The result of the development of Thebes into an independent sacerdotal principality was not only the downfall of the empire, but of course also the end of the unity of the kingdom. From now on the sacerdotal princes of Thebes, the High Priests of Amon, will either rule the country themselves or maintain Theban independence. As they rarely succeeded in doing the former the result was constant disunion and division, which continued in more or less pronounced form from the rise of Hrihor and Nesubenebded, in the latter part of the eleventh century, for four hundred and fifty years or more.

The complacent Hrihor maintained the fiction of a united ''Two Lands'', of which he called himself the lord, as if he really ruled them both. With amazing mendacity he filled his titulary with references to his universal power, and affirmed that the Syrian princes bowed down every day to his might. Fortunately we are well informed as to the real attitude of the Syrian dynasts toward Hrihor by the experiences of the redoubtable Wenamon at Dor and Byblos. The High Priest's methods and theory of government were not calculated to compel the respect of the Syrians. The state which he founded was a theocracy, pure and simple.

As far back as the days of Thutmose III and Hatshepsut there are remarkable examples of Amon's intervention in the affairs of practical government. Thutmose III himself was crowned by an oracle of the god; Hatshepsut erected her obelisks at his behest and sent her fleet to Punt in response to his special oracular command. But these and other examples of the god's intervention occurred on extraordinary occasions.

Under Hrihor's theocracy such oracles became part of the ordinary machinery of government. Whatever the High Priest wished legally to effect could be sanctioned by special oracle of the god at any time, and by prearrangement the cultus image before which the High Priest made known his desires invariably responded favourably by violent nodding of the head, or even by speech. All wills and property conveyances of members of the High Priest's family were oracles of Amon, and civil documents thus became divine decrees. Banished political exiles were recalled by oracle of the god, criminal cases were tried before him, and by his decision the convicted were put to death. In the case of a temple official, undoubtedly a favorite of the High Priest, two documents were placed before the god, one declaring the accused guilty of embezzlement of temple income, and the other declaring him innocent. The god seized the latter document, thus determining the innocence of the accused.

Priestly jugglery, ruling if necessary in utter disregard of law and justice, thus enabled the High Priest to cloak with the divine sanction all that he wished to effect.

Hrihor must have been an old man at his accession (1090 BC). He did not long survive Ramses XII, and at his death his son, Payonekh, also advanced in years, was unable to maintain the independence of Thebes against Nesubenebded at Tanis, who extended his authority over the whole country for a brief time. He is called the first king of the Twenty First Dynasty by Manetho, who knows nothing of the independence of Thebes. Payonekh's son, Paynozem I, quickly succeeded him, and while he was ruling at Thebes in more or less independence, but without royal titles, Nesubenebded was followed at Tanis by Pesibkhenno I, probably his son. Although unable to regain the royalty of his grandfather, Paynozem I showed considerable energy in his government of the Theban principality. He continued the Khonsu temple, restored some of the older temples, and unable to protect the royal bodies in the western necropolis from further molestation, began the policy of transferring them to a tomb which might be better guarded, selecting for this purpose the tomb of Seti I.

He now achieved a master stroke of diplomacy and gained in marriage the daughter of the Tanite, Pesibkhenno I. Thus on the death of the latter (1067 BC), he obtained through his wife the Tanite crown and the sovereignty over a united Egypt. He installed his son as High Priest at Thebes, but both he and a second son whom he appointed to the office died. His third son, Menkheperre, who now obtained the high priesthood, appeared at Thebes in the twenty fifth year of his father, and assumed authority not without suppression of some hostility.

The political turmoil of the time is evident in the fact that he was immediately obliged to appear before Amon and secure an oracle approving of the return of a body of political exiles who had been banished to one of the oases. Exactly who these exiles were does not appear; but we can surmise that the recall was effected to conciliate the Thebans, who now began to show themselves as turbulent as they were in the days of the revolts, which made Thebes notorious under the Ptolemies.

Paynozem I reigned some forty years at Tanis, and although his son Menkheperre seems to have gained some royal titles on his father's death (1026 BC) 4 he did not succeed to the crown, which was obtained by one Amenemopet, whose connection with Paynozem I is entirely problematical. Of the course of events during his long reign of half a century we can now discern nothing. These Tanite kings were not great builders, although Pesibkhenno I raised a massive enclosure wall eighty feet thick around his temple at Tanis. As they show little initiative in other directions, the century and a half during which they maintained themselves was apparently one of steady industrial and economic decline.

We have no data from other periods to aid us by comparison, but even so it is evident that the price of land was very low. Ten "stat" (about six and three quarters acres) of land at Abydos sold for one deben (a little over fourteen hundred grains) of silver at this time. While Nesubenebded did send a large body of men to Thebes to repair the damage done by an unusually high inundation, the Tanites as a whole did nothing for the great capital of the empire, and its decline was steady and rapid. They respected the memory of their royal ancestors and vied with the high priests at Thebes in protecting the bodies of the emperors.

During the reign of Siamon, Amenemopet's successor, the bodies of Ramses I, Seti I and Ramses II were taken from the tomb of Seti I and hidden in that of a queen named Inhapi. But such was the insecurity of the times that after a few years, under Pesibkhenno II, the last king of the Tanite Dynasty, they were hurriedly removed to their final hiding place, an old and probably unused tomb of Amenhotep I, near the temple of Der el-Bahri. Here they were concealed for the last time, and as the officials who superintended the transfer left the place a scribe hurriedly wrote upon the coffins the record of their last removal alongside similar graffiti hastily scrawled there under similar circumstances after earlier transfers beginning as far back as a hundred and fifty years before. These successive records on the royal coffins and bodies, in which one may trace their transfer from tomb to tomb in the vain effort to find a place of safety, form perhaps the most eloquent testimony of the decadence of the age.

The rough passage entering the cliff at the base of a shaft in which they were now deposited was sealed for the last time a few years later, early in the Twenty Second Dynasty, not long after 940 BC. Here the greatest kings of Egypt slept unmolested for nearly three thousand years, until about 1871 or 1872, when the Theban descendants of those same tomb-robbers whose prosecution under Ramses IX we can still read, discovered the place and the plundering of the royal bodies was begun again. By methods not greatly differing from those employed under Ramses IX the modern authorities forced the thieves to disclose the place. Thus nearly twenty nine centuries after they had been sealed in their hiding place by the ancient scribes, and some three thousand five hundred years after the first interment of the earliest among them, the faces of Egypt's kings and emperors were disclosed to the modern world, and hence the reader of these pages is frequently able to look upon the fleshly features of the monarchs whose deeds of three millenniums ago he has been reading.

Abroad, the Twenty First Dynasty was as feeble as its predecessors at the close of the Twentieth had been. They probably maintained Egyptian power in Nubia, but in Syria they were in no better reputation than in the days of Wenamon's ill-starred mission to the prince of Byblos. A nominal suzerainty over Palestine was probably one of the court fictions in continuance of a century-long tradition. During this period of Egypt's total eclipse the tribes of Israel thus gained the opportunity to consolidate their national organization and under Saul and David they gradually gained the upper hand against the Philistines. Whether the Egyptians had a hand in these events, thus enabling the Israelites to subdue this hardy people of the coast, it is as yet impossible to determine as we have no monuments which throw any light upon Egypt's connection with Asiatic politics in this period.

The sea-peoples no longer appear upon the monuments, and from the west the Delta was now the peaceful conquest of the Libyans, who accomplished by gradual immigration what they had failed to gain by hostile invasion. Although there was a native militia, chiefly under command of the High Priest of Amon at Thebes, Libyan mercenaries now filled the ranks oi the Egyptian army, and the commanders of the Meshwesh in control of the fortresses and garrisons of the important Delta towns soon gained positions of power and influence. A Tehen-Libyan named Buyuwawa settled at Heracleopolis early in the Twenty First Dynasty; his son Musen was installed as a priest of the Heracleopolitan temple and commander of the mercenaries of the town, and these offices became hereditary in the family.

Musen's great grandson, Sheshonk, was a "great chief of the Meshwesh". and a man of wealth and power. He buried his son Namlot at Abydos in great splendor and richly endowed the mortuary service of the tomb with lands, gardens, slaves, attendants and daily oblations. When the administrators of this property proved untrue to their trust Sheshonk was possessed of sufficient influence with one of the Twenty First Dynasty kings, whose name is unfortunately lost, to secure their punishment by oracle of Amon at Thebes.

While we cannot follow the fortunes of the other Libyan commanders throughout the Delta in this way, there can be no doubt that they were all enjoying similar prosperity in a greater or less degree, and gradually gathering the reins of authority into their hands. The weak and inglorious Twenty First Dynasty had now been ruling nearly a century and a half and the descendants of the Libyan Buyuwawa at Heracleopolis had been constantly increasing their local authority for an equal length of time, through five generations, when Sheshonk, the grandson of that Sheshonk of whom we have just spoken, succeeded as the representative of the family there. Either this Sheshonk or his immediate ancestors had extended Heracleopolis until it controlled a principality reaching probably as far as Memphis on the north and on the south as far as Siut. Whether the Tanite line died out or its last representative was too feeble to maintain himself we shall probably never know, but such was the power of the Heracleopolitan mercenary commander that he transferred his residence to Bubastis in the eastern Delta, where he seized the royal authority and proclaimed himself Pharaoh about 945 B. C.3 His line was known to Manetho as the Twenty Second Dynasty.

Thus in a little over two centuries after the death of Ramses III, who had smitten them so sorely, the Libyans gained the crown of Egypt without so much as drawing the sword. The change which thus placed a soldier and a foreigner upon the venerable throne of the Pharaohs had gone hand in hand with that which had delivered the country to the priests; but the power of the priest had culminated a little more rapidly than that of the soldier, although both were equally rooted in the imperial system of the Eighteenth Dynasty.

Sheshonk immediately gave to the succession of his line a legitimacy which he could not himself possess. He married his son to the daughter of Pesibkhenno II, the last of the Tanite kings of the Twenty First Dynasty, and thus gained for him the right to the throne through his wife, as well as unquestionable legitimacy for his son.A vigourous and an able ruler, it might have been expected that Sheshonk I, as we shall now call him, would be able to weld Egypt anew into a powerful nation; but those elements with which he was obliged to deal in the building up of a new state were not such as could possibly be wrought into any stable fabric. It was essentially a feudal organization which was now effected by Sheshonk I, and the princes who owed him fealty were largely the turbulent Meshwesh chiefs like himself, who would naturally not forget his origin nor fail to see that a successful coup might accomplish for any one of them what he had achieved for himself.

Though we cannot demark their geographical power with certainty, it is evident that they ruled the Delta cities, rendering to the Pharaoh their quota of troops, as did the Mamlukes under the Sultans of Moslem Egypt. Upper Egypt was organized into two principalities; that of Heracleopolis embracing, as we have seen, northern Upper Egypt as far south as Siut, where the Theban principality began, which in its turn included all the country to the cataract and perhaps Nubia also. The country thus already fell into three divisions roughly corresponding to those of Ptolemaic and Roman times. Sheshonk by his origin controlled Heracleopolis, and he and his family after him maintained close relations with the High Priests of Ptah at Memphis. Not later than his fifth year he had also acquired Thebes. He attempted to hold its support to his house by appointing his own son as High Priest of Amon there; but it still remained a distinct principality, capable of offering serious opposition to the ruling family in the Delta. The city itself at least was not taxable by the Pharaoh, and was never visited by his fiscal officials.

Under these circumstances an outbreak among the Libyan lords of the Delta or in the powerful principalities of' the South might be expected as soon as there was no longer over them a strong hand like that of Sheshonk I.

Under the energetic Sheshonk Egypt's foreign policy took on a more aggressive character, and her long merely formal claims upon Palestine were practically pressed. Solomon was evidently an Egyptian vassal who possibly received in marriage a daughter of the Pharaoh and whose territory his Egyptian suzerain extended by the gift of the important city of Gezer. We last heard of it under Merneptah three hundred years before; but never having been subdued by the Israelites, its Canaanite lord had now rebelled. The Pharaoh captured and burned it and presented it to Solomon, who rebuilt it.

The Pharaoh with whom Solomon had to deal, a Pharaoh who captured and burned strong cities in Palestine like Gezer, cannot have been one of the degenerate kings at the close of the Twenty First Dynasty, but an aggressive ruler who resumed Egypt's control in Palestine; and we know of no other king at this time who answers this description save Sheshonk I.

After the division of the kingdom of the Hebrews under Solomon's successor, Rehoboam, Sheshonk I, who had already harbored the fugitive Jeroboam, Rehoboam's northern enemy, thought it a good opportunity to make his claims in Palestine unquestionable, and in the fifth year of Rehoboam, probably about 926 BC, he invaded Palestine. His campaign penetrated no further north than the latitude of the Sea of Galilee and extended eastward probably as far as Mahanaim on the east of Jordan.

Egyptian troops had not penetrated Asia for over two hundred and seventy years, and Sheshonk let loose his Libyan mercenaries among the towns of the plain of Jezreel, which they plundered from Rehob on the north, through Hapharaim, Megiddo, Taanach and Shunem, to Beth-shean in the Jordan Valley on the east. In the South they spoiled Yeraza, Bethhoron, Ajalon, Gibeon, Socoh, Beth Anoth, Sharuhen and Arad, the last two places marking their extreme southern activity.

According to the Hebrew records they also entered Jerusalem and despoiled it of the wealth gathered there in Solomon's day; but it is clear that Sheshonk's campaign was directed impartially against the two kingdoms and did not affect Judah alone. He afterward claimed to have pushed as far north as Mitanni; but this is evidently a mere boast, for Mitanni had at this time long ceased to exist as a kingdom.

Among other Palestinian towns which Sheshonk records as taken by him is a place hitherto unnoticed called ''Field of Abram", in which we find the earliest occurrence of the name of Israel's eponymous hero. Sheshonk was able to return with great plunder with which to replenish the long depleted Pharaonic coffers. He placed a record of the tribute of Palestine and of Nubia, of which he had now gained control, beside those of the great conquerors of the Empire on the walls of the Karnak temple at Thebes. He installed a new Libyan governor in the Great Oasis, and one of his Libyan vassal chiefs governed the western Delta and administered the caravan communication with the oases. Thus for a time at least the glories of the Empire of the Nineteenth Dynasty were restored with tribute flowing into the treasury from a domain extending from northern Palestine to the upper Nile, and from the oases to the Red Sea.

With his treasury thus replenished Sheshonk was able to revive the customary building enterprises of the Pharaohs which had been discontinued for over two hundred years. He beautified Bubastis, his Delta residence, and at Thebes undertook a vast enlargement of the Karnak temple. His son Yewepet, who was High Priest of Amon there, dispatched an expedition to Silsileh to secure the stone for an enormous court and pylon which were to complete the Karnak temple on the west and give it a magnificent front toward the river. The side walls and colonnades of the court had been planned and erected at some time after the Nineteenth Dynasty, but the pylon was still lacking. It was, and is today, the largest temple court in existence, being over three hundred and fourteen feet wide by two hundred and sixty nine feet deep, fronted by the largest pylon in Egypt, thirty six feet thick, one hundred and fifty feet high and with a front of three hundred and fifty seven feet. Sheshonk intended that it should be used at the celebration of his thirty years' jubilee; whether it was ever so used we do not know; but he never lived to see it completed, and the builder's scaffolding and ramps of sun-dried brick still cumber the walls beneath the debris of many centuries. Part of its decoration was however completed, and by the south gate, now known as the Bubastite Portal, the Pharaoh had executed a huge relief in the old style, depicting himself smiting the Asiatics before Amon, who, together with the presiding goddess of Thebes, leads and presents to Sheshonk ten lines of captives, containing one hundred and fifty six Palestinian prisoners, each symbolizing a town or locality captured by Sheshonk and bearing its name. A number of Biblical names may be recognized among them, the chief of which we have already noted.

When Osorkon I, Sheshonk I's son and heir, followed him, probably about 920 BC, he succeeded by right of inheritance through his wife, the daughter of Pesibkhenno II, the last king of the old line of the Twenty First Dynasty. He inherited a prosperous kingdom and great wealth. During a little more than the first three years of his reign he gave to the temples of Egypt a total of no less than four hundred and eighty seven thousand pounds Troy of silver, while of gold and silver together he gave over five hundred and sixty thousand pounds Troy, a sum which doubtless includes the above total of silver. These enormous donations form the most striking evidence in our possession for the wealth and prosperity of the Libyan dynasty in its earlier days.

In order to control the Heracleopolitan principality, Osorkon I built a stronghold at the mouth of the Fayum, while in the matter of Thebes he followed his father's example and installed one of his sons as High Priest of Amon there. After the death of two of his sons while holding this office, his third son Sheshonk succeeded to the position. This Sheshonk maintained himself at Thebes in great splendor, assumed the titles of royalty and so increased his power that he was able to ensure the succession as sacerdotal prince of Thebes to his son. Thus about 895 BC, when Takelot I succeeded his father Osorkon I at Bubastis, he had his powerful brother Sheshonk as his rival at Thebes. But after Takelot I's short reign his son Osorkon II was able to regain control of Thebes and executed repairs in the Luxor temple after a great flood there.

A prayer of Osorkon II preserved on a statue of his found at Tanis contains a petition which significantly hints at the precarious situation in which the Libyan dynasty now found itself. He prays that his seed may rule over "the High Priests of Amon-Re, king of gods; the great chiefs of the Meshwesh. . .; and the prophets of Harsaphes", the last being the Libyan dynasts ruling at Heracleopolis, from which the family of the Pharaoh sprang. He adds, "You shall establish my children in the offices which I have given them; let not the heart of brother be exalted [against] his brother". Between the lines of this prayer one can read the story of a dynasty rent asunder by family feuds and constantly threatened by revolt of this or that powerful mercenary commander who feels himself aggrieved or able by force of arms to improve his position. In all essential particulars these Libyan rulers of Egypt were completely Egyptianized.

The grandfather of the first Sheshonk had buried his son in the Egyptian manner at Abydos, and had endowed the tomb in accordance with Egyptian mortuary belief. Although they retained their Libyan names, the Bubastites assumed the full Pharaonic titulary of the form which had been customary for fifteen hundred years in Egypt. Their mercenary vassal commanders still retained their old time native titles, translated into Egyptian as "great chief of the Meshwesh", or as frequently abbreviated on the monuments "great chief of the Me"; but they worshipped the Egyptian gods and presented to the temples endowments of land for the sake of procuring the divine favour as did the Egyptians themselves.

While Egyptian culture may have been but a slight veneer and they may have remained Libyan barbarians, yet the process of Egyptianizing was rapidly going on, and in the case of the ruling family was now doubtless practically complete. Thus in his twenty second year we find Osorkon II building an imposing hall at Bubastis for the purpose of celebrating after the old Egyptian manner the thirtieth anniversary of his appointment as crownprince.

But the splendour of this gorgeous jubilee cannot blind us to the decline in which the dangerous forces inherent in the situation were involving the Bubastite family. After a short coregency with his son, Sheshonk II, and the death of this prince, Osorkon II associated with himself another son, who after seven years coregency succeeded as Takelot II, about 860 BC.

The declining fortunes of the Twenty Second Dynasty from now on can only be traced in the career of the Theban principality, which, however, clearly exhibits the turbulent and restless character of the feudal princes who now make up the state. Here the High Priest Osorkon, who arrived at Thebes in the eleventh year of Takelot II, began a series of annals on the walls of the Karnak temple recording his deeds and his gifts to the temples in his own name.

These records show that after courting the favor of the Thebans by the inauguration of a new and richly endowed temple calendar he was nevertheless driven from the city by a revolt, which finally spread, involving the North and the South alike in civil war. The High Priest fled and the war lasted for years, until he was finally able to gain the support of his father's followers, when he returned to Thebes amid great rejoicing, as his long fleet of ships on the river drew near the city. He immediately repaired to the temple, from which Amon came forth to meet him in gorgeous procession, and the god thereupon delivered an oracle exempting the Thebans from punishment for revolt.

These significant events, preserved in a few meagre and fragmentary lines of the High Priest's annals, are doubtless such as filled the reigns of the last three Bubastites who continued to hold Thebes and ruled for a hundred years; although their city of Bubastis has perished so completely that little or no record of their careers has survived. To revolt must be added hostilities between the two principalities of Thebes and Heracleopolis, of which there are plain traces, and feuds among the mercenary lords of the Delta.

The situation will have closely resembled that under the Mamlukes, when the people, groaning under every oppression and especially exorbitant taxation, often successively taxed by two different lords, rose in revolt after revolt, only to be put down by the mercenaries with slaughter and rapine. Under such circumstances the Pharaoh's influence in Palestine must have totally vanished; but, alarmed at the growing power of Nineveh in Syria, one of the Bubastites, probably Takelot II, contributed a quota of a thousand men to the western coalition against the Assyrians, which was defeated by Shalmaneser II at Qarqar on the Orontes in 854 BC.

It is impossible to determine with certainty the family connection of the last three Bubastites, who followed Takelot II. Sheshonk III, Pemou and Sheshonk IV may have had no connection with him. They held Memphis and Thebes, and their names occasionally appear here and there on minor monuments. The memorials of Egypt's ancient splendor suffered flagrant destruction at their hands and the vast colossus of Ramses II at Tanis with other earlier monuments were broken up and employed by Sheshonk III in the construction of his Tanis pylon.

It is evident that during their rule the local lords and dynasts of the Delta were gradually gaining their independence, and probably many of them had thrown off their allegiance to the Bubastite house long before the death of Sheshonk IV, about 745 BC, with whom the Twenty Second Dynasty certainly reached its end.

One of these Delta lords, named Pedibast, who had cast off the suzerainty of the Bubastites, gained the dominant position among his rivals at the death of Sheshonk IV, and founded a new house known to Manetho as the Twenty Third Dynasty. Manetho places this dynasty at Tanis, but, as Pedibast's name shows, he was of Bubastite origin, like the family which he unseated, and as we shall later see, his successor ruled at Bubastis.

Pedibast gained Thebes and held it until his twenty third year, although from his fourteenth year he was obliged to share its control with king Yewepet, a dynast of the eastern Delta. A late Demotic papyrus in Vienna contains a folk-tale which significantly reveals the unsettled conditions of the time among the turbulent dynasts, whom, like Yewepet, Pedibast was unable to control. It narrates the course of a long and serious feud between Kaamenhotep, the dynast of Mendes in the Delta, and Pemou, the mercenary commander in Heliopolis. The occasion of the quarrel is the seizure of a valuable coat-of-mail by Kaamenhotep, and Pedibast is unable to prevent widespread hostilities among the Delta dynasts, as they pronounce for one or the other of the contending principals.

Under Pedibast's successor, Osorkon III, the power of the dominant house rapidly waned until there was at last an independent lord or petty king in every city of the Delta and up the river as far as Hermopolis. We are acquainted with the names of eighteen of these dynasts, whose struggles among themselves now led to the total dissolution of the Egyptian state.

The land again resolved itself into those small and local political units of which it had consisted in prehistoric days, before there existed any consolidated and centralized government. Its power was completely paralyzed and the political sagacity of such statesmen as the Hebrew prophets was of itself, without the aid of prophetic vision, quite sufficient to perceive how utterly futile was the policy of the Egyptian party in Israel, which would have depended upon the support of Egypt against the oppression of Assyria. When the troops of Tiglath-pileser III devastated the West down to the frontier of Egypt in 734-732 B. C, the kings of the Delta were too involved in their own complicated and petty wars to render the wretched Hebrews any assistance; nor did they foresee that the day must soon come when the great power on the Tigris would cross the desert that separated Egypt from Palestine and absorb the ancient kingdom of the Nile. But before this inevitable catastrophe should occur, another foreign power was to possess the throne of the Pharaohs.