in the center of each façade. That on the east, which faced the desert, and was exposed to the severest attacks, was flanked by a tower. The cataract of Wadi-Halfa offered a natural barrier to invasion from the south. Even without fortification the chain of granite rocks which crosses the valley at this spot would have been a sufficient obstacle to prevent any fleet which might attempt the passage from gaining access to northern Nubia. The Nile here has not the wild and imposing aspect which it assumes lower down between Aswan and File. It is bordered by low and receding hills, devoid of any definite outline. Masses of bare black rock, here and there covered by scanty herbage, block the course of the river in some places in such profusion that its entire bed seems to be taken up by them. For a distance of seventeen miles the main body of water is broken up into an infinitude of small channels in its width of two miles. Several of the streams thus formed present apparently attempting course to the navigator, so calm and safe do they appear, but they conceal ledges of hidden reefs, and are unexpectedly forced into narrow passages obstructed by granite boulders. The strongest built and best piloted boat must be dashed to pieces in such circumstances, and no effort or skillfulness on the part of the crew would save the vessel should the owner venture to attempt the descent. The only channel at all available for transit runs from the village of Aisha on the Arabian side, winds capriciously from one bank to another, and emerges into calm water a little above Nakhiyet Wadi-Halfa. During certain days in August and September the natives trust themselves to this stream, but only with boats lightly laden. Even then their escape is problematical, for they are in hourly danger of foundering. As soon as the inundation begins to fall the passage becomes more difficult. By the middle of October it is given up, and communication by water between Egypt and the countries above Wadi-Halfa is suspended until the return of the inundation. By degrees as the level of the water becomes lower, remains of wrecks jammed between the rocks, or embedded in sandbanks emerge into view, as if to warn sailors and discourage them from an undertaking so fraught with perils. Usurtas in the first realized the importance of the position, and fortified its approaches. He selected the little Nubian town of Bahani, which lay exactly opposite to the present village of Wadi-Halfa, and transformed it into a strong frontier fortress. Besides the usual citadel he built there a temple dedicated to the Theban god Amun and to the local Horus. He then set up a stele commemorating his victories over the peoples beyond the cataract. Ten of their principal chiefs had passed before Amun as prisoners, their arms tied behind their backs, and had been sacrificed at the foot of the altar by the sovereign himself. He represented them on the stele by enclosing their names in battle-minted cartouches, each surmounted by the bust of a man bound by a long cord which is held by the conqueror. Nearly a century later Usurtas in the third enlarged the fortress, and finding doubtless that it was not sufficiently strong to protect the passage of the cataract, he stationed outposts at various points, at Matuga, Fakas, and Casa. They served as mooring places where the vessels which went up and downstream with merchandise might be made fast to the bank at sunset. The bands of Bedouin, lurking in the neighborhood, would have rejoiced to surprise them, and by their depredations to stop the commerce between the Said and the Upper Nile, during the few weeks in which it could be carried on with a minimum of danger. A narrow gorge crossed by a bed of granite, through which the Nile passes at Semna, afforded another most favorable side for the completion of this system of defense. On cliffs rising sheer above the current, the king constructed two fortresses, one on each bank of the river, which completely commanded the approaches by land and water. On the right bank at Kama, where the position was naturally a strong one, the engineers described an irregular square, measuring about two hundred feet each side. Two projecting bastions flanked the entrance, the one to the north covering the approaching pathways, the southern one commanding the river bank. A road with a ditch runs about thirteen feet from the walls around the building, closely following its contour, except at the northwest and southeast angles, where there are two projections which formed bastions. The town on the other bank, Saminu Ka'kari, occupied a less favorable position. Its eastern flank was protected by a zone of rocks and by the river, but the three other sides were of easy approach. They were provided with ramparts which rose to the height of eighty-two feet above the plain and were strengthened at unequal distances by enormous buttresses. These resembled towers without parapets, overlooking every part of the encircling road, and from them the defenders could take the attacking sappers in flank. The intervals between them had been so calculated as to enable the archers to sweep the intervening space with their arrows. The main building is of crude brick, with beams laid horizontally between. The base of the external rampart is nearly vertical, while the upper part forms an angle of some seventy degrees with the horizon, making the scaling of it, if not impossible, at least very difficult. Each of the enclosing walls of the two fortresses surrounded a town complete in itself, with temples dedicated to their founders and to the Nubian deities, as well as numerous habitations now in ruins. The sudden widening of the river immediately to the south of the rapids made a kind of natural roadstead, where the Egyptian squadron could lie without danger on the eve of a campaign against Ethiopia. The Galeats of the Negroes there awaited permission to sail below the rapids, and to enter Egypt with their cargos. At once a military station and a river custom-house, Semna was the necessary bulwark of the new Egypt, and Yusuf Tassan III emphatically proclaimed the fact, in two decrees, which he set up there for the edification of posterity. Here is, so runs the first, the southern boundary fixed in the year eight under his holiness of Ka'kari Yusuf Tassan, who gives life always and forever, in order that none of the black peoples may cross it from above, except only for the transport of animals, oxen, goats, and sheep belonging to them. The edict of the year sixteen reiterates the prohibition of the year eight, and adds that his majesty caused his own statue to be erected at the landmarks which he himself had set up. The beds of the first and second cataracts were then less worn away than they are now. They are therefore more efficacious in keeping back the water and forcing it to rise to a higher level above. The cataracts acted as indicators of the inundation, and if their daily rise and fall were studied, it was possible to announce to the dwellers on the banks lower down the river the progress and probable results of the flood. As long as the dominion of the pharaohs reached no further than Phile, observations of the Nile were always taken at the first cataract, and it was from Elephantine that Egypt received the news of the first appearance and progress of the inundation. Amenham High at the third set up a new nilometer at the new frontier, and gave orders to his officers to observe the course of the flood. They obeyed him scrupulously, and every time that the inundation appeared to them to differ from the average of ordinary years they marked its height on the rocks of Semna and Kuma, engraving side by side with the figure the name of the king in the date of the year. The custom was continued there under the Thirteenth Dynasty. Afterwards, when the frontier was pushed further south, the nilometer accompanied it. The country beyond Semna was virgin territory, almost untouched and quite uninjured by previous wars. Its name now appears for the first time upon the monuments, in the form of Ka'usha, the Humboldt Kush. It comprised the district situated to the south within the immense loop described by the river between Dangala and Khartoum, those vast plains intersected by the windings of the white and blue niles, known as the regions of Khartoufan and D'Aufour. It was bounded by the mountains of Abyssinia, the marshes of late New, and all those semi-fabulous countries to which were relegated the Isle of the Mains and the lands of spirits. It was separated from the Red Sea by the land of Puanit, and to the west, between it and the confines of the world, lay the Timihu. Scores of tribes, white, copper-coloured and black, bearing strange names, wrangled over the possession of this vaguely defined territory. Some of them were still savage or emerging from barbarism, while others had obtained to a pitch of material civilization almost comparable with that of Egypt. The same diversity of types, the same instability and the same want of intelligence which characterised the tribes of those days, still distinguished the medley of peoples who now frequent the upper valley of the Nile. They led the same sort of animal life, guided by impulse and disturbed, owing to the caprices of their petty chiefs, by bloody wars which often issued in slavery or in emigration to distant regions. With such shifting and unstable conditions it would be difficult to build up a permanent state. From time to time some kinglet, more daring, cunning, tenacious, or better fitted to govern than the rest, extended his dominion over his neighbours, and advanced step by step till he united immense tracks under his single rule. As by degrees his kingdom enlarged he made no efforts to organise it on any regular system, to introduce any uniformity in the administration of its affairs, or to gain the adherence of its incongruous elements by just laws which would be equally for the good of all. When the massacres which accompanied his first victories were over, when he had incorporated into his own army what was left of the vanquished troops, when their children were led into servitude and he had filled his treasury with their spoil and his harem with their women, it never occurred to him that there was anything more to be done. If he had acted otherwise it would not probably have been to his advantage. Both his former and present subjects were too divergent in language and origin, too widely separated by manners and customs, and too long in a state of hostility to each other, to draw together and to become easily welded into a single nation. As soon as the hand which held them together relaxed its hold for a moment, discord crept in everywhere, among individuals as well as among tribes, and the empire of yesterday resolved itself into its original elements even more rapidly than it had been formed. The clash of arms which had inaugurated its brief existence died quickly away. The remembrance of its short-lived glory was lost after two or three generations in the horrors of a fresh invasion. Its name vanished without leaving a trace behind. The first occupation of Nubia brought Egypt into contact with this horde of incongruous peoples, and the contact soon entailed a struggle. It is futile for a civilized state to think of dwelling peacefully with any barbarous nation with which it is in close proximity. Should it decide to check its own advances and impose limits upon itself which it shall not pass over, its moderation is mistaken for feebleness and impotence. The vanquished again take up the offensive and either force the civilized power to retire or compel it to cross its former boundary. The pharaohs did not escape this inevitable consequence of conquest. Their southern frontier advanced continually higher and higher up the Nile, without ever becoming fixed in a position sufficiently strong to defy the attacks of the barbarians. Ussertas in the first had subdued the countries of Hahu, of Kantan and Ophir, and Shahad, and had beaten in battle the Shemik, the Kasa, the Seuss, the Aquan, the Anu, the Sabiri, and the people of Akiti and Makisa. Amenem Hai at the second, Ussertas in the second, and Ussertas in the third never hesitated to strike the humbled Kush whenever the opportunity presented itself. The last mentioned king in particular chastised them severely in his eighth, twelfth, sixteenth, and nineteenth years, and his victories made him so popular that the Egyptians of the Greek period, identifying him with the sassastras of Herodotus, attributed to him the possession of the universe. On the base of a colossal statue of Rose Granite which he erected in the Temple of Tannis, we find preserved a list of the tribes which he conquered. The names of them appear to us most outlandish, Alaka, Matakarao, Turasu, Pamaika, Yoraki, Paramaka, and we have no clue as to their position on the map. We know merely that they lived in the desert, on both sides of the Nile in the latitude of Berber or their bouts. Similar expeditions were sent after Ussertasen's time, and Amenem Hai at the third regarded both banks of the Nile between Semna and Dangala as forming part of the territory of Egypt proper. Little by little, and by the force of circumstances, the making of Greater Egypt was realized. She approached nearer and nearer towards the limit which had been prescribed for her by nature, to that point where the Nile receives its last tributaries, and where its peerless valley takes its origin in the convergence of many others. CHAPTER III The conquest of Nubia was on the whole an easy one, and so much personal advantage accrued from these wars that the troops and generals entered on them without the least repudnance. A single fragment has come down to us which contains a detailed account of one of these campaigns, probably that conducted by Ussertasen III in the sixteenth year of his reign. The Pharaoh had received information that the tribes of the district of Huwah on the Takazah were harassing his vassals, and possibly also those Egyptians who were attracted by commerce to that neighborhood. He resolved to set out and chastise them severely, and embarked with his fleet. It was an expedition almost entirely devoid of danger. The invaders landed only at favourable spots, carried off any of the inhabitants who came in their way, and seized on their cattle, on one occasion as many as a hundred and twenty-three oxen and eleven asses, on others less. Two small parties marched along the banks, and foraging to the right and left drove the booty down to the river. The tactics of invasion have scarcely undergone any change in these countries. The account given by Kayod of the first conquest of Fazogel by Ismail Pasha in 1822 might well serve to complete the fragments of the inscription of Ussertasen III, and restore for us, in almost every detail, a faithful picture of the campaigns carried on in these regions by the kings of the Twelfth Dynasty. The people are hunted down in the same fashion. The country is similarly ravaged by a handful of well-armed, fairly disciplined men attacking naked and discontented hordes. The young men are massacred after a short resistance or forced to escape into the woods. The women are carried off as slaves, the huts pillaged, villages burnt, whole tribes exterminated in a few hours. Sometimes a detachment, having imprudently ventured into some thorny thicket to attack a village perched on a rocky summit, would experience a reverse, and would with great difficulty regain the main body of troops after having lost three-fourths of its men. In most cases there was no prolonged resistance, and the attacking party carried the place with the loss of merely two or three men killed or wounded. The spoil was never very considerable in any one locality, but its total amount increased as the raid was carried afield, and it soon became so bulky that the party had to stop and retrace their steps in order to place it for safety in the nearest fortress. The booty consisted for the most part of herds of oxen and of cumbrous heaps of grain, as well as wood for building purposes. But it also comprised objects of small size but of great value, such as ivory, precious stones, and particularly gold. The natives collected the latter in the alluvial tracts watered by the Takazi, the Blue Nile, and its tributaries. The women were employed in searching for nuggets, which were often of considerable size. They enclosed them in little leather cases and offered them to the merchants in exchange for the products of Egyptian industry, or they handed them over to the goldsmiths to be made into bracelets, ear, nose, or finger-rings, a fairly fine workmanship. Gold was found in combination with several other metals, from which they did not know how to separate it. The purist gold had a pale yellow tint, which was valued above all others. But electrum, that is to say, gold alloyed with silver in the proportion of eighty percent, was also much in demand, while grayish-colored gold mixed with platinum served for making common jewelry. None of these expeditions produced any lasting results, and the pharaohs established no colonies in any of these countries. Their Egyptian subjects could not have lived there for any length of time without deteriorating by intermarriage with the natives, or from the effects of the climate. They would have degenerated into a half-breed race, having all the vices and none of the good qualities of the Aborigines. The pharaohs, therefore, continued their hostilities without further scruples, and only sought to gain as much as possible from their victories. They cared little if nothing remained after they had passed through some district, or if the passage of their armies was marked only by ruins. They seized upon everything which came across their path, men, chattels, or animals, and carried them back to Egypt. They recklessly destroyed everything for which they had no use, and made a desert of fertile districts which but yesterday had been covered with crops and studded with populous villages. The neighboring inhabitants, realizing their incapacity to resist regular troops, endeavored to buy off the invaders by yielding up all they possessed in the way of slaves, flocks, wood, or precious metals. The generals in command, however, had to reckon with the approaching low Nile, which forced them to be to retreat. They were obliged to halt at the first appearance of it, and they turned homeward in peace, their only anxiety being to lose the smallest possible number of men or captured animals on their return journey. As in earlier times, adventurous merchants penetrated into districts not reached by the troops, and prepared the way for conquest. The princes of Elephantine still sent caravans to distant parts, and one of them, Seran Pitu, who lived under Yusurtas in the first and Amenem High at the second, recorded his explorations on his tomb after the fashion of his ancestors. The king at several different times had sent him on expeditions to the Sudan, but the inscription in which he gives an account of them is so mutilated that we cannot be sure which tribes he visited. We learn merely that he collected from them skins, ivory, ostrich feathers, everything in fact which Central Africa has furnished as articles of commerce from time immemorial. It was not, however, by land only that Egyptian merchants traveled to seek fortune in foreign countries. The Red Sea attracted them, and served as a quick route for reaching the land of Puanid, whose treasures in perfumes and rarities of all kinds had formed the theme of ancient traditions and navigators' tales. Relations with it had been infrequent, or had ceased altogether, during the wars of the Herakliapolitan period. On their renewal it was necessary to open up afresh routes which had been forgotten for centuries. Traffic was confined almost entirely to two or three out of the many, one which ran from Elephantine or from Nekhabit to the Head of Nekhabit, the Berenice of the Greeks, others which started from Thebes or Coptos and struck the coast at the same place or at Sao, the present Kosir. The latter, which was the shortest as well as the favorite route, passed through Wadi Hamamat, from whence the pharaohs drew the blocks of granite for their sarcophagi. The officers who were sent to quarry the stone often took advantage of the opportunity to visit the coast and to penetrate as far as the spice regions. As early as the year eight of Saun Keri, the predecessor of Amenem Hai at the first, the sole friend Hanu had been sent by this road in order to take the command of a squadron to Puanit, and to collect a tribute of fresh incense from the princes of the desert. He got together three thousand men, distributed to each one a goat-skin bottle, a crook for carrying it, and ten loaves, and set out from Coptos with this little army. No water was met with on the way. Hanu boarded several wells and cisterns in the rock, one at a halting-place called Byte, two in the district of Adahite, and finally one in the valleys of Adabaite. Having reached the seaboard, he quickly constructed a great barge, freighted it with merchandise for barter, as well as with provisions, oxen, cows, and goats, and set sail for a cruise along the coast. It is not known how far he went, but he came back with a large cargo of all the products of the divine land, especially of incense. On his return he struck off into the Uga'i Valley, and thence reached that of Rahanu, where he chose out splendid blocks of stone for a temple which the king was building. Never had royal cousins sent on an expedition done as much since the time of the God Ra. Numbers of royal officers and adventurers followed in his footsteps, but no record of them has been preserved for us. Two or three names only have escaped oblivion. That of Kanum Haqpu, who in the first year of Yusurtas in the first erected a stele in the Wadi Gassus in the very heart of the divine land, and that of Kent Kit'yoyru, who in the twenty-eighth year of Amenem Hai II entered the haven of Sao after a fortunate cruise to Puanit, without having lost a vessel or even a single man. Navigation is difficult in the Red Sea. The coast has a rule as precipitous, bursting with reefs and islets, and almost entirely without strand or haven. No river or stream runs into it. It is bordered by no fertile or wooded tract but by high cliffs, half disintegrated by the burning sun, or by steep mountains, which appear sometimes a dull red, sometimes a dingy gray color, according to the material, granite or sandstone which predominates in their composition. The few tribes who inhabit this desolate region maintain a miserable existence by fishing and hunting. They were considered, during the Greek period, to be the most unfortunate of mortals, and if they appeared to be so to the mariners of the Ptolemies, doubtless they enjoyed the same reputation in the more remote time of the pharaohs. A few fishing villages, however, are mentioned as scattered along the littoral, watering places, at some distance apart, frequented on account of their wells of brackish water by the desert tribes, such were Nahasit, Tup, Nekhabit, Sao, and Tal. These Egyptian merchant vessels used as victualing stations, and took away as cargo the products of the country, mother of pearl, amethysts, emeralds, a little lapis lazuli, a little gold, gums, and sweet-smelling resins. If the weather was favorable and the intake of merchandise had been scanty, the vessel, braving numerous risks of shipwreck, continued its course as far as the latitude of Sao Kin and Masawal, which was the beginning of Puanit properly so called. Here riches poured down to the coast from the interior, and selection became a difficulty. It was hard to decide which would make the best cargo, ivory or ebony, panther's skins or rings of gold, myrrh, incense, or a score of other sweet-smelling gums. So many of these odiferous resins were used for religious purposes, that it was always to the advantage of the merchant to procure as much of them as possible. Incense, fresh or dried, was the staple and characteristic merchandise of the Red Sea, and the good people of Egypt pictured Puanit is a land of perfumes, which attracted the sailor from afar by the delicious odours which were wafted from it. These voyages were dangerous in trying. Popular imagination seized upon them and made material out of them for marvellous tales. The hero chosen was always a daring adventurer sent by his master to collect gold from the minds of Nubia. By sailing further and further up the river he reached the mysterious sea which forms the southern boundary of the world. I set sail in a vessel one hundred and fifty cubits long, forty wide, with one hundred and fifty of the best sailors in the land of Egypt, who had seen heaven and earth, and whose hearts were more resolute than those of lions. They had foretold that the wind would not be contrary, or that there would be even none at all, but a squall came upon us unexpectedly while we were in the open, and as we approached the land the wind freshened and raised the waves to the height of eight cubits. As for me I clung to a beam, but those who were on the vessel perished without one escaping. A wave of the sea cast me on to an island, after having spent three days alone with no other companion than my own heart. I slept there in the shade of a thicket. Then I set my legs in motion in quest of something from my mouth. The island produced a quantity of delicious fruit. He satisfied his hunger with it, lighted a fire to offer a sacrifice to the gods, and immediately, by the magical power of the sacred rites, the inhabitants, who up to this time had been invisible, were revealed to his eyes. I heard a sound like that of thunder, which I at first took to be the noise of the flood-tide in the open sea. But the trees quivered, the earth trembled. I uncovered my face, and I perceived that it was a serpent which was approaching. He was thirty cubits in length, and his waddles exceeded two cubits. His body was encrusted with gold, and his color appeared like that of real lapis. He raised himself before me and opened his mouth. While I prostrated myself before him, he said to me, Who hath brought thee? Who hath brought thee, little one? Who hath brought thee? If thou dost not tell me immediately who hath brought thee to this island, I will cause thee to know thy littleness. Either thou shalt faint like a woman, or thou shalt tell me something which I have not yet heard, and which I knew not before thee. Then he took me into his mouth and carried me to his dwelling-place, and put me down without hurting me. I was safe and sound, and nothing had been taken from me. Our hero tells the serpent the story of his shipwreck, which moves him to pity and induces him to reciprocate his confidence. Fear nothing, fear nothing, little one. Let not thy countenance be sad. If thou hast come to me, it is the God who has spared thy life. It is he who has brought thee to this isle of the double, where nothing is lacking, and which is filled with all good things. Here thou shalt pass one month after another till thou hast remained four months in this island. Then shall come a vessel from thy country with mariners. Thou canst depart with them to thy country, and thou shalt die in thy city. To converse rejoices the heart. He who enjoys conversation bears misfortune better. I will therefore relate to thee the history of this island. The population consisted of seventy-five serpents, all of one family. It formerly comprised also a young girl, whom a secession of misfortunes had cast on the island, and who was killed by lightning. The hero, charmed with such good nature, overwhelmed the hospitable dragon with thanks, and promised to send him numerous presents on his return home. I will slay asses for thee in sacrifice. I will pluck birds for thee. I will send to thee vessels filled with all the riches of Egypt. Meet for a God. The friend of man in a distant country unknown to men. The monster smiled and replied that it was needless to think of sending presents to one who was the ruler of Puanit. Besides, as soon as thou hast quitted this place thou wilt never again see this island, for it will be changed into waves. And then, when the vessel appeared, according as he had predicted to me, I went and perched upon a high tree and sought to distinguish those who manned it. I next ran to tell him the news, but I found that he was already informed of its arrival, and he said to me, A pleasant journey home, little one, mayest thou behold thy children again, and may thy name be well spoken of in thy town. Such are my wishes for thee. He added gifts to these obliging words. I placed all these on board the vessel which had come, and, prostrating myself, I adored him. He said to me, After two months thou shalt reach thy country, thou wilt press thy children to thy bosom, and thou shalt rest in thy sepulcher. After that I descended the shore to the vessel, and I hailed the sailors who were in it. I gave thanks on the shore to the master of the island, as well as to those who dwelt in it. This might almost be an episode in the voyages of Sinbad the sailor, except that the monsters which Sinbad met with in the course of his travels were not of such a kindly disposition as the Egyptian serpent. It did not occur to them to console the shipwrecked with the charm of a lengthy gossip, but they swallowed them with a healthy appetite. Putting aside entirely the marvellous element in the story, what strikes us is the frequency of the relations which it points to between Egypt and Puanit. The appearance of an Egyptian vessel excites no astonishment on its coasts. The inhabitants have already seen many such, and at such regular intervals, that they are able to predict the exact date of their arrival. The distance between the two countries it is true was not considerable, and a voyage of two months was sufficient to accomplish it. While the new Egypt was expanding outward in all directions, the old country did not cease to add to its riches. The two centuries during which the twelfth dynasty continued to rule were a period of profound peace. The monuments show us the country in full possession of all its resources and its arts, and its inhabitants both cheerful and contented. More than ever do the great lords and royal officers expatiate in their epitaphs upon the strict justice which they have rendered to their vassals and subordinates, upon the kindness which they have shown to the fellaheen, on the paternal solicitude with which, in the years of insufficient inundations or of bad harvests, they have striven to come forward and assist them, and upon the unheard of disinterestedness which kept them from raising the taxes during the times of average Niles, or of unusual plenty. Gifts to the gods poured in from one end of the country to the other, and the great building works which had been at a standstill since the end of the sixth dynasty were recommended simultaneously on all sides. There was much to be done in the way of repairing the ruins of which the number had accumulated during the two preceding centuries. Not that the most audacious kings had ventured to lay their hands on the sanctuaries. They emptied the sacred treasuries and partially confiscated their revenues, but when once their cupidity was satisfied they respected the fabrics and even went so far as to restore a few inscriptions, or when needed to replace a few stones. These magnificent buildings required careful supervision, in spite of their being constructed of the most durable materials, sandstone, granite, limestone, in spite of their enormous size or of the strengthening of their foundations by a bed of sand, and by three or four courses of carefully adjusted blocks to form a substructure, the Nile was ever threatening them and secretly working at their destruction. Its waters, filtering through the soil, were perpetually in contact with the lower courses of these buildings, and kept the foundations of the walls and the bases of the columns constantly damp. The saltpeder which the waters had dissolved in their passage, crystallizing on the limestone, would corrode and undermine everything, if precautions were not taken. When the inundation was over, the subsidence of the water which impregnated the subsoil caused in course of time settlements in the most solid foundations. The walls, disturbed by the unequal sinking of the ground, got out of the perpendicular and cracked. This shifting displaced the architraves which held the columns together, and the stone slabs which formed the roof. These disturbances, aggravated from year to year, were sufficient, if not at once remedied, to entail the fall of the portions attacked. In addition to this, the Nile, having threatened the part below with destruction, often hastened by direct attacks the work of ruin, which otherwise proceeded slowly. A breach in the embankments protecting the town of the temple allowed its waters to rush violently through, and thus to affect large gaps in the decaying walls, completing the overthrow of the columns and wrecking the entrance halls and secret chambers by the fall of the roofs. At the time when Egypt came under the rule of the Twelfth Dynasty, there were but few cities which did not contain some ruined or dilapidated sanctuary. Amenham Hyatt I, although fully occupied in reducing the power of the feudal lords, restored the temples as far as he was able, and his successors pushed forward the work vigorously for nearly two centuries. The Delta profited greatly by this activity in building. The monuments there had suffered more than anywhere else, faded to bear the first shock of foreign invasion, and transformed into fortresses while the towns in which they were situated were besieged. They have been captured again and again by assault, broken down by attacking engines, and dismantled by all the conquerors of Egypt, from the Assyrians to the Arabs and the Turks. The Felaen in their neighborhood have for centuries come to them to obtain limestone to burn in their kilns, or to use them as a quarry for sandstone or granite for the doorways of their houses, or for the thresholds of their mosques. Not only have they been ruined, but the remains of their ruins have, as it were, melted away and almost entirely disappeared in the course of ages. And yet wherever excavations have been made among these remains which have suffered such deplorable ill treatment, Colossae and inscriptions commemorating the pharaohs of the Twelfth Dynasty have been brought to light. Amenem Hyatt I founded a great temple at Tannis in honor of the gods of Memphis. The vestiges of the columns still scattered on all sides show the main body of the building was of rose granite, and a statue of the same material has preserved for us a portrait of the king. He is seated, and wears the tall head dress of Osiris. He has a large smiling face, thick lips, a short nose, and big staring eyes. The expression is one of benevolence and gentleness, rather than of the energy and firmness which one would expect in the founder of a dynasty. The kings who were his successors all considered it a privilege to embellish the temple and to place in it some memorial of their veneration for the god. Eustertas in the first, following the example of his father, set up a statue of himself in the form of Osiris. He is sitting on his throne of great granite, and his placid face unmistakably recalls that of Amenem Hyatt the first. Amenem Hyatt the second, Eustertas in the second, and his wife Nofrit, have also dedicated their images within the sanctuary. Nofrit's is a black granite. Her head is almost eclipsed by the heavy Hathor wig, consisting of two enormous tresses of hair which surround the cheeks, and lie with an outward curve upon the breast. Her eyes, which were formerly inlaid, have fallen out. The bronze eyelids are lost. Her arms have almost disappeared. What remains of her, however, gives us, nonetheless, the impression of a young and graceful woman, with a lithe and well-proportioned body, whose outlines are delicately modelled under the tight-fitting smock worn by Egyptian women. The small and rounded breast curve outward beneath the extremities of her curls, and the embroidered hem of her garment, and a pectoral bearing the name of her husband lies flat upon her chest, just below the column of her throat. These various statues have all an evident artistic relationship to the beautiful granite figures of the ancient empire. The sculptors who executed them belonged to the same school as those who carved Kefren out of the solid diorite. There is the same facile use of the chisel, the same indifference to the difficulties presented by the material chosen, the same finish in the detail, the same knowledge of the human form. One is almost tempted to believe that Egyptian art remained unchanged all through those long centuries, and yet as soon as a statue of the early period is placed side by side with one of the twelfth dynasty, we immediately perceive something in the one which is lacking in the other. It is a difference in feeling, even if the technique remains unmodified. It was the man himself that the sculptors desired to represent the older pharaohs, and however haughty may be the countenance which we admire in the Kefren, it is the human element which predominates in him. The statues of Amenem Hayd I and his successors appear, on the contrary, to represent a superior race. At the time when these were produced, the pharaoh had long been regarded as a god, and the divine nature in him had almost eliminated the human. Whether intentionally or otherwise, the sculptors idealized their model, and made him more and more resemble the type of the divinities. The head always appears to be a good likeness, but smoothed down and sometimes lacking in expression. Not only are the marks of age rendered less apparent, and the features made to bear the stamp of perpetual youth, but the characteristics of the individual, such as the accentuation of the eyebrows, the protuberance of the cheekbones, the projection of the upper lip, are all softened down as if intentionally, and made to give way to a uniform expression of majestic tranquility. Only one king, Amenem Hayd III, refused to go down to posterity thus effaced, and caused his portrait to be taken as he really was. He has certainly the round, full face of Amenem Hayd I or of Eustertas in the first, and there is an undeniable family lightness between him and his ancestors, but at the first glance we feel sure that the artist has not in any way flattered his model. The forehead is low and slightly retreating, narrow across the temples, his nose's aquiline pronounced in form and large at the tip, the thick lips are slightly closed, his mouth has a disdainful curve, and its corners are turned down as if to repress the inevitable smile common to most Egyptian statues. The chin is full and heavy, and turns up in front in spite of the weight of the false beard dependent from it. He has small, narrow eyes with full lids, his cheekbones are accentuated and projecting, the cheeks hollow, and the muscles about the nose and mouth strongly defined. The whole presents so strange an aspect that for a long time statues of this type have been persistently looked upon as productions of an art which was only partially Egyptian. It is indeed possible that the tannous sphinxes were turned out of workshops where the principles and practice of the sculptor's art had previously undergone some asiatic influence. The bushy mane which surrounds the face and the lion's ears emerging from it are exclusively characteristic of the latter. The purely human statues in which we meet with the same type of countenance have no peculiarity of workmanship which could be attributed to the imitation of a foreign art. If the nameless masters to whom we owe their existence desire to bring about a reaction against the conventional technique of their contemporaries, they at least introduce no foreign innovations. The monuments of the Memphite period furnished them with all the models they could possibly wish for. CHAPTER III. THE FIRST THEBAN EMPIRE PART IX. Bubastas had no less occasion than tannous to boast of the generosity of the Theban pharaohs. The temple of Bastet, which had been decorated by Kyops and Kefren, was still in existence. Amenem Hai at the first, Yusuf Tassan the first, and their immediate successors confined themselves to the restoration of several chambers and to the erection of their own statues, but Yusuf Tassan the third added to it a new structure which must have made it rival the finest monuments in Egypt. He believed no doubt that he was under particular obligations to the lioness goddess of the city and attributed to her aid for unknown reasons some of his successes in Nubia. It would appear that it was with the spoil of a campaign against the country of the Hua that he endowed a part of the new sanctuary. Nothing now remains of it except fragments of the architraves and granite columns which have been used over again by pharaohs of a later period when restoring or altering the fabric. A few of the columns belong to the Lodiform type. The shaft is composed of eight triangular stalks rising from a bunch of leaves, symmetrically arranged and bound together at the top by a ribbon. Twisted thrice round the bundle, the capital is formed by the union of the eight lotus buds, surmounted by a square member on which rest the architrave. Other columns have hathor-headed capitals, the heads being set back to back, and bearing the flat headdress ornamented with the urus. The face of the goddess, which is somewhat flattened when seen closely on the eye level, stands out and becomes more lifelike in proportion as the spectator recedes from it. The projection of the features has been calculated so as to produce the desired effect at the right height when seen from below. The district line between Tannis and Bubastis is thickly studded with monuments built or embellished by the Eminem Hyats and Usurtassans. Wherever the pickaxes applied, whether at Fakus or Tel Nebeshesh, remains of them are brought to light, statues, stelae, tables of offerings, and fragments of dedicatory or historical inscriptions. While carrying on works in the Temple of Ptah at Memphis, the attention of these pharaohs was attracted to Heliopolis. The Temple of Ra there was either insufficient for the exigencies of worship or had been allowed to fall into decay. Usurtassan III resolved, in the third year of his reign, to undertake its restoration. The occasion appears to have been celebrated as a festival by all Egypt, and the remembrance of it lasted long after the event. The somewhat detailed account of the ceremonies which then took place was copied out again at Thebes towards the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty. It describes the king mounting his throne at the meeting of his council, and receiving, as was customary, the eulogies of his soul-friends and of the courtiers who surrounded him. Here, says he, addressing them, has my majesty ordained the works which shall recall my worthy and noble acts to posterity. I raise a monument. I establish lasting decrees in favor of Hermacus, for he has brought me into the world to do as he did. To accomplish that which he decreed should be done. He has appointed me to guide this earth. He has known it. He has called it together, and he has granted me his help. I have caused the eye which is in him to become serene. In all things acting as he would have me to do. And I have sought out that which he had resolved should be known. I am a king by birth, a suzerain not of my own making. I have governed from childhood. Petitions have been presented to me when I was in the egg. I have ruled over the ways of Anubis, and he raised me up to be master of the two halves of the world. From the time when I was a nursing. I had not yet escaped from the swaddling bands when he enthroned me as master of men. Creating me himself in the sight of morals he made me to find favor with the dweller in the palace. When I was a youth I came forth as Horus the eloquent, and I have instituted divine obligations. I accomplished the works in the palace of my father Atumu. I supply his altar on earth with offerings. I lay the foundations of my palace in his neighborhood, in order that the memorial of my goodness may remain in his dwelling. For this palace is my name. This lake is my monument. All that is famous or useful that I have made for the gods is eternity. The great lords testified their approbation of the king's piety. The latter summoned his chancellor and commanded him to draw up the deeds of gift and all the documents necessary for the carrying out of his wishes. He arose adorned with the royal circlet and with the double feather, followed by all his nobles. The chief lector of the divine book stretched the cord and fixed the stake in the ground. This temple has ceased to exist, but one of the granite obelisks raised by Yusuf Tassan I on each side of the principal gateway is still standing. The whole of Heliopolis has disappeared. The site where it formerly stood is now marked only by a few almost imperceptible inequalities in the soil, some crumbling lengths of walls, and here and there some scattered blocks of limestone, containing a few lines of mutilated inscriptions which can with difficulty be deciphered. The obelisk has survived even the destruction of ruins, and to all who understand its language it still speaks of the pharaoh who erected it. The undertaking and successful completion of so many great structures had necessitated a renewal of the working of the ancient quarries and the opening of fresh ones. Amenam Hayat I sent Antuf, a great dignitary, chief of the prophets of Minu and Prince of Coptos, to the valley of Ruhanu to seek out fine granite for making the royal sarcophagi. Amenam Hayat III had, in the forty-third year of his reign, been present at the opening of several fine veins of white limestone in the quarries of Turra, which probably furnished material for the buildings proceeding at Heliopolis and Memphis. Thebes had also its share of both limestone and granite, and Amen, whose sanctuary up to this time had only attained the modest proportions suited to a provincial god, at last possessed a temple which raised him to the rank of the highest feudal divinities. Amen's career had begun under difficulties. He had been merely a vassal god of Mantu, Lord of Hermontus, the A'unu of the south, who had granted to him the ownership of the village of Karnak only. The unforeseen good fortune of the Antufs was the occasion of his emerging from his obscurity. He did not dethrone Mantu, but shared with him the homage of all the neighboring villages, Luxor, Medemut, Bayadiyah, and, on the other side of the Nile, Guernah and Medenet Habu. The accession of the Twelfth Dynasty completed his triumph and made him the most powerful authority in southern Egypt. He was an earth god, a form of Minu who reigned at Coptos, at Akhmim, and in the desert, but he soon became allied to the sun, and from thence forth he assumed the name of Aman-Ra. The title of Sutan-Nutiru, which he added to it, would alone have suffice to prove the comparatively recent origin of his notoriety. As the latest arrival among the great gods, he employed, to express his sovereignty, this word Sutan, king, which had designated the rulers of the valley ever since the union of the two Egypts under the shadowy Minis. Raining at first alone, he became associated by marriage with a vague indefinite goddess called Mat, or mut, the mother, who never adopted any more distinctive name. The divine son who completed this triad was, in early times, Mantu, but in later times a being of secondary rank, chosen from among the genie appointed to watch over the days of the month, or the stars, was added, under the name of Kansu. A menom high laid the foundations of the temple, in which the cultus of Aman was carried on down to the latest times of paganism. The building was supported by polygonal columns of sixteen sides, some fragments of which are still standing. The temple was at first of only moderate dimensions, but it was built of the choicest sandstone and limestone, and decorated with exquisite bow-reliefs. Yusurtas in the first enlarged it, and built a beautiful house for the high priest on the west side of the sacred lake. Luxor, Zoret, Edfu, Hieroconpolis, Elcob, Elephantine, and Dendera shared between them the favor of the pharaohs. The venerable town of Abidos became the object of their special predilection. Its reputation for sanctity had been steadily growing from the time of the poppies. Its god, Contamentit, who was identified with Osiris, had obtained in the south a rank as high as that of the Mendicien Osiris in the north of Egypt. He was worshipped as the sovereign of the sovereigns of the dead, he who gathered around him and welcomed in his domains the majority of the faithful of other cults. His sepulcher, or more correctly speaking, the chapel representing his sepulcher, in which one of his relics was preserved, was here as elsewhere built upon the roof. Access to it was gained by a staircase leading up on the left side of the sanctuary. On the days of the passion and resurrection of Osiris solemn processions of priests and devotees slowly mounted its steps to the chanting of funeral hymns, and above on the terrace, away from the world of the living, and with no other witnesses than the stars of heaven, the faithful celebrated mysteriously the rites of the divine death and embalming. The vassals of Osiris flocked in crowds to these festivals, and took a delight in visiting, at least once during their lifetime, the city whether their souls would proceed after death, in order to present themselves at the mouth of the cleft, there to embark in the barry of their divine master or in that of the sun. They left behind them, under the staircase of the great god, a sort of fictitious tomb, near the representation of the tomb of Osiris, in the shape of Estelle, which immortalized the memory of their piety, and which served as a kind of hostelry for their soul, when the latter should, in course of time, repair to this rallying place of all Osirian souls. The concourse of pilgrims was a source of wealth to the population. The priestly coffers were filled, and every year the original temple was felt to be more and more inadequate to meet the requirements of worship. Mr. Tossan I desired to come to the rescue. He dispatched Montaupu, one of his great vassals, to superintend the works. The ground plan of the portico of White Limestone which preceded the entrance court may still be distinguished. This portico was supported by square pillars, and standing against the remains of these we see the Colossae of Rose Granite, crowned with the Osirian headdress, and with their feet planted on the nine bows, the symbol of vanquished enemies. The best preserved of these figures represents the Founder, but several others are likenesses of those of his successors who interested themselves in the temple. Montaupu dug a well which was kept fully supplied by the infiltrations from the Nile. He enlarged and cleaned out the sacred lake upon which the priest launched the holy ark, on the knights of the great mysteries. The alluvial deposits of fifty centuries have not as yet wholly filled it up. It is still an irregularly shaped pond which dries up in winter, but is again filled as soon as the inundation reaches the village of El Carba. A few stones, corroded with salt peter, mark here and there the lines of the landing stages. A thick grove of palms fringes its northern and southern banks, but to the west the prospect is open, and extends as far as the entrance to the gorge, through which the souls set forth in search of paradise and the solar bark. Buffaloes now come to drink and wallow at midday where once floated the gilded barry of Osiris, and the murmur of bees from the neighbouring orchards alone breaks the silence of the spot, which have old resounded with the rhythmical lamentations of the pilgrims. The First Theban Empire Part X Heracleopolis the Great, the town preferred by the earlier Theban pharaohs as their residence in times of peace, must have been one of those which they proceeded to decorate Khan Amore with magnificent monuments. Unfortunately it has suffered more than any of the rest, and nothing of it is now to be seen but a few wretched remains of buildings of the Roman period, and the ruins of a barbaric colonnade on the site of a Byzantine basilica almost contemporary with the Arab conquest. Perhaps the enormous mounds which cover its site may still conceal the remains of its ancient temples. We can merely estimate their magnificence by casual allusions to them in the inscriptions. We know, for instance, that Yusurtas in the Third rebuilt the sanctuary of Haar Shafitu, and that he sent expeditions to the Wadi Hamama to quarry blocks of granite worthy of his god. But the work of this king and his successors has perished in the total ruin of the ancient town. Something at least has remained of what they did in that traditional dependency of Heracliopolis, the Fayum, the temple which they built to the god Sabku in Shaddit, retained its celebrity down to the time of the Caesars, not so much perhaps on account of the beauty of its architecture as for the unique character of their religious rites which took place there daily. The sacred lake contained a family of tamed crocodiles, the image and incarnation of the god, whom the faithful fed with their offerings, cakes, fried fish, and drinks sweetened with honey. Advantage was taken of the moment when one of these creatures, wallowing on the bank, basked contentedly in the sun. Two priests opened his jaws and a third threw in the cakes, the fried morsels, and finally the liquid. The crocodile bore all this without even winking. He swallowed down his provinder, plunged into the lake, and lazily reached the opposite bank, hoping to escape for a few moments from the oppressive liberality of his devotees. As soon, however, as another of these approached, he was again beset at his new post and stuffed in a similar manner. These animals were in their own way great dandies, rings of gold or enameled terracotta were hung from their ears, and bracelets were soldered onto their front paws. The monuments of Shaddit, if any still exist, are buried under the mounds of Madenet Alfayoun, but in the neighborhood we meet with more than one authentic relic of the twelfth dynasty. It was Eustertas in the first who erected that curious, thin granite obelisk, with a circular top, whose fragments lie forgotten on the ground near the village of Begig. A sort of basin has been hollowed out around it, which fills during the inundation, so that the monument lies in a pool of muddy water during the greater part of the year. Owing to this treatment, most of the inscriptions on it have almost disappeared, though we can still make out a series of five scenes in which the king hands offerings to several divinities. Near to Biyahmou there was an old temple which had become ruinous. Amenem Hyatt III repaired it, and erected in front of it two of those colossal statues which the Egyptians were want to place like sentinels at their gates, to ward off baleful influences and evil spirits. The Colossae at Biyahmou were of red sandstone, and were seated on high limestone pedestals, placed at the end of a rectangular court. The temple walls hid the lower part of the pedestals, so that the Colossae appeared to tower above a great platform which sloped gently away from them on all sides. Herodotus, who saw them from a distance at the time of the inundation, believed that they crowned the summits of two pyramids rising out of the middle of a lake. Near Ilohun, Queen Sovkinov Furi herself has left a few traces of her short reign. The Fayum, by its fertility and pleasant climate, justified the preference which the pharaohs of the Twelfth Dynasty bestowed upon it. On emerging from the gorges of Ilohun, it opens out like a vast amphitheater of cultivation, whose slopes descend towards the north till they reach the desolate waters of the Burkut Kerund. On the right and left the amphitheater is isolated from the surrounding mountains by two deep ravines, filled with willows, tamarisks, mimosas, and thorny acacias. Upon the high ground, lands devoted to the culture of corn, dura, and flax alternate with groves of palms and pomegranates, vineyards and gardens of olives, the latter being almost unknown elsewhere in Egypt. The slopes are covered with cultivated fields, irregularly terraced woods, and meadows enclosed by hedges, while lofty trees, clustered some places and thinly scattered in others, rise in billowy masses of verdure one behind the other. Shodit, or Shadu, stood on a peninsula stretching out into a kind of natural reservoir, and was connected with the mainland by merely a narrow dike. The water of the inundation flowed into this reservoir and was stored here during the autumn. Countless little rivulets escaped from it, not merely such canals and ditches as we meet with in the Nile Valley, but actual running brooks, coursing and babbling between the trees, spreading out here and there into pools of water, and in places forming little cascades like those of our own streams, but dwindling in volume as they proceeded, owing to constant drains made on them, until they were for the most part absorbed by the soil before finally reaching the lake. They brought down in their course part of the fertilizing earth accumulated by the inundation, and were thus instrumental in raising the level of the soil. The water of the burka rose or fell according to the season of the year. It formerly occupied a much larger area than it does at present, and half of the surrounding districts was covered by it. Its northern shores, now deserted and uncultivated, then shared in the benefits of the inundation, and supplied the means of existence for a civilized population. In many places we still find the remains of villages and walls of uncemented stone. A small temple even has escaped the general ruin, and remains almost intact in the midst of the desolation, as if to point out the furthest limit of Egyptian territory. It bears no inscriptions, but the beauty of the materials of which it is composed, and the perfection of the work, led us to attribute its construction to some prince of the twelfth dynasty. An ancient causeway runs from its entrance to what was probably at one time the original margin of the lake. The continual sinking of the level of the burka has left this temple isolated at the edge of the Libyan plateau, and all life has retired from the surrounding district, and has concentrated itself on the southern shores of the lake. Here the banks are low and the bottom deepens almost imperceptibly. In winter the retreating waters leave exposed long patches of the shore, upon which a thin crust of snow-white salt is deposited, concealing the depths of mud and the quicksands beneath. Immediately after the inundation, the lake regains in a few days the ground it had lost. It encroaches on the tamarisk bushes which fringe its banks, and the district is soon surrounded by a belt of marshy vegetation, affording cover for ducks, pelicans, wild geese, and a score of different kinds of birds which distort themselves there by the thousand. The pharaohs, when tired of residing in cities, here found varied and refreshing scenery, an equable climate, gardens always gay with flowers, and in the thickets of the Karen they could pursue their favorite pastimes of interminable fishing and of hunting with the boomerang. They desired to repose after death among the scenes in which they had lived. Their tombs stretch from Herakliopolis till they nearly meet the last pyramids of the Memphites. At Dasur there are still two of them standing. The northern one is an immense erection of brick, placed in close proximity to the truncated pyramid, but nearer than it to the edge of the plateau so as to overlook the valley. We might be tempted to believe that the Theban kings, in choosing a site immediately to the south of the spot where Poppy II slept in his glory, were prompted by the desire to renew the traditions of the older dynasties prior to those of the Herakliopolitans, and thus proclaimed to all beholders the antiquity of their lineage. One of their residences was situated at no great distance, near Minniyet Dasur, the city of Titaoui, the favorite residence of Amenam Hayat I. It was here that those royal princesses, Nofer Hanit, Sonnet Sunbit, Sithethor, and Monit, his sisters, wives, and daughters, whose tombs lie opposite the northern face of the pyramid, flourished side by side with Amenam Hayat III. There, as of old in their harem, they slept side by side, and in spite of robbers their mummies have preserved the ornaments with which they were adorned, on the eve of burial, by the pious act of their lords. The art of the ancient jewelers, which we have hitherto known only from pictures on the walls of tombs or on the boards of coffins, is here exhibited in all its cutting. The ornaments comprise a wealth of gold gorges, necklaces of agate beads or of enameled lotus-flowers, cornelian, amethyst and onyx scarabs, pectorals of pierced goldwork inlaid with flakes of vitreous paste or precious stones, bear the cartouches of usurtoss in the third, and of Amenam Hayat II, and every one of these gems of art reveals a perfection of taste and a skillfulness of handling which are perfectly wonderful. Their delicacy and their freshness in spite of their antiquity make it hard for us to realize that fifty centuries have elapsed since they were made. We are tempted to imagine that the royal ladies to whom they belonged must still be waiting within their shot, ready to reply to our summons as soon as we deign to call them. We may even anticipate the joy they will evince when these sumptuous ornaments are restored to them, and we need to glance at the worm-eaten coffins which contain their stiff and disfigured mummies to recall our imagination to the stern reality of fact. Two other pyramids, but in this case of stone, still exist further south, to the left of the village of Lyst. Their casing, torn off by the Felaen, has entirely disappeared, and from a distance they appear to be merely two mounds which break the desert horizon line, rather than two buildings raised by the hand of man. The sepulcher chambers, excavated at a great depth in the sand, are now filled with water which is infiltrated through the soil, and they have not as yet been sufficiently empty to permit of an entrance being affected. One of them contained the body of usurtoss in the first. Does Amenam Hayat I or Amenam Hayat II repose in the other? We know at all events that usurtoss in the second built for himself the Pyramid of Ilahun, and Amenam Hayat III that of Hawara. Hotpoo, the tomb of usurtoss in the second, stood upon a rocky hill at a distance of some two thousand feet from the cultivated lands. To the east of it lay a temple, and close to the temple a town, Hayat usurtoss in Hotpoo, the castle of the repose of usurtossin, which was inhabited by the workmen employed in building the Pyramid, who resided there with their families. The remains of the temple consists of scarcely anything more than the enclosing wall, whose sides were originally faced with fine white limestone covered with hieroglyphs and sculptured seams. It adorned the wall of the town, and the neighboring quarters are almost intact. The streets were straight and crossed each other at right angles, while the houses on each side were so regularly built that a single policeman could keep his eye on each thoroughfare from one end to the other. The structures were of rough material hastily put together, and among the debris are to be found portions of older buildings, stella, and fragments of statues. Chapter 3 The first Theban Empire, Part XI. The town began to dwindle after the pharaoh had taken possession of his sepulcher. It was abandoned during the Thirteenth Dynasty, and its ruins were entombed in the sand which the wind heaped over them. The city which Aminam Hayat III had connected with his tomb maintained, on the contrary, a long existence in the course of the centuries. The king's last resting-place consisted of a large sarcophagus of Kortso's Standstone, while his favorite consort, Noferiq Ta, reposed beside him in a smaller coffin. The sepulcher chapel was very large, and its arrangements were of a somewhat complicated character. It consisted of a considerable number of chambers, some tolerably large, and others of moderate dimensions, while all of them were difficult of access and plunged in perpetual darkness. This was the Egyptian labyrinth, to which the Greeks, by a misconception, have given a world-wide renown. Aminam Hayat III, or his architects, had no intention of building such a childish structure as that in which classical traditions so fervently believed. He had richly endowed the attendant priests, and bestowed upon the cult of his double considerable revenues, and the chambers above mentioned were so many storehouses for the safekeeping of the treasure and provisions for the dead, and the arrangement of them was not more singular than that of ordinary storage depots. As his cult persisted for a long period, the temple was maintained in good condition during a considerable time. It had not, perhaps, been abandoned when the Greeks first visited it. The other sovereigns of the Twelfth Dynasty must have been interred not far from the tombs of Aminam Hayat III and Yusuf Tassan II. They also had their pyramids, of which we may one day discover the site. The outline of these was almost the same as that of the Memphite pyramids, but the interior arrangements were different. As at Ilhoun and Dasher, the mass of the work consisted of crude bricks of large size, between which spined sand was introduced to bind them solidly together, and the hole was covered with a facing of polished limestone. The passages and chambers were not arranged on the simple plan which we meet with in the pyramids of earlier date. Experience had taught the pharaohs that neither granite walls nor the multiplication of barriers could preserve their mummies from profanation. No sooner was the vigilance relaxed, either in the time of civil war or under feeble administration, than robbers appeared on the scene, and boring passages through the masonry with the ingenuity of moles, they at length, after indefatagable patience, succeeded in reaching the sepulcher vault and despoiling the mummy of its valuables. With a view to further protection, the builders multiplied blind passages and chambers without apparent exit, but in which a portion of the ceiling was movable, and gave access to other equally mysterious rooms and corridors. Shafts sunk in the corners of the chambers and again carefully closed to put the sacrilegious intruder on a false scent, for after causing him a great loss of time and labor they only led down to the solid rock. At the present day the water of the Nile fills the central chamber of the Hawara pyramid and covers the sarcophagus. It is possible that this was foreseen, and that the builders counted on the infiltration as an additional obstacle to depredations from without. The hardness of the cement, which fastens the lid of the stone coffin to the lower part, protects the body from damp, and the pharaoh, lying beneath several feet of water, still defies the greed of the robber or the zeal of the archaeologist. The absolute power of the kings kept their feudal vassals in check. Far from being suppressed, however, the seniorial families continued not only to exist, but to enjoy continued prosperity. Everywhere, at Elephantine, Coptos, Thinus, and Aphroditopolis, and in most of the cities of the Syed and of the Delta, there were ruling princes who were descended from the old feudal lords or even from pharaohs of the Memphite period, and who were of equal, if not superior rank, to the members of the reigning family. The princes of Syed no longer enjoyed an authority equal to that exercised by their ancestors under the Herakliapolitan dynasties, but they still possessed considerable influence. One of them, Hapuzelphi I, excavated for himself in the reign of Eustertas I, not far from the burying place of Qiti and Tafabi, that beautiful tomb, which though partially destroyed by Coptic monks or Arabs, still attracts visitors and excites their astonishment. The lords of Shashapu in the South, and those of Hermopolis in the North, had acquired to some extent the ascendancy which their neighbors of Syed had lost. The Hermapolitan princes dated at least from the time of the Sixth Dynasty, and they had passed safely through the troublest times which followed the death of Papi II. A branch of their family possessed the Nome of the Hare, while another governed that of the Gazelle. The lords of the Nome of the Hare espoused the Theven cause, and were reckoned among the most faithful vassals of the Sovereigns of the South. One of them, Thotatpu, caused a statue of himself worthy of a pharaoh to be erected in his loyal town of Hermopolis, and their burying places at El Bershia bear witness to their power no less than to their taste in art. During the troubles which put an end to the Eleventh Dynasty, a certain Kanum Hapu, who was connected in some unknown manner with the lords of the Nome of the Gazelle, entered the Theven service and accompanied Amenham High at the first on his campaigns into Nubia. He obtained, as a reward of faithfulness, Manet Kafui and the district of Kuit Horu, the horizon of Horus, on the East Bank of the Nile. On becoming possessed of the Western Bank also, he entrusted the government of the district which he was giving up to his eldest son, Nikiti the First, but the latter having died without heirs, Yusurtas in the First granted to Bikit, the sister of Nikiti, the rank and prerogative of a reigning princess. Bikit married Nuri, one of the princes of Hermopolis, and brought with her as her dowry the fiefdom of the Gazelle, thus doubling the possessions of her husband's house. Kanum Hapu II, the eldest of the children born of this union, was, while still young, appointed governor of Manet Kafui, and this title appears to have become an appendage of his heir apparent, just as the title of Prince of Kaushu was, from the nineteenth dynasty onwards, the special designation of the heir to the throne. The marriage of Kanum Hapu II with the useful Kiti, heiress of the Nome of the Jackal, rendered him master of one of the most fertile provinces of Middle Egypt. The power of this family was further augmented under Nikiti II, son of Kanum Hapu II and Kiti. Nikiti, prince of the Nome of the Jackal in right of his mother, and lord of that of the Gazelle after the death of his father, received from Yusurtas in the second the administration of fifteen southern nomads, from Aphroditopolis to Thebes. This is all we know of his history, but it is probable that his descendants retained the same power and position for several generations. The career of these dignitaries depended greatly on the pharaohs with whom they were contemporary. They accompanied the royal troops on their campaigns, and with the spoil which they collected on such occasions they built temples or erected tombs for themselves. The tombs of the princes of the Nome of the Gazelle are disposed along the right bank of the Nile, and the most ancient are exactly opposite Menea. It is at Zawet el-Mietin and at Komel Amar, nearly facing Hibonu, their capital, that we find the burying places of those who lived under the sixth dynasty. The custom of taking the dead across the Nile had existed for centuries, from the time when the Egyptians first cut their tombs in the eastern range. It still continues to the present day, and part of the population of Menea are now buried, year after year, in the places which their remote ancestors had chosen as the site of their eternal houses. The cemetery lies peacefully in the center of the sandy plain at the foot of the hills. A grove of palms, like a curtain drawn along the riverside, partially conceals it. A Coptic convent and a few Mohammedan hermits attract around them the tombs of their respective followers, Christian or Muslim. The Rockune tombs of the twelfth dynasty succeeded each other in one long, irregular line along the cliffs of Menehasan, and the traveler on the Nile sees their entrances continuously coming into sight and disappearing as he goes up or descends the river. These tombs are entered by a square aperture, varying in height and width according to the size of the chapel. Two only, those of Ammoni Aminam Hyatt and of Canoom Hopu II, have a columned façade, of which all the members, pillars, bases, and tablatures have been cut in the solid rock. The polygonal shafts of the façade look like a bad imitation of ancient Doric. Inclined plains or flights of steps, like those at Elephantine, formerly led from the plain up to the terrace. Only a few traces of these exist at the present day, and the visitor has to climb the sandy slope as best he can. Wherever he enters, the walls present to his view inscriptions of immense extent, as well as civil, sepulchre, military, and historical scenes. These are not in size like those of the Memphite mastabas, but are painted in fresco on the stone itself. The technical skill here exhibited is not a whit behind that of the older periods, and the general conception of the subjects has not altered since the time of the pyramid-building kings. The object is always the same, namely, to ensure wealth to the double in the other world, and to enable him to preserve the same rank among the departed as he enjoyed among the living. Hence sowing, reaping, cattle-wearing, the exercise of different trades, the preparation and bringing of offerings, are all represented with the same minuteness as formerly. But a new element has been added to the ancient themes. We know, and the experience of the past is continually reiterating the lesson, that the most careful precautions and the most conscientious observation of customs were not sufficient to perpetuate the worship of ancestors. The day was bound to come when not only the descendants of Kanum Hapu, but a crowd of curious or indifferent strangers, would visit his tomb. He desired that they should know his genealogy, his private and public virtues, his famous deeds, his court titles and dignities, the extent of his wealth, and in order that no detail should be omitted he relates all that he did, or he gives the impression of it upon a wall. In a long account of two hundred and twenty-two lines he gives a resume of his family history, introducing extracts from his archives to show the favors received by his ancestors from the hands of their sovereigns. Many Enkiti, who were, it appears, the warriors of their race, have everywhere recounted the episodes of their military career, the movements of their troops, their hand-to-hand fights, and the fortresses to which they laid siege. The scions of the house of the gazelle and of the hare, who shared with Pharaoh himself the possession of the soil of Egypt, were no mere princely ciphers. They had a tenacious spirit, a war-like disposition, and insatiable desire for enlarging their borders, together with sufficient ability to realize their aims by court intrigues or advantageous marriage alliances. We can easily picture from their history what Egyptian feudalism really was, what were its component elements, what were the resources it had at its disposal, and we may well be astonished when we consider the power intact which the pharaohs must have displayed in keeping such vassals in check during two centuries. End of Section 35, read by Professor Heather Mbae. For more free audiobooks or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org.