The death of Ramses III introduced a long line of nine weaklings all of whom bore the great name Ramses. They were far from bearing it worthily, and under them the waning power of the Pharaohs declined swiftly to its fall
in a few decades. We see Ramses IV, the son of Ramses III, struggling feebly with the hopeless situation which he inherited about 1167 BC. Immediately on his accession the new king prepared in his own behalf and that of his father, one of the most remarkable documents which has reached us from the civilization of ancient Egypt. In order that his father might prosper among the gods and that he himself might gain the benefit of his father's favour among them, the young king compiled for burial with the departed Pharaoh a list of the deceased's good works. It contained an enormous inventory of Ramses Ill's gifts to the three chief divinities of the nation; Amon of Thebes, Re of Heliopolis and Ptah of Memphis, as well as those also to the minor gods, in so far as the data could be obtained; besides a statement of his achievements in war and of his benefactions toward the people of his empire. All this recorded on papyrus formed a huge roll one hundred and thirty feet long containing one hundred and seventeen columns about twelve inches high. It is now called Papyrus Harris, and is the largest document which has descended to us from the early orient. As the gifts enumerated therein are largely the long inherited estates of the gods merely confirmed by Ramses III at his accession, this unique document enables us to determine the proportion of the wealth of ancient Egypt held by the temples, as the reader has already noticed in the preceding chapter. Accompanied by this extraordinary statement of his benefactions toward gods and men, Ramses III was laid in his tomb, in the lonely Valley of the Kings. In its efficacy in securing him unlimited favor with the gods there could be no doubt; and it contained so many prayers placed in the mouth of Ramses III on behalf of his son and successor that the gods, unable to resist the appeals of the favorite to whom they owed so much, would certainly grant his son a long reign. Indeed it is clear that this motive was powerfully operative in the production of the document. In this decadent age the Pharaoh was more dependent upon such means for the maintenance of his power than upon his own strong arm, and the huge papyrus thus becomes a significant sign of the times.

At Abydos Ramses IV has left a unique prayer to Osiris, having the same practical purpose in view,—a prayer which he placed there in his fourth year: "Thou shalt double for me the long life, the prolonged reign of king Ramses II, the great god; for more are the mighty deeds and the benefactions which I do for thy house, in order to supply thy divine offerings, in order to seek every excellent thing, every sort of benefaction, to do them for thy sanctuary daily, during these four years, [more are they] than those things which king Ramses II, the great god, did for thee in his sixty seven years".

With fair promises of a long reign the insatiable priesthoods were extorting from the impotent Pharaoh all they demanded, while he was satisfied with the assured favor of the gods. The sources of that virile political life that had sprung up with the expulsion of the Hyksos were now exhausted. The vigourous grasp of affairs which had once enabled the Pharaoh to manipulate with ease the difficult problems of the dominant oriental state had now given way to an excessive devotion to religious works and superstitious belief in their effectiveness, which were rapidly absorbing every function of the state. Indeed, as we have before indicated, the state was rapidly moving toward a condition in which its chief function should be religious and sacerdotal, and the assumption of royal power by the High Priest of Amon but a very natural and easy transition.

Naturally the only work of Ramses IV, of which we know, is an enterprise for the benefit of the gods. Early in his second year he went out in person to the quarries of the Wadi Hammamat, five days from the Nile, to look for stone for his temple buildings, and he then followed this journey of inspection by a great expedition of over nine thousand men, which reached the quarries nearly two years later. Although maintained by a long train of pack-bearers and ten carts, each drawn by six yoke of oxen, yet no less than nine hundred of the expedition perished in the heat and exposure, being about ten percent of its people. The destination of the materials secured at so great cost is uncertain; the only surviving building of any extent erected by Ramses IV is the continuation of the rear chambers and the small hypostyle of the Khonsu temple at Thebes already begun by his father.

After an inglorious reign of six years he was succeeded in 1161 BC by the fifth Ramses, probably his son. The exploitation of the mines of Sinai now ceased, and the last Pharaonic name found there is that of Ramses IV. In quick succession these feeble Ramessids now followed each other; after a few years a collateral line of the family gained the throne in the person of a usurper, probably a grandson of Ramses III, who became Ramses VI, having succeeded in supplanting the son of Ramses V. The seventh and eighth Ramses quickly followed. They all excavated tombs in the Valley of the Kings, but we know nothing of their deeds. Now and again the obscurity lifts, and we catch fleeting glimpses of a great state tottering to its fall. Under Ramses VI, nevertheless, the tomb of Penno, one of his deputies at Ibrim, in Nubia, shows us a picture of peaceful and prosperous administration there under Egyptian officials who have now replaced the native chief, the ruler of this locality at the close of the Eighteenth Dynasty. Penno 's family and relatives are found holding the important offices of the region, and it is evident that Egyptian families have now migrated to Nubia and more fully Egyptianized the country than ever. Penno himself is sufficiently wealthy to erect a statue of Ramses VI in the temple at Derr, built by Ramses II, and to endow it with the income from six parcels of land; whereupon the Pharaoh honours him with a gift of two vessels of silver, a distinction which the grateful Penno does not fail to record in his tomb.

From the close of Ramses III's reign to the first years of Ramses IX, only some twenty five or thirty years elapsed, and the same High Priest at El Kab who assisted in the celebration of Ramses III's jubilee was still in office under Ramses IX. Likewise the High Priest of Amon at Thebes under Ramses IX, Amenhotep, was the son of the high priest Ramsesnakht, who held the office under Ramses III and IV. The high priesthood of Amon which had at least once descended from father to son in the Nineteenth Dynasty had thus become permanently hereditary, and while it was passing from the hands of Ramsesnakht to his son Amenhotep, with a single uninterrupted transmission of authority, six feeble Ramessids had succeeded each other, with ever lessening power and prestige, as each struggled for a brief time to maintain himself upon a precarious throne. Meanwhile Amenhotep, the High Priest of Amon, flourished. He sumptuously restored the refectory and kitchen of the priests in the temple of his god at Karnak built 800 years before by Sesostris I. We see the crafty priest manipulating the pliant Pharaoh as he pleases, and obtaining every honour at his hands.

In his tenth year Ramses IX summoned Amenhotep to the great forecourt of the Amon-temple, where in the presence of the High Priest's political associates and supporters, the king presented him with a gorgeous array of gold and silver vessels, with costly decorations, and precious ointments. The days when such distinctions were the reward of valour on the battle fields of Syria are long passed; and skill in priest-craft is the surest guarantee of preferment. As the king delivered the rich gifts to the High Priest he accompanied them with words of praise such that one is in doubt whether they are delivered by the soverign to the subject or by the subject to his lord. At the same time he informs Amenhotep that certain revenues formerly paid to the Pharaoh shall now be rendered to the treasury of Amon, and although the king's words are not entirely clear it would seem that all revenues levied by the king's treasury but later intended for the treasury of the god, shall now be collected directly by the scribes of the temple, thus putting the temple to a certain extent in the place of the state.

All these honours were twice recorded by Amenhotep, together with a record of his buildings on the walls of the Karnak temple. Both the records of his gifts and honors are accompanied each by a large relief showing Amenhotep receiving his gifts from the king, and depicting his figure in the same heroic stature as that of the king,— an unprecedented liberty, to which no official had ever before in the history of Egypt dared to presume. In all such scenes from time immemorial the official appearing before the king had been represented as a pigmy before the towering figure of the Pharaoh; but the High Priest of Amon was now rapidly growing to measure his stature with that of the Pharaoh himself, both on the temple wall and in the affairs of government. He had a body of temple troops at his command, and as he gathered the sinews of the state into his fingers, gradually gaining control of the treasury, as we have seen, he did not hesitate to measure his strength with the Pharaoh. Naturally no records of such struggles, of the daily friction which must have existed between them, have survived; but a woman giving testimony in a court during the reign of Ramses IX dated a theft in her father's house by telling the court that it happened "when the revolt of the High Priest of Amon took place!".

The state of disorganization and helplessness which was gradually evolving is revealed to us in a chapter from the government of the Theban necropolis, preserved in certain legal archives of Ramses IX's reign. Thebes was now rapidly declining; it had been forsaken as a royal residence by the Pharaohs two hundred years before, but it continued to be the burial place of all the royal dead. There had thus been gathered in its necropolis a great mass of wealth in the form of splendid regalia adorning the royal bodies. In the lonely valley behind the western plain, deep in the heart of the cliffs, slept the great emperors, decked in all the magnificence which the wealth of Asia had brought them; and now again, as at the close of the Eighteenth Dynasty, their degenerate descendants, far from maintaining the empire which they had once won, were not even able to protect their bodies from destruction. In the sixteenth year of Ramses IX's reign the royal tombs of the plain before the western cliffs were found to have been attacked; one of them, that of Sebekemsaf, of the Thirteenth Dynasty, had been robbed of all its mortuary furniture and his royal body and that of his queen violated for the sake of their costly ornaments. Although the authors of this deed were captured and prosecuted, the investigation shows sinister traces that the officials engaged in it were not altogether disinterested.

Three years later, when Ramses IX had made his son, Ramses X, coregent with himself, six men were convicted of robbing the tombs of Seti I and Ramses II, showing that the emboldened robbers had now left the plain and entered the cliff tombs of the valley behind. Ramses II, who had himself despoiled the pyramid of Sesostris II at Ulahun, was now receiving similar treatment at the hands of his descendants. The tomb of one of Seti I's queens
followed next, and then that of the great Amenhotep III. Within a generation, as the work of plunder continued, all the bodies of Egypt's kings and emperors buried at Thebes were despoiled, and of the whole line of Pharaohs from the beginning of the Eighteenth to the end of the Twentieth Dynasty, only one body, that of Amenhotep II, has been found still lying in its sarcophagus; although it had by no means escaped spoliation. Thus while the tombs of the Egyptian emperors at Thebes were being ransacked and their bodies rifled and dishonoured, the empire which they conquered was crumbling to ruin.

While we can find nothing of the reign of Ramses X to record, beyond the rifling of the royal tombs, and our knowledge of his successor, the eleventh of the name, is still more meagre, at the accession of Ramses XII we are able to discern the culmination of the tendencies which we have been endeavouring to trace. Before he had been reigning five years a local noble at Tanis named Nesubenebded, the Smendes of the Greeks, had absorbed the entire Delta and made himself king of the North. It was such an enterprise as the unnamed vizier had attempted at Athribis in the time of Ramses III, who was too able and energetic for the audacious noble to succeed. But no longer commanding the undivided resources of Upper Egypt, which he might otherwise have employed against Nesubenebded, there was now nothing for the impotent Pharaoh to do but retire to Thebes,—if this transfer had not indeed already occurred before this,—where he still maintained his precarious throne. Thebes was thus cut off from the sea and the commerce of Asia and Europe by a hostile kingdom in the Delta, and its wealth and power still more rapidly declined. The High Priest of Amon was now virtually at the head of a Theban principality, which we shall see becoming gradually more and more a distinct political unit. Together with this powerful priestly rival, the Pharaoh continued to hold Nubia.

The swift decline of the Ramessids was quickly noticed and understood in Syria long before the revolution which resulted in the independence of the Delta. The Thekel and Peleset-Philistines, whose invasion Ramses III had for a time halted, as we have before stated, had continued to arrive in Syria. They had moved gradually southward, pushing before them the Amorites and scattered remnants of the Hittites, who were thus forced to enter Palestine, where they were found later by the Hebrews. Seventy five years after Ramses III had beaten them into submission, the Thekel were already established as an independent king dom at Dor, just south of the seaward end of Carmel.

As we do not find them mentioned in the surviving records of the Hebrews, they must have merged into the larger mass of the Philistines, whose cities gradually extended probably from Beth-Shean in the Jordan valley westward and southward, through the plain of Jezreel or Megiddo to the southern sea-plain, cutting of the northern tribes of Israel from their kinsmen in the south. Their pottery, as found at Lachish and Gezer in southern Palestine, is Cretan, confirming the Hebrew tradition that the Philistines were strangers who wandered in from Crete (Caphtor).

Continually replenished with new arrivals by sea, they threatened to crush Israel, as they had done the kingdom of Amor, before the Hebrew tribal leaders should have welded the Palestinian Semites into a nation. With their extreme southern frontier at the very gates of Egypt, these hardy and warlike wanderers from the far north could not have paid tribute to the Pharaoh very long after the death of Ramses III (1167 BC).

In the reign of Ramses IX (1142-1123 BC), or about that time, a body of Egyptian envoys were detained at Byblos by the local dynast for seventeen years, and unable to return, they at last died there. The Syrian princes, among whom Ramses III had built a temple to Amon, to which they brought their yearly tribute, were thus indifferent to the power of Egypt within twenty or twenty five years of his death.

A few years later, under Ramses XII, these same conditions in Syria are vividly portrayed in the report of an Egyptian envoy thither. In response to an oracle, Wenamon, the envoy in question, was dispatched to Byblos, at the foot of Lebanon, to procure cedar for the sacred barge of Amon. Hrihor, the High Priest of Amon, was able to give him only a pitiful sum in gold and silver, and therefore sent with him an image of Amon, called "Amon-of-the- Way," who was able to bestow "life and health", hoping thus to impress the prince of Byblos and compensate for the lack of liberal payment. As Wenamon was obliged to pass through the territory of Nesubenebded, who now ruled the Delta, Hrihor supplied him with letters to the Delta prince, and in this way secured for him passage in a ship commanded by a Syrian captain.

Nothing more eloquently portrays the decadent condition of Egypt than the humiliating state of this unhappy envoy, dispatched without ships, with no credentials, with but a beggarly pittance to offer for the timber desired, and only the memory of Egypt's former greatness with which to impress the prince of Byblos.

Stopping at Dor on the voyage out, Wenamon was robbed of the little money he had, and was unable to secure any satisfaction from the Thekel prince of that city. After waiting in despair for nine days, he departed for Byblos by way of Tyre, having on the way somehow succeeded in seizing from certain Thekel people a bag of silver as security for his loss at Dor. He finally arrived in safety at Byblos, where Zakar-Baal, the prince of the city, would not even receive him, but ordered him to leave. Such was the state of an Egyptian envoy in Phoenicia, within fifty or sixty years of the death of Ramses III.

Finally, as the despairing Wenamon was about to take passage back to Egypt, one of the noble youths in attendance upon Zakar-Baal was seized with a divine frenzy, and in prophetic ecstasy demanded that Wenamon be summoned, honorably treated and dismissed. This earliest known example of Old Testament prophecy in its earlier form thus secured for Wenamon an interview with Zakar-Baal, which the envoy himself thus relates:

"When morning came he sent and had me brought up, when the divine offering occurred in the fortress wherein he was, on the shore of the sea. I found him sitting in his upper chamber, leaning his back against a window, while the waves of the great Syrian sea were beating against the shore behind him. I said to him, 'Kindness of Amon!' He said to me: 'How long is it until this day, since you earnest away from the abode of Amon? I said, 'Five months and one day until now'. He said to me, 'Behold if you are true, where is the writing of Amon, which is in your hand? Where is the letter of the High Priest of Amon, which is in thy hand?' I said to him, 'I gave them to
Nesubenebded. . . .' Then he was very wroth, and he said to me, 'Now behold the writing and the letter are not in your hand! Where is the ship of cedar which Nesubenebded gave you? Where is the Syrian crew? He would not deliver your business to this ship-captain, to have you killed! That they might cast yyou into the sea! From whom would they have sought the god [Amon-of-the-Way] then? And you! From whom would they have sought you then?' So spoke he to me. I said to him, 'There are indeed Egyptian ships and Egyptian crews which sail under Nesubenebded, but he has no Syrian crews.' He said to me, 'There are surely twenty ships here in my harbour which are in connection with Nesubenebded; and at this Sidon, whither you also would go, there are indeed 10,000 ships also, which are in connection with Berket-El [probably a merchant of Tanis], and sail to his house'. Then I was silent in that great hour. He answered and said to me, 'On what business hast you come hither?' I said to him, 'I have come after the timber for the great and august barge of Amon-Re, king of gods. Your father did it, and you wilt also do it.' So spoke I to him. He said to me, 'They did it truly. If thou give me something for doing it I will do it. Indeed my agents transacted the business; the Pharaoh sent six ships laden with the products of Egypt, and they were unloaded into their store-houses. And you also shall bring something for me'. He had the journal of his fathers brought in, and he had them read it before me. They found one thousand deben [about 244 Troy pounds] of every kind of silver, which was in his book. He said to me, 'If the ruler of Egypt were the owner of my property and I were also his servant, he would not send silver and gold, saying, "Do the commandment of Amon." It was not the payment of tribute which they exacted of my father. As for me, I am myself neither your servant, nor am I the servant of him who sent you. If I cry out to the Lebanon, the heavens open and the logs lie here upon the shore of the sea. Give me the sails which you hast certainly brought to propel
your ships which bear your logs to Egypt! Give me the cordage [whichyou have of course brought to bind], the trees which I fell, in order to make them fast for you! [What then if a storm comes up] and they break and you die in the midst of the sea, when Amon thunders in heaven. . . . For [I admit that] Amon equips all lands; he equips them, having first equipped the land of Egypt, whence you come. For artisanship came forth from it to reach my place of abode; and teaching came forth from it to reach my place of abode. What then are these miserable journeys which they have had thee make!' I said to him, 'guilty one! They are no miserable journeys on which I am. There is no ship upon the river which Amon does not own. For his is the sea, and his is Lebanon, of which you say, "It is mine". It grows for the divine barge of Amon, the lord of every ship. Yea, so spoke Amon-Re, king of gods, saying to Hrihor, my lord, ' ' Send me'', and he made me go, bearing this great god [Amon-of-the-Way]. But behold, you have let this great god wait twenty nine days, when he had landed in thy harbour, although you did certainly know that he was here. He is indeed still what he once was, while you stand and bargain for the Lebanon with Amon, its lord. As for what you say, that the former kings sent silver and gold; if they had given life and health, they would not have sent the valuables; but they sent the valuables to your fathers instead of life and health. Now as for Amon-Re, king of gods, he is the lord of life and health; and he was the lord of your fathers, who spent their lives offering to Amon. And you also are the servant of Amon. If you say to Amon, "I will do it! I will do it!" and you execute his command, you shall live, and you shall be prosperous, and you shall be healthy, and you shall be pleasant to oury whole land and your people. Wish not for yourself a thing belonging to Amon-Re, king of gods. Yea, the lion loves his own. Let my scribe be brought to me, that I may send him to Nesubenebded and Tentamon [his wife], the rulers, whom Amon has given to the North of his land, and they will send all that of which I shall write to them, saying, '' Let it be brought'', until I return to the South and send to you all, all your trifles again [the balance still due]'. So spake I to him''.

The observing reader will have drawn many conclusions from this remarkable interview. The Phoenician prince quite readily admits the debt of culture which his land owes Egypt as a source of civilization, but emphatically repudiates all political responsibility to the ruler of Egypt, whom he never calls Pharaoh, except in referring to a former sovereign.

The situation is clear. A burst of military enthusiasm and a line of able rulers had enabled Egypt to assume for several centuries an imperial position, which her unwarlike people were not by nature adapted to occupy; and their impotent descendants, no longer equal to their imperial role, were now appealing to the days of splendor with an almost pathetic futility. It is characteristic of the time that this appeal should assume a religious or even theological form, as Wenamon boldly proclaims Amon's dominion over Lebanon, where the Phoenician princes had, only two generations before, worshipped and paid tribute at the temple of Amon, erected by Ramses III. With oracles and an image of the god that conferred "life and health" the Egyptian envoy sought to make his bargain with the contemptuous Phoenician for timber which a Thutmose III or a Seti I had demanded with his legions behind him.

We can hardly wonder that the image of "Amon-of-the-Way" failed to impress Zakar-Baal, as the Pharaoh's armies had impressed his ancestors; and it was only when Wenamon's messenger to Egypt returned with a few vessels of silver and gold, some fine linen, papyrus rolls, ox-hides, coils of cordage, and the like, that the Phoenician ruler ordered his men to cut the desired logs; although he had sent some of the heavier timbers for the hull of the barge in advance, as an evidence of his good faith.

As Wenamon was about to depart with his timber, some eight months after he had left Thebes, Zakar-Baal tells him with grim humour of the fate of the Egyptian envoys of a former reign who had been detained seventeen years and had ultimately died in Byblos. He even offers to have Wenamon taken and shown their tombs. This privilege the frightened envoy declines, adding that the embassy which had been so treated was one of merely human envoys, while Zakar-Baal was now honored with an unparalleled distinction in receiving the god himself! Promising the prince the payment of the balance due him, Wenamon proceeded to embark, when he discovered in the offing a fleet of eleven Thekel ships, coming with instructions to arrest him, doubtless for the seizure of the silver which he had taken from the Thekel on the voyage from Tyre to Byblos.

The unhappy Wenamon now lost all hope, and throwing himself down upon the shore burst into weeping. Even Zakar-Baal was touched by his misery and sent to him a reassuring message, with food and wine and an Egyptian chanteuse. The next day the prince succeeded in holding the Thekel of the fleet to an interview, while Wenamon embarked and escaped. But a tempest drove him far out of his course and cast him upon the coast of Cyprus, where the populace was about to slay him at the palace of Hatiba, the queen. Her he fortunately intercepted as she was passing from one palace to another. Among her following, Wenamon by inquiry found a Cyprian who spoke Egyptian, and he bade this new-found interpreter speak to the queen for him. "Say to my mistress: 'I have heard as far as Thebes, the abode of Amon, that in every city injustice is done; but that justice is done in the land of Alasa [Cyprus]. But, lo, injustice is done every day here'."

She said, "Indeed! What is this that you say?" I said to her, "If the sea raged and the wind drove me to the land where I am, you will not let them take advantage of me to slay me, I being a messenger of Amon. I am one for whom they will seek unceasingly. As for the crew of the prince of Byblos whom they sought to kill, their lord will surely find ten crews of yours, and he will slay them on his part."

Wenamon's crew was then summoned, and he himself bidden to lie down and sleep. At this point his report breaks off, and the conclusion is lost; but here again, in Cyprus, whose king, as practically his vassal, the Pharaoh had been wont to call to account for piracy in the old days of splendor, we find the representative of Egypt barely able to save his life.

It is to be noticed that his reminder of unpleasant consequences makes no reference to the Pharaoh, while it places fully as much emphasis upon the vengeance of the prince of Byblos as upon that of Egypt; this only two generations after a great war-fleet of Ramses III had destroyed the powerful united navy of his northern enemies in these very waters.

This unique and instructive report of Wenamon, therefore, reveals to us the complete collapse of Egyptian prestige abroad and shows with what appalling swiftness the dominant state in the Mediterranean basin had declined under the weak successors of Ramses III. When Tiglath-pileser I appeared in the West about 1100 BC, a Pharaoh, who was probably Nesubenebded, feeling his exposed position in the Delta, deemed it wise to propitiate the Assyrian with a gift, and sent him a crocodile. Thus all Egyptian influence in Syria had utterly vanished, while in Palestine a fiction of traditional sovereignty, totally without practical political significance, was maintained at the Pharaoh's court.

In resumption of that sovereignty we shall see future kings making sporadic campaigns thither after the establishment of the Hebrew monarchy. Meanwhile there was but one possible issue for the conditions at Thebes. The messenger who procured the timber for the sacred barge of Amon was no longer dispatched by the Pharaoh, but as we have seen, by the High Priest of Amon, Hrihor. The next year he had gained sufficient control of the royal necropolis at Thebes to send his people thither to rewrap and properly reinter the bodies of Seti I and Ramses II, which had been violated and robbed in the first year of Ramses X.

The temple of Khonsu, left with only the holy of holies and the rear chambers finished since the time of Ramses III, was now completed with a colonnaded hall preceded by a court and pylon. The walls of these new additions bear significant evidence of the transition which was now going on in the Egyptian state. In the new hall the official dedications on the architraves are strictly in accordance with the conventional form, customary since the Old Kingdom: "Live king Ramses XII! He made it as his monument for his father, 'Khonsu in Thebes, Beautiful Rest,' making for him [the hall called] 'Wearer of Diadems,' for the first time, of fine white limestone, making splendid his temple as a beautiful monument forever, which the Son of Re, Ramses XII, made for him."

But around the base of the walls are words which have never been found in a Pharaonic temple before; we read: "High Priest of Amon-Re, king of gods, commander in chief of the armies of the South and North, the leader, Hrihor, triumphant; he made it as his monument for 'Khonsu in Thebes, Beautiful Rest'; making for him a temple for the first time, in the likeness of the horizon of heaven.

That the commander in chief of the armies of the South and North was the real builder of the hall we can hardly doubt. On either side of the central door which leads out into the court, lying before the hall, is a pair of reliefs, each showing a festal procession of the god, before whom, in the place for thousands of years occupied by the Pharaoh, stands the High Priest Hrihor, offering incense; while strangely enough, the conventional blessings regularly recorded over the god, and supposed to be uttered by him to the king, are still addressed to Ramses XII! Like the shadowy caliph, whom the Egyptian sultans brought from Bagdad to Cairo, and maintained for a time there, so the unfortunate Ramses XII had been brought from his Delta residence to Thebes, that the conventionalities of the old Pharaonic tradition
might still be continued for a brief time. A letter written to his Nubian viceroy in his seventeenth year shows that he still retained some voice there up to that time at least; but the door, bearing the two reliefs just mentioned, shows him deprived of his authority there also, for it bears an inscription of Hrihor, still dated under Ramses XII (the year is unfortunately broken out), in which the High Priest appears as ''viceroy of Kush".

Already at the close of the Nineteenth Dynasty we recall that Amon had gained possession of the Nubian gold-country; the High Priest has now gone a step further and seized the whole of the great province of the Upper Nile. The same inscription calls him also "overseer of the double granary", who, as grain was always Egypt's chief source of wealth, was the most important fiscal officer in the state, next the chief treasurer himself.

There is now nothing left in the way of authority and power for the High Priest to absorb; he is commander of all the armies, viceroy of Kush, holds the treasury in his hands, and executes the buildings of the gods. When the fiction of the last Ramessid's official existence had been maintained for at least twenty seven years the final assumption of the High Priest's supreme position seems to have been confirmed by an oracle of Khonsu, followed by the approval of Amon.

It is recorded in the above inscription, a document very fragmentary and obscure, engraved on that same fatal door, which in the growth of the Khonsu temple, as in the history of the state, marks the final transition. For through this door the modern visitor passes from the inner hall bearing the names of both Hrihor and Ramses XII, to the outer court, built by Hrihor, where the shadowy Pharaoh vanishes, and the High Priest's name, preceded by the Pharaonic titles and enclosed in the royal cartouche at last appears alone. Henceforth the name "Ramses" is no longer a personal name, but is worn as a title designating a descendant of the once mighty line.