the British Museum. One is in a group of the king with the god Chem, who holds his arm over him as his guardian; in the other, the king is himself in the character of Hapimou, the Nile god.

Α

II

Fig. 69.

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N

(24) As the neighbourhood of the Phenicians had a good deal changed the eastern half of the Delta, so the western half was not a little coloured by Greek civilisation. It would seem that there had been from the earliest times an important settlement of Greek traders, or pirates, near Sais, in the Delta, who carried on the Egyptian trade on the Mediterranean. They lived under their own laws and magistrates, and made themselves independent of the kings of Egypt; and Manetho, seeing that, like the Phenicians, they had gained a forcible settlement, calls them Greek shepherds, without noticing the difference in their Manetho. way of life. He gives to their petty chiefs the name of kings; and says that they reigned in Egypt for upwards of five hundred years. The overthrow of this little state probably took place in the reign of Amunmai Anemneb, and the chiefs driven out of Egypt carried with them to Greece so much that was valuable of Egyptian science and civilisation, that many of the Grecian cities dated their foundation from their arrival. The fabulous or halffabulous founders, Erech- lib. v. 58. theus of Athens, Cadmus of Boeotian Thebes, and Danaus of the whole Greek nation, were said to have then arrived from Egypt. But whatever may have been the names of the heroes driven away from Sais, they gave to Greece its architecture and some of its mythology, and the knowledge of an alphabet (see Fig. 69); and so willing were the Greeks at all times to look back to Lower Egypt as the birth-place of their civilisation, that, instead of seeing that a handful of Greeks had

A

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F

H☺

K

AL

OP

σ

Y

Φ

X

I v Greek Letters, with their Hiero

glyphic originals.

Diod. Sic.

lib. i. 28.

in old times settled in the Delta, they thought Athens itself a colony from Sais. Thus, at this period of Egyptian history, when we have traced the chronology of the Theban kings for many hundred years, we are only entering on the fabulous ages of Greece, about four generations before the Trojan war, a war by which the Greeks of the Peloponnesus, who were then becoming more settled, undertook to punish the piracies of their neighbours on the coast of Asia Minor. From Egypt, the Greeks borrowed many of their religious opinions about the state of the soul after death, as we see from the Egyptian words which had been taken into the Greek language even before the time of Homer. From Charo, silent, they took the name of Acheron, the river in hell, and Charon, the boatman on that river; from Amenti, the place of the dead, Rhad-amanthus, the king of the dead; from King Menes, Minos, another judge of the dead; from Kabiri, the punishing gods, the dog Cerberus; and from Thmei, justice, Themis, the goddess of justice. The Egyptians, like the

Diod. Sic.

lib. i. 67. Hindoos, looked on the sea, and

voyages by sea, with religious dread, and they held all seafaring persons in dislike as impious. This increased the natural jealousy with which they guarded the mouths of the river, and drove these

Virgil,

Fig. 70.

Georg. ii. 5. foreigners, who were more often pirates than merchants, from their inhospitable coast, and it gave

rise to the tradition that they burned all shipwrecked strangers upon the altar of Busiris. It was not till the seat of government was moved to Sais, that the people of Lower Egypt, who in blood, as in their prejudices, were half Phenicians, ventured on foreign trade, or had any willing intercourse with their Mediterranean neighbours.

(25) RAMESES I. (see Fig. 70) reigned

Tablet of

Fig. 71.

next; but we know nothing of him but his tomb ir. Abydos. the valley of kings' tombs near Thebes.

Thebes.

Wilkinson, (26) The name of his son and successor is variously written in the hieroglyphics.

One of the more usual forms is Osirimenpthah, or OIMENEPTHAH (see Fig.

71); and it may be at the same time the name Osymundyas of the historian Diodorus, and Ammenephthes of Tablet of Manetho, and Chomaeptha of Eratosthenes. At Abydos.

one time, the first letter in his name was a sitting Abyssinian dog, with large square ears and upright bushy tail (see Fig. 72). This was the vowel A or O. But later in his

Fig. 72.

reign, on some change in religion or politics, this dog was ordered to be chiselled out of all his inscriptions from the south of Ethiopia to Tanis in the Delta. In its place was carved either a hawk for an A, or a sitting figure of the god Hence the difficulty about his name. In his tomb it is spelt with the sitting Osiris.

Fig. 73.

Osiris for an O.

(27) Thebes being no longer the chief city of a province, but now the capital. of the whole kingdom, was steadily increasing in size. and magnificence. There Oimen- Wilkinson, epthah built a new temple at Rebek, now the village of Quorneh, which, though smaller than some of the Theban temples, is built upon what may be called

Thebes.

each is between two lofty towers, which guard the entrance; and each court is crossed between double rows of sphinxes. This leads to the portico of ten columns (see Fig. 74),

behind which is a hall; and out of the latter are the passages into the several rooms on each side and beyond. The portico in this temple is open to the view of all who had been admitted into the courtyard, whereas we shall see in

those built afterwards that the spaces between the columns were closed with a dwarf wall, so that the profane vulgar could no longer see what took place within. Oimenepthah also added the great Hall of Columns to the temple of Karnak; and the sculptures on its walls are in the best style of Egyptian art. We may there see painted in the liveliest colours the king's conquest of the people whom we have before called Lydians. He drives his chariot into the thickest of the fight (see Fig. 75). He storms their city

among the mountains, and leads back his prisoners in triumph to the temple of Amun-Ra. The River Nile is known in the picture by the crocodiles swimming about in it; and the bridge over it is perhaps the earliest met with in history. This king also built a temple and a palace at Abydos, once the capital and then the second city of Upper Egypt. Here he sculptured a list of the kings his predecessors on the throne, to the number of seventy-five, but of these the fiftyseven earlier can claim no place in history. They have left no monuments, and which of them ever reigned in Thebes, or even ever lived, must remain doubtful. The temple was dedicated to Osiris; and the palace, taking its name from the next king, who finished it, was by the Greeks called the