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than among the neighbouring nations. The cities were fortified with moats, and walls, and wooden towers. Their standards were figures of animals raised on poles. The foot soldiers were chiefly archers, but some were armed with spears, some with battle-axes, and some only with clubs (see Fig. 94). The spears and arrows were tipped with metal. The men marched some in loose ranks, and others in a close square phalanx with the locked step; and the chiefs, like Homer's heroes, fought in chariots before the rest. Their best troops also fought in two-wheeled chariots drawn by a pair of horses; for though unarmed men sometimes rode on horseback, the horses in Egypt had not yet been bred large enough and strong enough to carry armed soldiers into battle. The chariots usually held three men, one to drive, and two to fight (see Fig. in p. 57); but the king's sons rode with only one companion in the chariot, and the king always rode alone (see Fig. 95). These war

Fig. 95.

chariots and war-horses were the best known; and a little later Solomon supplied his army with them from 1 Kings, Egypt. An Egyptian chariot cost him six hundred ch. x. 28. shekels of silver, or about eighty pounds sterling. An Egyptian horse cost him about a quarter of that sum.

(38) The sculptured walls explain to us not only the art of war, but also the unhappy moral feelings with which it was carried on and brought to a close. There was little or

no law of nations to soften its horrors. The only maxim agreed between them was, Woe to the conquered. We see no ceremonies of proclaiming war before it was begun; but the ceremony with which it was closed was counting out before the monarch the hands or other mutilated limbs to prove the number of his foes that had been put to death. On the Assyrian monuments we see that during the siege of a fortress, when a prisoner is taken, he is impaled alive on a stake, to warn the garrison of the fate that awaits them. The Egyptians were perhaps not so cruel. Among all nations slavery, with its accompanying horrors, was the lot of a

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weaker neighbour; but even in the case of an enemy conquered in battle it was by the Egyptians sometimes allowed to stand in place of the more triumphant cruelty of slaughter.

Letters.

(39) The temples, obelisks, and statues of Rameses II. are found in all parts of Egypt and Ethiopia. Egypt now ranked by means of its buildings as far before all other nations, as Greece did, ten centuries later, by means of its writings. A temple at Napata, at the foot of Lepsius's Mount Barkal, dedicated by him to his patron god, Amun-Ra, assures us that the kingdom of Egypt now reached southward to the fourth cataract. The large temple at Abou Simbel, in Nubia, near the second cataract, was hollowed out of the sandstone rock in this reign. The sculpture there is the grandest of any to the south of Egypt, but the Ethiopian artist did not give to the human figure the just proportions that we admire in the Theban statues. Four broad-limbed colossal statues of the king sit with their backs against the rock, and ornament the doorway (see Fig. 96). The inside is wholly dark. The figures in the great hall are dimly lighted up when the morning gleam is thrown in by the golden sand without; but the painted sculptures in the rooms beyond were never seen but by torchlight. It was dedicated to Amun-Ra, the Sun, and it sheltered the priests from the scorching rays of the god, while with their prayers they endeavoured to turn aside his punishment from the parched land (see Ground Plan, Fig. 97, and Section, Fig. 98). In these temples at Abou Simbel, Rameses is sometimes represented as worshipping the god with the head of the square-eared dog, a divinity who was still respected in Ethiopia, although in Thebes his worship had been discontinued in the middle of the last reign. But even here he was soon to lose his honours, and his name and form were to be chiselled off the wall. This probably took place before the end of this king's reign.

(40) In Egypt the priests had long since left off using caves in the side of the mountain for their temples; such caves were now only used for burial-places, as at Benihassan (see Fig. 10). But the Ethiopians still followed the old fashion; and this larger temple at Abou Simbel is the finest work of the kind. Other Ethiopian temples are partly built, and partly hollowed out of the rock, like the old temple at Sarbout ei Cadem, near Sinai (see Fig. 33). The older and more holy part is a dark cave, while the newer and larger part is built of squared stones, and copied from the

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