Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/758

734 EGYPT [HISTORY. are of later date than Dynasty IV., if we may judge from their structure, and both of which from their size imply reigns of the greatest prosperity and of long duration. Pepi was succeeded by his son Merenra. The new king made Una governor of Upper Egypt, and employed him to bring blocks of granite from Elephantine for his pyramid, and in various other works of which the inscription already referred to gives most curious details. He was charged to obtain wood, which was provided by the prince of four Ethiopian nations already mentioned among those furnish ing negroes to the great army of Pepi. We thus learn that tributary Ethiopia was ruled by a native prince or princes under the governor of Upper Egypt, who also had the power of establishing posts in the dependency. Una made four docks and timber-yards in Ethiopia for build ing boats, and attached a chapel to each. We may thus expect to find some record of Egyptian rule at this early time, long before the complete reduction of Lower Nubia, in territories far south ; for the timber-growing country does not begin for some distance within the tropics. Merenra was followed by his younger brother Neferkara, and, according to Manetho, the dynasty ended with the beautiful Queen Nitocris, whose name appears in the Turin Papyrus, but whose exact historical place is not certain. If she was buried in the Third Pyramid, of which Manetho, according to the copyists, makes her the builder, she enlarged the original work of Mencheres, and certainly no pyramid is so evidently not merely a double structure but one of double design. Nitocris is almost the only Egyptian whose historical character has been lost in a succession of legends. One version of her story is the most ancient form of that of Cinderella ; in another, she still bewitched the Arab of the Middle Ages when he approached her pyramid (cf. Maspero, Hist. Anc., 94). With the later part of Dynasty VI. the second great chasm in Egyptian history begins, and we have no monu ments to guide us imtil the time of Dynasty XL Accord ing to Manetho, Dynasties VII. and VIII. were of Mem- phites, and IX. and X. of Heracleopolites, the Diospolite or Theban line comprising Dynasties XL, XII., and XIII. Whether the dynasties which intervened between the Vlth and Xllth were contemporary or successive, and how much time they occupied, cannot yet be proved. In the Tablet of Abydos, a series of kings unknown from other monuments follows Dynasty VL, and precedes two kings of Dynasty XL In the Chamber of Kings of El-Karnak other and earlier kings of Dynasty XL are named, with curious indications that it was first but a local line. To the period of the earlier kings of Dynasty XL belongs Entef-aa, who reigned at least fifty years. It would appear that the Memphite kingdom waned, and that another line arose at Thebes, the house of the Entefs and Mentuhoteps. The power of these kings gradually increased, and at last one of them reunited under a single rule the whole of Egypt. (Maspero, Hist. Anc., 98, 99.) Probably the Heracleopolite line, Dynasties IX., X., was a local house contemporary with the Memphites or Thebans, or both. With Dynasty XII. 1 the Theban line was firmly estab lished over all Egypt. In the circumstances referred to in the "Instructions" of Amenemhat L, its first king, to his son Usurtesen L, we have a glimpse into the unquiet condition of the country when the line arose (Id., 101). Similarly the custom of associating the heir apparent as king with his father, the peculiarity of this dynasty, indi cates the dangers that then siirrounded the throne (cf. Id. 105). It is to the grottoes of Benee-Hasan that we owe most of 1 The length of Dynasty XII. appears to have been 213 years 1 m. 24 1. (Lepsius, Ueber die Zwiilfte Aegypt-ische KOniysdynastic, Akad. Berl. 1853.) our knowledge of the manners and arts of Egypt under Dynasty XII., and much of its history is there told in the memoirs of a family of governors under the first five kings of this house. No one can have examined these beautiful tombs without being struck by the advance in architecture which they show, and the evidence of prosperity and cultivation afforded by their paintings. The subjects re semble those of the tombs of the earlier dynasties, but there is a greater variety, partly due to a more luxurious condition of society, partly to a more flexible art. It is sufficiently evident that the preceding dynasty (XL) cannot have been weak, and the country under its rule distracted. A time of prosperity must have preceded this bright period of Egyptian history. Amenemhat L, probably a successful minister of an earlier king (Brugsch, Hist., 2d ed., 79, 80, 84), had an active and prosperous reign, ruling like Pepi beyond Egypt to the south, and occupying himself in the construction of various monuments. As the head of a new line he paid special attention to the boundaries of territories, to the regulation of the inundation, and to the confirmation of hereditary governors (Benee-Hasan inscr. ; Brugsch, Hist., 2d ed., 94, 95). A very curious view of the state of Egypt in his time is given us by the story of Saneha in a hieratic papyrus of the Berlin Museum (translated by M. Goodwin, in Records of the Past, vi. 131, seqq.}. It is the history of an Egyptian who fled from the king and took refuge with a neighbouring prince, whose territory unhappily we cannot as yet determine, and after a long sojourn sought his sovereign s pardon and returned home to be taken into the favour of Amenemhat. The reception of tho fugitive abroad, his home-sickness, and the kindness of the Pharaoh, who at the same time is described in terms of the most abject respect, form an interesting picture, and one re markably illustrating several events in the history of Egypt. Under Usurtesen L, the co-regent and successor of Amenemhat L, Egypt had reached its highest prosperity after the age of the pyramid-builders of Dynasty IV. The obelisk which still marks the site of Heliopolis, a fragment of a statue at Tanis, inscriptions on the rocks of the Sinaitic peninsula, and a stele from Wadee Halfeh, recording foreign conquests in the south, now in the Naples Museum, attest the splendour of this reign. The records of private individuals are, however, its most instructive memorials. Mentuhotep has given us a picture of the power and status of an Egyptian prime minister, holding all or nearly all the functions of the members of a modern cabinet, a position singularly parallel to that of Joseph, to the detail that even great men bowed before him. To his stele we owe the in - formation that he gained successes against the Asiatics, tho Herusha, and the negroes. (Brugsch, Hist., 2d ed., 91, seqq.) Of Amenemhat II. and Usurtesen II., the next kings, there is little to relate but that Egypt continued to prosper. It was under Usurtesen III. that a great step in advance was made by the fixing of the boundaries of the Egyptian dominion beyond the Second Cataract, at Semneh and Kummeh, where this king built sanctuaries and fortresses, and placed great boundary-marks in the form of tablets. These in their inscriptions define the limits of the king dom, and regulate the passage of negroes by the river (/</., 102). Here and throughout Nubia, L T surtesen was worshipped in subsequent times. He had introduced a settled government into the country, which long after was virtually a part of Egypt rather than a dependency. His successor Amenemhat III. is chietiy famous for his great engineering works. That care which the first Amenemhut bestowed on the regulation of the inundation seems to have been the great object of his reign. The rocks of Semneh and

Kummeh bear registers of the height of the Nile in several