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Eygpt 3300 Years Ago

daily augmenting the chances of existence already so easy on a fertile soil and beneath a smiling sky. And, while all these causes combined were making the agricultural and industrial classes of Egypt the most laborious and the most compact population then existing, on the other hand, the military castes, trained to warfare from generation to generation by a series of successful distant expeditions, presented in its real effective force, and in that alleged in the exaggerated figures handed down to us by the writers of Greece and Rome,* the most martial, the best armed and the most formidable mass of combatants known to those ancient times. Such elements of greatness, taken together with the youth of Mei-Amoun and his natural ardor, excited, as it was, in the highest degree by his first triumphs in war, and by the example of his father, ren ler it needless for us to search, with the legendary historians, in the oracles of the gods or the interpretation of dreams, the motives of his ambition and his conquests. * We cannot admit the 700,000 armed men spoken of in the recital of the Theban priests to Germanicus (See the Annals of Tacitus) any more readily than the picked force of 640,000 reported by Diodorus. Either of these accounts would make the numbers of the entire caste amount to from two to three millions of individuals, and that is excessive. See Appendix VII. Moreover, at that time, great disorders were agitating the East, and the noise of their distant tumults could not but re-echo as far as the borders of the Nile. In the great irruptions that Seti I. had guided toward Central Asia, he had repeatedly come into collision with the confederation of the Khetas, in whose title seem to lie concealed both that of the old Hycsos and the more modern name of the Scythians. From the gorges of the Taurus and the Lebanon mountains, where they had established their citadels and the centre of their power, these ancient wandering races presided over the great movements of the Oriental populations which the religious or social convulsions of Upper Asia were incessantly detaching from the antique Aryan throne, and continually recruited their numbers with fresh swarms. There was reason to apprehend that, ere long, all these torrents of men would follow the descending channel worn for them by former migrations, and, like them, pour down and inundate Egypt. To await their attacks was dangerous. It was better to hasten to meet them and to hurl them back toward the sources whence they came, or, at all events, to break the force of the stream, and scatter its ramifications over the earth. Thus, no doubt, thought Mei-Amoun, and from the modern point of view, we cannot but agree with him.

According to Diodorus, whom, we think, we can take for our guide in this matter, Mei-Amoun prepared himself for his great enterprise by such acts as were most likely to give his popularity deep root in the minds of his subjects. In order to feel assured of the fidelity of those whom he was to leave behind him on the soil of his country, and to make certain of the indomitable perseverance of the companions in arms selected to follow him, he strove to link them to his destiny by the ties of interest and of gratitude. Affable and cordial with all, he displayed a liberality equal to his unlimited power. He overwhelmed some with gifts; to others he distributed lands, while to still others, again, he remitted the fines and penalties they had incurred, and gave liberty to all prisoners of State, and all who had been incarcerated for debt, of whom the multitude then overstocked the jails.* The population and area of the Empire increasing from reign to reign, and necessitating a new territorial division, he fixed the number of nomes or provincial governments† at thirty-six, and placed at the head of each, to preside over the local ad- * See Diodorus, Book I. † M. Brougsch, who very naturally, will have it that this administrative division of Egypt dates back to a period ministration and the collection of taxes, men whose reputation or hereditary attachment to his dynasty recommended them the most to his confidence.

One of the first results of this scheme having been an exact census of the military caste, he was enabled to raise from its midst an army composed of men who were the most robust and the most capable of supporting the long fatigues and perilous chances of distant or unknown climes. He gave them for leaders the playmates of his childhood and the comrades who had shared the exploits of his early youth. All of them, like himself, full of ardor and ambition and inured to warlike exercises, were bound to each other by fraternal ties of which the common bond was an absolute devotion to Mei-Amoun, who, at the expense of the treasures amassed by his ancestors, and the regions annexed to the domains of the crown by previous conquests, had provided for their pecuniary welfare sufficiently to leave them free from any other anxieties than those of war.* much anterior to Rameses, raises the number of nomes to forty-four, equally divided between Upper and Lower Egypt. He confesses, however, that concerning many nomes of this latter part of the Egyptian territory, he still felt some lingering uncertainty, the solution of which demands fresh researches and discoveries. * Diodorus Book I, ch. LIV.

AFTER having thus regulated the organization of the interior, and of the army, Mei-Amoun had still to provide for the security of the frontiers during the whole period of his projected absence, on his distant expeditions. On the western side, his possession of the oases, maintained by fortified posts, and the immensity of the desert, dispelled the idea of all serious danger. On the north, the carefully secured and guarded locks and barriers that closed the seven mouths of the Nile, sufficed to prevent the rovers of the Mediterranean from penetrating into Egypt, and the natives from leaving it. The Isthmus of Suez, the point of both departure and arrival for all the Asiatic routes, and partly covered by the Bitter Lakes which, at the epoch in question, every high tide still put in communication with the neighboring gulf, was moreover sheltered from all attack by the numerous military establishments that were to serve as a base for the warlike operations toward the East that Rameses was planning. There remained the districts on the south, ever exposed to the descents of the savage hordes belonging to the bad race of Cush, and the Sea-Weed Lake, the way to which the monsoons of the Indian Ocean had taught to the Pelasgians from the banks of the Indus and the Nerbudda. Always in quest of adventure and pillage, as their brethren of the Ægæar Sea and of the open Ocean were to be, after an interval of many centuries, they frequently came thither to gather booty, sometimes as traders but oftener as pirates.

To remedy this double inconvenience, two things seemed necessary to Mei-Amoun;-the subjugation of Upper Ethiopia and the establishment of a military marine which, riding supreme on the wa ters of the Arabian Gulf, should, in maintaining the security of the two shores, guarantee the communications that trade and the working of the copper mines on the peninsula of Tor had kept open between them for several centuries. These two enterprises were interlinked, because the soil of Egypt and of Lower Nubia lacking timber fit for naval construction, it was necessary to seek that material upon the broad plateaux watered by the tributaries of the great river above Meroe. Consequently, he penetrated those regions and traversed them in every direction, at the head of a continually victorious army, exacting tribute in gold, ivory, ebony, and building-timber from all the Ethiopian tribes extending from the Nile to the Red Sea, who, until then, had escaped the Egyptian yoke. Then, when the shipyards established in the ports subsequently named Adulis, Berenice and Leucos * had given him the first long vessels constructed by Egyptian hands,† he embarked upon the waters of the Arabian Gulf, and subdued its islands, and its shores as far as its southern extremity. The port of Mosselycus, situated not far from Cape Guardafui, and six hundred leagues from Thebes was, according to Pliny and Strabo, the extreme point reached by Rameses in that direction.‡ The mementoes of these events, precursors as they were of others on a grander scale, may still be deciphered on the ruins that cover Mount Barkal to the south of Nubia, as also among the broken remains of the Rameseum or great temple of Thebes, on the right bank. In one of the bas relief pictures of the speos of Ipsamboul, even the triumphal entry of Rameses into his capital, on his return from the regions of the south, has been made out.