in the neighborhood of Memphis. The sixth dynasty, evidently another line, if it did not transfer the royal seat to Middle Egypt, certainly has left more memorials of its subjects there, and at Abydos in the Thebaïd. Then the Egyptian memoir is first found, thenceforward to be our most precious source of history.
It is worth while to see how the Egyptian memoir had its origin. The purpose of all the sculptures and inscriptions of the pyramid age is historical. They embody the wish of the old Egyptian who caused them to be graven, that all should know what he was and what he did, not in a vainglorious sense, but with the natural desire to record good service. It is indicative of the growth of this idea that the oldest memoirs only speak of service to the king, and careful and just administration; but the later ones dwell in addition on services to the people, each governor being specially anxious for the well-being of his province.
The first, and in some respects the most important, of the memoirs, is that of Una, which tells us almost all we know of the history of the sixth dynasty. The writer was a great officer under three kings, whom he probably served for at least sixty years, perhaps much longer. Like many of the earlier Egyptians, he attained high office in youth, and held it in old age. The story of Joseph finds its parallel in the selection of young men of character and talent for the highest offices; and yet the wisdom of experience is not seen to be undervalued in ancient Egypt.
The story of Una shows a change in the national instincts. In earlier times there is no hint of foreign wars. The older Pharaohs are not known to have attempted any expedition against their neighbors. They maintained the frontiers, but we do not find any record telling us that they crossed them except to establish and hold against the natives mining-stations in the peninsula of Sinai. But under the sixth dynasty foreign expeditions were undertaken. Whether they arose from a threatened invasion, or whether ambition prompted them, we do not know. The story reads as if there was danger on the borders. Una made a levey en masse of the Egyptians, and tributary negro states, which now appear for the first time, contributed a contingent, which all the Egyptian officials, including the priests, were ordered to drill. A series of successful expeditions by land, and one by water, were carried out. All was under the direction of Una. Who the chief enemies were we know; they were "the dwellers on the sand;" but we fail to identify any later race or tribe with this designation. Probably they represent a great pressure of Arab tribes, either driven by famine or attracted by the wealth of Egypt, into which the Arab race has never ceased to pour.
In the same memoir we see the first indication of the growth of Egyptian power in the south. In the land of the tributary negro princes, stations and dockyards are made for the purpose of supplying Egypt with timber. At this time the Ethiopian forests must have extended far north of the Atbara, or the Egyptians must have penetrated a great distance beyond the First Cataract to the south. A hint of the different character of the country in very early times is afforded by the name of the island of Elephantine, near the First Cataract, of which the meaning is the same in Egyptian as in Greek, for when the elephant was found so far north there must have been forests at no great distance. The subsequent change in the level of the Nile, which before the empire was much higher in the upper Thebaïs and lower Nubia, may have had something to do with a general modification of the productions of the country.
We find this great officer of state, Una, whose last post was that of governor of Upper Egypt, occupied in the duty of conveying stones from the quarries for royal buildings, and we observe that the first care of a new king was to provide himself with a block of alabaster for a sarcophagus.
With the beautiful queen Nitocris, the subject of many legends, the sixth dynasty either ended or lost all power. It was she who appears to have enlarged the third pyramid, as a tomb for herself, and to have cased it wholly with red granite of Syene, making it worthy of its name, "the Superior." In Greek tradition she is confused with Rhodopis, and by the Arabs she was thought, in the Middle Ages, still to haunt her burial-place as an evil fairy who lured the wayfarer into the desert to his destruction.
One of the chasms of Egyptian history follows the sixth dynasty. Other Memphite kings then ruled, a rival or later royal house arose at Heracleopolis, either the town of that name in Middle Egypt or that in Lower Egypt, and we have no records but the names of kings in later royal lists, which we cannot assign to any dynasty. Contemporary monuments fail us until the rise of the Theban house, when
