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The Queen Nofre-Ari: Rameses

At these words, Rameses having seized the crown upon the altar to place it on his head, the high priest stretched forth his pastoral staff toward the four quarters of the globe, and while the assistant pontiffs set at liberty four living geese which, kept in reserve until that moment, represented the genii of the four cardinal points of the compass, he exclaimed: "Amset, Hapi Dawu-Mutef and Keba-snuf, Go ye toward The South, the North, the West, the East, And tell the gods of those regions That Horus, the son of Isis and of Asiri, Has put the Pshent upon his forehead, That King Rameses has put on the Pshent!"

His head encircled with this mystic tiara, Mei- Amoun had, then, to cut with his own hands a stalk of wheat which had grown within one of the enclosures of the temple, and to place it upon the altar of Ammon. This offering and the reading aloud by the high-priest of certain sealed rules relative to the duties and conduct of kings terminated the religious ceremony. Rameses was then escorted with the white bull and the images of the ancestral Kings, back to the exterior limits of the temple, and, amid a cloud of incense and flowers, regained the naos that was awaiting him in front of the pylons; then, preceded and followed with acclamations, oaths of fidelity and universal expressions of interest and regard, he advanced slowly to his palace, between two rows of sphinxes whose granite heads, that day adorned with ornaments and a royal or divine head-dress which determined the symbolical expression of each of them, seemed to become animated with the breath of human enthusiasm and rise up to salute the new sovereign as he passed by. Such were the grand official pageants of Egypt fourteen centuries before Jesus Christ.

The Egyptian monarchs celebrated, during their entire reign, the anniversary of their coronation, by a ceremony of the same kind, less imposing no doubt than the first, but invested, by the events of the year, with more or less interest and distinction. VIII.