pl. 134.

be seen by the less holy laity without. Here the painted sculptures on the walls proclaim the king's victories over distant and neighbouring nations, and his triumphal Young's and religious processions at home. In one of the Hierogl. sculptures we see the king sitting in his chariot, pl. 15. Denon, after his victory over the Arabs, while his attendants are boastfully counting and writing down the thousands of hands that they have brought home as trophies of the enemies that they had slain in battle. The handcuffed prisoners who stand by are guarded by the Egyptian bowmen. In another place the king under a canopy, the god Chem, the bull Apis, and the ark, are borne along on men's shoulders, in a religious procession, accompanied by priests and soldiers. The procession of Rameses III., sitting under a canopy, and carried along on men's shoulders, helps us to the derivation of an English word. This canopy, we learn from a remark of Horace, was the frame upon which was stretched a gauze net to keep off the gnats and flies; though the gauze is not shown by the sculptor because of its transparency. Horace mentions

the shame felt by the Roman Epod. ix. soldiers in the service of the

16. luxurious Antony and Cleopatra, at having the royal gnat-gauze carried among the military standards of Rome. From Conops, a Gnat, it was named Conopium, and hence the word Canopy. The little regard which the Egyptians paid to regularity in their buildings is well shown by an addition which Rameses III. made to the great temple of Karnak. He broke down part of the wall on the west side of the front courtyard, and in the gap he built a small temple, half within the court and half outside (see Fig. 107). It has square towers, a courtyard, a portico, and inner

Fig. 105.

rooms of its own, but is in size only one twenty-fourth part of the temple of Karnak itself.

(48) By the inroads of Rameses III. through Palestine

into Syria and other parts of Asia, the power of the Philistines must have been again weakened. These warlike and well-armed people on the coast had 1 Samuel, hitherto been able to debar the Israelites from the use of iron for weapons; but during the reign of Saul they

ch. xiii. 19.

were no longer too powerful to be met in battle. If the Egyptian army now occupied any part of the country, no other mention of it is made in the Bible than the ch. xxiii. quarrel of one of the soldiers with a Hebrew peasant, though a

2 Samuel,

21.

an

1 Samuel, little earlier we ch. xxx. 11. meet with a poor Egyptian as slave to Amalekite and a starving wanderer in the land. The Egyptian troops, indeed, were probably often wanted at home. We gather from a few hints among the inscriptions that the sway of these great Theban kings was not wholly undisputed by the rest of Egypt. The trouble seems to have come from the cities on the eastern half of the Delta, where the Phenicians settled freely for purposes of trade, where the Phenician Shepherds may have left behind them a mixed race, and where the language spoken and the gods worshipped were not wholly the same as those either of the Thebaid or the western half of the Delta. Thothmosis III. styles himself conqueror of Mendes, showing that he was called upon to enforce obedience in that city within his own dominions. That was followed

Fig. 107.

by the ill-treatment of the Israelites under Moses in the same district. Then Thothmosis IV. styles himself Lord of Mendes. Amunothph III. also says he is Lord of Mendes, and particularly favoured by Pasht, the cat-headed goddess of

Bubastis. A little later the Greek settlers are driven by force of arms out of the west of the Delta. Then Oimenepthah I. styles himself Lord of San or Tanis, as if that city had claimed to be independent; and afterwards Rameses III. uses the same title. These notices are slight, but they are the only forerunners that we can find of the successful rebellion of the castern cities a century later, when Thebes yielded its unwilling obedience to Bubastis. For the west of the Delta it is even yet more clear that the people bore no love to the Theban kings. In the numerous tombs of the priests and nobles of Memphis, which have been opened in the neighbourhood of the pyramids-tombs of all ages-in none of them are the inscriptions dated by the reigns of the great kings of Thebes.

(49) The calendar on the walls of Medinet Abou shows that the Egyptian knowledge of astronomy had as Egypt. yet arrived at very little exactness. We there read Inscript. that the festival of the day of the Dog-star was the 2nd Series, pl. 57. first day of the month of Thoth, as it had been declared to be on the walls of the Memnonium one hundred years earlier, in the reign of

Rameses II.
they had not yet discovered the
want of a leap year, or remarked
that the new year's day had
become a month earlier between
these two reigns; and we must
not trust to either calendar as the
foundation of an exact calculation
in chronology.

Hence we see that

(50) The lid of the sarcophagus in which Rameses III. was buried is now in the museum at Cambridge. It is a slab of syenite, from the quarries near the first cataract. On it (see Fig. 108) is the king's figure sculptured in the form of a god between two goddesses, Isis and Nephthys; and as if he had himself on his

Fig. 108.

death been changed into a god with three characters, he has on

his head the sun of Amun-Ra, and the horns of Athor, and he holds in his hands the two sceptres of Osiris. He is thus a trinity in himself, while he is also the first person in another of the Egyptian trinities, of which the two other persons are Isis and her sister Nephthys.

Wilkinson,

(51) Rameses III. was followed by three sons of his own name, RAMESES IV., RAMESES V., and RAMESES VI.; Materia the first or second of whom was reigning at the Hierogl. time which the Alexandrian chronologists fixed on In Thebes they

Manetho. as the date of the Trojan war.

B.C. 1050.

carved their names upon the temples which had been built by their forefathers; but as their sculptures are never to be seen out of Thebes, we must suppose that their power was for the most part limited to that city, or at least to the Thebaid. These were followed by seven other Theban kings, of whom we know little but the names, and under whom Upper Egypt was falling, while Lower Egypt was rising in wealth and power. None of them held all Lower Egypt, and most of them were even vassals of the kings who then rose in Bubastis and Tanis. Here, as in other countries, on the growth of commerce the seat of government left the hills for the plains nearer the river's mouth. In Asia, Babylon was gaining in wealth and civilisation, what Nineveh two hundred and fifty miles further from the sea was losing; so henceforth the events in our history are to be traced, not among the hills of the Thebaid, but on the open plains of the Delta. Some nations have sunk when the framework of society has been undermined by vice and irreligion. This was not the case with the Thebans; they continued after their fall to be an earnest and devout people. Others have been conquered when several neighbouring states became united under one sceptre. Neither was this the case with Thebes. New and better weapons and discipline among the armies of the Delta may have been part of the cause of its fall. A lessened yield in the gold mines, and loss of wealth on the rise of the Mediterranean trade, may have been another part of the cause. A further cause of weakness in the Thebans arose from their castes, from that fixed line, drawn by religion and prejudice, between the upper and lower ranks of society, between the privileged soldiers and priests, and the unprivileged millions. The lower caste, the