them to the very utmost, so that his successor, Merenptah, had to bear the burden of a weakened people and an impoverished treasury. The king's harem was enormous. One record states the number of his sons at over a hundred; but there were at least seventy-nine sons and fiftynine daughters—a fact which, as Petrie remarks, ‘suggests that his concubines were probably as readily accumulated as those of an Arabian Khalifa.' Of his numerous wives, his sister Nefertari appears to have been the favourite-at least, in the earlier years of his reign. Her figure appears on a number of his colossal statues (Plate XXVI.), and she is prominent in the smaller rock-temple at Abu Simbel. Another sister and wife, Ast-nefert, was the mother of his two most important sons, Khaemuas and Merenptah. His eldest daughter, Banutanta, or Bint-Anath, was probably also married to her father, as were at least two other daughters. Of his sons, the fourth, Khaemuas, seems to have been the favourite. He was made High-Priest of Ptah, at Memphis, and had the conduct of the great festivals of his father's reign; but in the fifty-fifth year he died, and his place as heir was filled by Merenptah. Khaemuas left behind him a great reputation for learning. Round his name there grew up traditions of his skill in all manner of magic arts, and the 'wizard prince 'is the hero of the famous romance of Setna, in which he is depicted as having stolen from the mummy of a wizard the magic books of Thoth, and having in consequence become the victim of a voluptuous and murderous species of female ghoul. As the long reign dragged on, Khaemuas was followed to the grave by other members of the royal family, until Merenptah, the thirteenth son, was heir-apparent. The consequences of a long period of luxurious and slothful rule began to show themselves in the state of the nation, and her enemies began to press hard upon the frontiers, and even to establish themselves upon the sacred soil of Egypt. But the warlike days of Ramses were long since done. He could no longer display the vigour which had baffled the cunning plans of the Hittite king; and he delighted himself in idly recalling the exploits of his hot youth, when what was needed was not recollection, but prompt action. Finally, after a reign of sixty-six years, he passed away in extreme old age. His mummy was found, along with that of his father Sety, at Deir-el-Bahri, and the face 'still bears strongly the stamp of the haughty self-satisfaction and pride of the monarch.' In truth, he had but little real cause for satisfaction. The vanity which led him to inscribe his name and the story of his deeds on almost every building in the land imposed for long upon other nations and ages the idea that he was the greatest of all kings; and to this day the name which he bore suggests to most minds the typical Pharaoh. But his was a fatal reign for the country which he ruled so long. The headlong and rash valour of his early morning added nothing to the real greatness of Egypt; the luxury and senile vanity of his long evening impoverished and weakened her. His father had handed down to him a land rapidly recovering from the disasters which had diminished her power and lowered her prestige among the nations. He left to his successor an Egypt which was far advanced in an incurable decay, and at whose gates the enemy was already thundering. CHAPTER XII THE DEFENDERS OF THE EMPIRE-MERENPTAH AND RAMSES III THE kingdom to which Merenptah (1234-1214 B.C.) succeeded on the death of his father, Ramses II., was in a condition which called for the utmost vigour and care on the part of the new ruler. The warlike glory, such as it was, of the earlier days of the old king's reign, had been fruitless of any real accession of strength to the nation; the abundant display of material splendour scarcely masked the very real decline in national prestige; the vast building operations of Ramses must have constituted a very heavy burden on the resources of the land; and altogether the reign, like that of Louis XIV., had been grandiose rather than great. Of its sixty-six years, about fifty had been spent in peace; and during this long period of inaction the military organization of the Empire probably declined considerably in efficiency. Indeed, the evidence indicates that, in spite of the vainglorious records of Ramses, the Egyptians found it a heavy task to maintain their borders, and, in particular, were being heavily pressed upon from the west by the restless tribes of North Africa. Merenptah's heritage was, therefore, a somewhat troubled one, and the outlook was threatening. As already mentioned, the new king was the thirteenth son of Ramses, and only became heir-apparent on the death of Khaemuas, the wizard prince. At the time of his accession he must have been nearly sixty years of age; and thus the throne of Egypt was occupied by a comparatively old man at a time when her condition seemed to require a young and vigorous ruler. The early years of his reign were peaceful. Intercourse with Syria was frequent; the treaty of peace with the Hittites was maintained, and Merenptah was politic enough to put the neutrality of that warlike people on the firmer basis of an interested friendship by sending supplies of corn during a famine in Syria-an act of helpfulness which may have stood him in good stead in the great crisis of his reign, when trouble on the eastern border might easily have proved fatal. In his fifth year the storm-cloud which had long been gathering on his western frontier broke at last. Under the Libyan king, Mauroy, an alliance had been formed embracing the Libyans and several other tribes whose names are given as the Aqayuasha, Tursha, Luku, Shardena, and Shakalsha, and a large army had been gathered together for the invasion of Egypt. The object aimed at was not mere conquest and plunder, but a permanent occupation of the Delta, as is shown by the fact that the invaders brought their families with them. No such danger had threatened Egypt since the Hyksos invasion. Merenptah gathered a strong force to meet the Libyan army, and prepared a second line of defence, in case his troops should be defeated in the field, by re-fortifying Heliopolis and Memphis. Before the actual shock of war took place, he was visited in a dream by the god Ptah, who gave him a sword, and encouraged him to hope for victory in the approaching battle. The Egyptian troops got into touch with the invaders at Pa-ari-sheps (possibly Prosopis) on the first day of the month Epiphi (April 25). The actual battle was delayed for two days, as the whole Libyan army had not yet come up, and the Egyptian leaders, with a confidence justified by the event, preferred apparently to wait until all their foes were assembled, and to strike a single crushing blow. By April 27 Mauroy had brought up the last of his straggling contingents, and the battle began. The Egyptian tactics were those which have generally been adopted by civilized races in dealing with a less civilized enemy. The heavyarmed infantry and the chariots were held back, while for six hours the Libyan army was subjected to a hail of arrows from the Egyptian bowmen. When the invaders, who seem to have had no archers with whom they could reply, as no bows are mentioned among the spoils, had been sufficiently disorganized, the infantry was sent in to complete their discomfiture with the sword, and finally the chariots were loosed in pursuit of the broken enemy. The slaughter was heavy. The lists at Karnak give a total of between 8,000 and 9,000 slain, to which the Libyan contingent contributed over 6,000; while more than 9,000 captives were taken, together with a great booty. The number of swords taken from the captives was 9,111, while upwards of 120,000 weapons of all sorts were picked up on the battle-field. Such figures make it evident that the allied force was a very large one, and that the Battle of Pa-ari-sheps should rank as one of the greatest triumphs ever achieved by the Egyptian arms. The Libyan camp was plundered, and then the skin tents and equipment of the invaders were set fire to, and the sacred soil of Egypt purged from the last relics of the presumptuous foe who had desecrated it. On seeing that the battle was hopelessly lost, Mauroy fled, tearing off the plumes which were the insignia of his rank; and, under covert of the darkness, he succeeded in eluding the pursuit of the victors. Merenptah's Song of Triumph graphically describes the miserable condition to which the would-be conqueror of Egypt was reduced: 'The wretched conquered prince of Libya fled, |