gation was less easy, and when seas separated kingdoms instead of joining them, the Thebaid enjoyed, under the Coptic kings, the trading wealth which followed the stream of its great river, the longest piece of inland navigation then known; but with the improvement in navigation and shipbuilding, countries began to feel their strength in the timber of their forests and the number of their harbours; and, as timber and sea-coast were equally unknown in the Thebaid, that country fell as Lower Egypt rose; the wealth which before centered in Thebes was then found in the ports of the Delta, where the barges of the Nile met the ships of the Mediterranean. What used to be Egypt was an inland kingdom, bounded by the desert; but Egypt under Ptolemy was a country on the sea-coast. On the conquest of Phenicia and Cole-Syria, he was master of the forest of Lebanon and Antilibanus, and stretched his coast from Cyrene to Antioch, a distance of twelve hundred miles, and aimed at making Egypt a naval power. After this time, we note the increase of the timber trade with Asia Minor, or Phoenicia, or Cyprus by finding mummy cases made of wood foreign to Egypt.

(11) The wise and mild plans which were laid down by Alexander for the government of Egypt when a province, were easily followed by Ptolemy when it became his own kingdom. The Greek soldiers lived in their garrisons or in Alexandria under the Macedonian laws; while the Egyptian laws were administered by their own priests, who were upheld in all the rights of their order and in their freedom from land-tax. The temples of Pthah, of Amun-Ra, and the other gods of the country were not only kept open, but were repaired and even built at the cost of the king; the religion of the people, and not that of their rulers, was made the established religion of the state. On the death of the god Apis, the sacred bull of Memphis, the chief of the animals which were kept and fed at the cost of the several cities, and who had died of old age soon after Ptolemy came to Egypt, he spent the sum of fifty talents, or eight thousand five hundred pounds, on its funeral; and the priests, who had not forgotten that Cambyses, their former conqueror, had wounded the Apis of his day with his own sword, must have been highly pleased with this mark of his care for them. The burial

place for the bulls is an arched gallery tunnelled into the hill behind Memphis for more than two thousand feet, with a row of cells on each side of it. In every cell is a huge granite sarcophagus, within which were placed the earthly remains of a bull that had once been the Apis of its day, which after having for perhaps twenty years received the honours of a god, was there buried with more than kingly state. The cell was then walled up, and ornamented on the outside with various tablets in honour of the deceased animal, which were placed in these dark passages by the piety of his worshippers (see Fig. 210). The priests of Thebes were now at liberty to cut out from their monuments the names of Mandoo-Ra or other usurping gods, and to restore that of Amun-Ra, which

Thebes.

Fig. 210.

had been before cut out. They also rebuilt the Wilkinson, inner room, or the holy of holies, in the great temple of Karnak. It had been overthrown by the Persians in wantonness, or in hatred of the Egyptian religion; and the priests now put upon it the name of Philip Arridæus, for whom Ptolemy was governing Egypt.

(12) The Egyptians, who during the last two centuries had sometimes seen their temples plundered and their trade crushed by the grasping tyranny of the Persian satraps, and had at other times been almost as much hurt by their own vain struggles for freedom, now found themselves in the quiet enjoyment of good laws, with a prosperity which promised soon to equal that of the reigns of Necho or Amasis. It is true that they had not regained their independence and political liberty; that as compared with the Greeks they felt themselves an inferior race, and that they only enjoyed their civil rights during the pleasure of a Greek autocrat; but then it is to be remembered that the native rulers with whom Ptolemy was compared were the kings of Lower Egypt, who like himself were surrounded by Greek mercenaries, and who never rested their power on the broad base of national pride and love of country; and that nobody

could have hoped to see a Theban king arise to bring back the days of Thothmosis and Rameses. Thebes was every

day sinking in wealth and strength; and its race of hereditary soldiers, proud in the recollection of former glory, who had after centuries of struggles been forced to receive laws from Memphis, perhaps yielded obedience to a Greek conqueror with less pain than to their own vassals of Lower Egypt.

(13) Ptolemy's government was in form nearly the same in Alexandria as in the rest of Egypt, but in reality it was wholly different. His sway over the Egyptians was supported by Greek force, but over the Greeks it rested on the broad base of public opinion. Every Greek had the privilege of bearing arms, and of meeting in the Gymnasium in public assembly, to explain a grievance and petition for its redress. The citizens and the soldiers were the same body of men; they at the same time held the force and had the spirit to use it. But they had no senate, no body of nobles, no political constitution which might save their freedom in after generations from the ambitious grasp of the sovereign, or from their own degeneracy. While claiming to be equal among themselves they were making themselves slaves; and though at present the government so entirely bore the stamp of their own will that they might fancy they enjoyed a democracy, yet history teaches us that the simple paternal form of government never fails to become sooner or later a cruel tyranny. The building of Alexandria must be held the master-stroke of policy by which Egypt was kept in obedience. Here, and afterwards in a few other cities, such as Ptolemais in the Thebaid and Parembole in Nubia, the Greeks lived without insulting or troubling the Egyptians, and by their numbers held the country like so many troops in garrison. It was a wise policy to make no greater change than necessary in the kingdom, and to leave the Egyptians under their own laws and magistrates, and in the enjoyment of their own religion; and yet it was necessary to have the country garrisoned with Greeks, whose presence in the old cities could not but be extremely galling to the Egyptians. This was done by means of these new Greek cities, where the power by which Egypt was governed was stronger by being united, and less hateful by being out of sight. Seldom

or never was so great a monarchy founded with so little force and so little crime.

Morton's

(14) Ptolemy, however, did not attempt the difficult tas of uniting the two races, and of treating the conquered and the conquerors as entitled to the same privileges, a task which modern European humanity has the credit of first attempting. From the time of Necho and Psammetichus, many of the Greeks who settled in Egypt intermarried with the natives, and very much laid aside their own habits; and sometimes their offspring, after a generation or two, became wholly Egyptian. By the Greek laws the children of these mixed marriages were declared to be barbarians, not Greeks but Egyptians, and were brought up accordingly. They left the worship of Jupiter and Juno for that of Isis and Osiris, and perhaps the more readily for the greater earnestness with which the Egyptian gods were worshipped. Crania We now trace their descendants by the form of Egyptiaca. their skulls, even into the priestly families; and of one hundred mummies covered with hieroglyphics, taken up from the catacombs near Thebes, about twenty show an European origin, while of those from the tombs near Memphis, seventy out of every hundred have lost their Coptic peculiarities. It is easy to foresee that an important change would have been wrought in the character of the people and in their political institutions, if the Greek laws had been humane and wise enough to grant to the children of mixed marriages the privileges, the education, and thereby the moral feelings of the more favoured parent. Greek civilization, instead of struggling like a plant in foreign soil, would each generation have become more naturalised. This had been done by the Copts before the beginning of our history, if we are right in thinking that they were new-comers. They held all children equally legitimate; and though they marked the natives of the soil as a lower caste, yet they had brought all the nation to talk Coptic, and to receive the Coptic civilization. It was also done by the Arabs at the end of our history, who gave to all the nation the Arabic language and civilization. But it was not attempted by the Greeks; and, when we remember the fitness of the Greeks for founding colonies, and the ease with which the arts and customs of a conquering

and more civilised people have spread and been received, it is not too much to suppose, if the Greek law of marriage had been altered by Ptolemy, that within three centuries above half the nation would have spoken the Greek language, and boasted of its Greek origin. This wise mixture of races had indeed been planned by Alexander, as was learned from the papers which he left behind him. Diod. Sic. But history then taught no lessons which needed the observation of centuries, and Ptolemy probably felt no necessity for interfering with these prejudices of his countrymen, nor could he have been aware that the permanency of his new kingdom could in any way depend upon the law of marriage.

lib. xviii. 4.

Strabo, lib. xvii.

(15) The building of the city of Alexandria, which was begun before the death of Alexander, was carried on briskly by Ptolemy, though many of the public works were only finished in the reign of his son. It was placed on a strip of land between the sea and the Lake Mareotis, where hitherto the ibis had walked at leisure, disturbed only by the few fishermen of the neighbouring village of Rhacotis. The citizens pleased themselves with remarking that its ground-plan was in the form of a soldier's cloak. The two main streets crossed one another at right angles in the middle of the city, which was thirty stadia or three miles long, and seven stadia broad; and the whole of the streets were wide enough for carriages. In front of the city was a long narrow island named Pharos, which in the piercing mind of Alexander only needed a little help from art to become the breakwater of a large harbour. Accordingly one end of the island of Pharos was joined to the mainland by a stone mole seven stadia or nearly threequarters of a mile long, which from its length was called the Heptastadium. There were two breaks in the mole to let the water pass, without which perhaps the harbour might have become blocked up with sand; and bridges were thrown over these two passages, while the mouth of the harbour was between the mainland and the other end of the island. Most of the public buildings of the city fronted the harbour. Among these were the royal docks for building the ships of war; the Emporium or exchange, which had, by the favour of its founder, gained the privileges which before belonged