office of the Registration of Land, to that of the Inundation, and to various other departments. In theory, at least, all these departments were twofold, preserving in name the remembrance of the time when Egypt was divided into two kingdoms; but probably this became a mere fiction at a very early stage of the history. There was a highly elaborated system of law, of which, unfortunately, no part has been preserved; but there was no official class of judges, the law being administered in the various districts by the local governors, many of whom boast of their integrity in the discharge of this important function. In cases of special moment a judicial commission was sometimes appointed, with powers to hear and to determine, as in the case of Queen Amtes, where Una, as already mentioned, was made judge.

For administrative purposes the land was divided into local districts, or 'nomes,' of which there were about forty. These were administered by local governors, or 'nomarchs,' who were responsible to the central treasury and to the king. This system of devolution, while simplifying the administration of the country, led in the end to the destruction of the Old Kingdom; for these small States became each a kind of imperium in imperio, the local governors became more and more important, and at last, by the combination of their growing influence, the central authority was overthrown.

This consummation was aided by the military system of the nation. There was no standing army, but each nome maintained its own body of local militia. These troops were liable to be called out by the Pharaoh when occasion arose, and were then sometimes stiffened, as in the case of Una's expeditionary force, by regiments and brigades enlisted from among the tribes on the borders of the land. In addition to the forces thus more or less at the disposal of the Pharaoh, the various temples, like the

abbeys of the Middle Ages, had each its own body of militia. This loose form of military organization, however convenient in many respects, was obviously a source of weakness and danger to the central authority. The local troops, raised and led by local governors, might easily become more attached to the interests of their particular nome or governor than to the larger but vaguer interests of the kingdom or the Pharaoh, and in the hands of an able and ambitious nomarch might be used as readily against the power of the central authority as in support of it - a state of things which was actually realized repeatedly in the course of the nation's history.

At this stage of the national development no fixed capital existed. The locality of the court and capital was determined, for the time being, by the place which the reigning Pharaoh selected for his pyramid. Around this spot a new court grew up, which lasted as long as the reign; and when the king had passed away the court was again shifted to the new locality which had been chosen by his successor. In the days in question, however, the locality of the court was generally somewhere in the vicinity of the great city of Memphis. This mobility of so complex an organization as the royal court of Egypt was rendered possible by the character of Egyptian domestic architecture. Egypt has left us many temples and tombs, but practically no complete specimen of its palaces or of the houses of its noble class. Its cities have all perished, for the reason that the houses were of the very lightest construction. No doubt the royal palaces, and even the mansions of the nobles, were of great size; but, as the climate dictated, they were of the most fragile materials, consisting mainly of wood and sun-dried brick. They were profusely, and in some instances very beautifully, adorned with designs in colour, and were richly furnished; but such methods of construc

tion were, of course, totally unable to withstand the assaults of time, and in consequence we know of the structure and adornment of the Old Kingdom palaces and mansions only from pictured representations of them. The houses of the wealthier Egyptians were generally surrounded with gardens, carefully and tastefully laid out, and diversified with trees and shrubs, the chief feature of the design being frequently a piece of ornamental water. Very different from these beautiful, if fragile, villas were the houses of the common people, of which traces have come down to us. In the city life of Egypt under the Old Kingdom the working classes seem to have been huddled together in mud hovels packed closely side by side, with only narrow streets, or rather alleys, between the blocks; and overcrowding would seem to have been as characteristic of the cities in those far-off days as it is at the present time.

Of the moral standard prevalent not very much is known. The fact of the king keeping a harem is merely in accordance with the immemorial custom of Eastern sovereigns, and does not necessarily imply a low level of moral ideas. In fact, the position of women all through the historic period was much higher in the land of the Nile than in any other Eastern country. As already mentioned, the most direct line of inheritance was on the female side; and if we may judge from the few specimens of literature which have survived from these ancient days, the wife and the mother were looked upon with considerable respect, and occupied a position of much influence in the household. Monogamy was the rule, and the women of the community appear to have been well treated, and to have had a much greater amount of freedom than is common among Eastern peoples. At the same time, where people were crowded together in such promiscuous fashion as in the great towns of ancient Egypt, the

standard of morality among the lower classes cannot have been very high, and the urgent warnings against immoral conduct which have been preserved in the literature of the period indicate that while the ideal of conduct was lofty, the practice was not always in accordance with it.

Of the ordinary life of the people we have fairly good evidences. The Old Kingdom nobles were by no means in that stage of idleness which has so often proved the ruin of a leisured and privileged class. On the contrary, they appear to have been active and energetic, taking a prominent part in the government of their respective districts, holding themselves responsible for the welfare of the people under them, and exerting themselves in very praiseworthy fashion to secure it. They exercised a constant personal supervision over their own estates, and in addition were liable, as we have seen, to be dispatched on long and arduous expeditions in the service of their sovereign. So far as the evidence goes, a leading characteristic of the ancient Egyptian nobility was a passionate love of Nature. The houses of the nobles were adorned with lifelike and artistic representations of natural objects, rendered frequently with the utmost fidelity, and their chief diversion seems to have been found in outdoor sports. The great noble goes fishing or fowling among the reeds and papyrus thickets of the marshes in his light papyrus skiff, often with his wife as companion. Sometimes he amuses himself by harpooning the fish which abound in the shallow waters; at other times he pursues water-fowl, which he brings down by means of a throwstick (Figs. 35 and 36) resembling the Australian boomerang, though there is no evidence that the Egyptian had learned so to make and control this weapon as to render it capable of the wonderful feats which the Australian black-fellow can perform with it. Occasion

ally bigger game occupied his attention, and a great hunt was organized for the capture of the hippopotamus or the crocodile, abundant in those days in the Nile waters, from which they have now been practically driven (Fig. 4). Sometimes the hunt was carried into the desert after the lion and the antelope, in the pursuit of which dogs of

FIG. 4.-HUNTING THE HIPPOPOTAMUS.

various breeds were used; but the desert remained to the Egyptian a somewhat fearful place, and his imagination. peopled it with strange mysterious creatures of fantastic shapes (Fig. 5).

On the whole the life of the Egyptian upper classes seems not to have differed much, save in detail, from