with difficulty, are silent about their deeds. The hour of Egypt's death had struck. No god had the power to grant the land the respite of a longer existence.

As the most remarkable monument of their times, we may point to a sarcophagus of dark granite, which belonged to a descendant of the last kings of the Thirtieth Dynasty. The inscriptions upon it have accurately preserved for us its owner's pedigree, as a valuable memorial of the former greatness of ancient Egypt. We subjoin it, according to the indications of the hieroglyphs, in the following translation:

nomarch of the district of Buto, Sebennytus and Tanis,

commander-in-chief of the king.

*The names thus marked are those of women. Nakhtnebef, 'the chief captain of his Majesty,' the grandson of the last Pharaoh, Nakhtnebef, had his last resting-place in that Berlin sarcophagus of stone. But who was his Majesty,' to whom he gave his service as commander? The question can only be answered approximately. As grandson of king Nakhtnebef, who reigned over the land from 358-340 B.C.,

1 Now in the Royal Museum at Berlin. [Another sarcophagus, which vies with this in beauty, is that of king Nakht-Hor-ib, in the British Museum.-ED.]

the end of his life falls about sixty years after his grandfather's death, and therefore about 280 B.C., that is, about fifty years after the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great. He could not therefore have served either him or his immediate successors, Philip Arrhidæus and Alexander II., as commander. We must rather reckon Ptolemy I. Soter, or Ptolemy II. Philadelphus, as his contemporary. From these calculations we should be already carried over into the history of Egypt under the Ptolemies.

As through a thin transparent mist, we cast a glance at the close of our historical subject-the climax and fall of the Pharaohs-with the perusal of the following inscription of an eminent priest, a contemporary of the Persian great king, Darius III., and of the hero Alexander of Macedon. His own words are engraved on a memorial stone, which is now preserved in the collection of Greek and Roman antiquities at Naples. The translation will form a fit conclusion to our History of Egypt according to the Monuments.

(1) The hereditary prince, the noble, one of the friends; the seer of Horus, the lord of Hibonu (Hipponon); the seer of the gods of the nome of Hibonu; the seer of the god Samtaui, of the city of (2) A-hehu: the chief seer of the goddess and the president of the priests of Sokhet in the whole land-SAMTAUI-TAFNAKHT- -the son of the temple-master and (3) seer of the god Amon-ra, the lord of the city Pi-sha, Nes-samtaui-auf-'ankh, and the child of his wife 'Ankhet: he speaks as follows:

O thou lord of the gods, Khnum, thou king of Upper and Lower Egypt, (4) thou prince of the land, at whose rising the world is enlightened, whose right eye is the sun's disk, whose left eye is the moon, whose spirit (5) is the beam of light, and out of whose nostrils comes the North wind, to give life to all.

'I was thy servant, who did according to thy will, and whose heart was replenished by thee. (6) I have not let any city be higher than thy city, I have not failed to impart of thy spirit to all the children of men among hundreds of thousands, which (spirit)

is the most wonderful in all houses, (7) day by day. Thou hast for this recompensed me good a hundred-thousandfold. Thus wast thou diffused everywhere, and (wast made) a leader for the king's house. The heart of the divine benefactor was moved to clemency (8) at my speech. I was exalted to be the first among hundreds of thousands. When thou turnedst thy back upon the land of Egypt, thou didst incline thyself in thy heart to the master of Asia. His (9) twice five friends loved me. He conferred on me the office of president of the priests of the goddess Sokhet on the seat of my mother's brother, the president of the goddess Sokhet (10) in Upper and Lower Egypt, Ser-honb. Thou didst protect me in the battle of the Ionians (i.e. the army of Alexander) when thou didst rout the Asiatic (Darius III.).

(11) They slew a hundred thousand at my side, (but) none lifted up his hand against me. When what befel had befallen, there was peace (12) afterwards. Thy Holiness spake to me: "Proceed to Khinensu (Heracleopolis Magna); I will be with thee; I will be thy guide among the foreign people."

(13) I was alone, I sailed up the great stream; I was not afraid, for I thought of thee. Since I did not transgress thy commandment, I reached the city of Khinensu (14) without having a hair of my head rumpled. And as was the beginning, only by the one appointment of thy decree, so also was the end, for thou gavest me a long life in peace of heart.

(15) O all ye priests, who serve this glorious god Khnum, the king of both worlds, the (god) Hormakhu, the lord of the universe, the good spirit in the city of Khinensu, (16) the (god) Tum in the city of Tanis, the king of the rams, the primordial male power, the Majesty of the ram, the male, the begetter, the last king of the kings of the land;-(17) the son, who loved the king of Upper and Lower Egypt, has departed to the heavenly kingdom, to see what is there: (to see) the god Khnum, the king of Upper and Lower Egypt, the god Tum in his shrine, Khnum, (18) the great god in his hall, the king Unnofer.

'May your name remain for ever upon the earth, reaping the reward of honour from Khnum, the king of both worlds! And sing ye praise and laud to the kingly gods of Khinensu, and praise ye the image of the godlike, who was reverenced in his nome, SAM-TAUI-TAF-NAKHT: so shall all that is best be your portion, and another will praise your name in turn in years to come.'

SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE BY THE EDITOR.

HISTORY OF EGYPT FROM PSAMMETICHUS TO PTOLEMY.

Dr. Brugsch's plan, of excluding all historical information from any other sources than the monuments, necessarily gives an air of incompleteness to this concluding period, for the authentic evidence of contemporary writers is as abundant as the notices on the monuments are scanty. It may therefore be an acceptable service to readers who are not already familiar with the subject, if we fill up what our Author has designedly omitted, by a brief consecutive outline of the history of Egypt's revival under the New Monarchy, and her final conquest by the Persians, down to the time when these were expelled by Alexander the Great and the long Greek Dynasty of the Ptolemies was established in Egypt. The outline now given may be filled up by the reader from Mr. Sharpe's excellent History of Egypt; Dr. Birch's summary, entitled Egypt from the Earliest Times to B.C. 300 (Christian Knowledge Society); the present Editor's Student's Ancient History of the East; and especially the full and learned work of Dr. Alfred Wiedemann, Geschichte Aegyptens von Psammetich I. bis auf Alexander den Grossen (Leipzig, 1880).

§ I. EGYPT'S RECOVERED INDEPENDENCE UNDER THE TWENTYSIXTH DYNASTY OF SAIS (B.c. 666-527).-Though Herodotus, who is our chief authority for this period, did not write till a hundred years after its close, and though his story is not free from some admixture of fable, yet the generally authentic character of the history is marked by the line which he so emphatically draws at this point of his work-In what follows I have the authority, not of the Egyptians only, but also of others who agree with them.'1 It is at this epoch also, as we have seen Dr. Brugsch stating more than once, that the certain chronology of Egypt begins; and the dates derived from the Greek authors and the parallel parts of Scripture history are confirmed, with some corrections, from the invaluable data of the Apis tombstones. (See pp. 294, foll.)