We shall have to picture to ourselves the Laconians—­the people of Menelaues—­about the time of his grandfather, Atreus, or his great-grandfather, Pelops, similarly employed, and contending with the Pharaoh of the Exodus on the soil of the Delta.  Nay, we shall have to antedate the rise of the Tyrsenians to naval greatness by about seven hundred years, and to suppose that the Sicels and Sardi, whom the Greeks and Romans found living the life of savages in Sicily and Sardinia, when they first visited their shores, about B.C. 750-600, were flourishing peoples and skilful navigators half a millennium earlier.  The picture which we thus obtain of the ancient world is very surprising, and quite unlike anything that could be gathered from the literature of the Greeks; but it is not to be regarded as beyond the range of possibility, since nations are quite as apt to lapse from civilization into barbarism as to emerge out of barbarism into civilization.  It is quite conceivable that the nations of South-Eastern Europe were more advanced in civilization and the arts of life about B.C. 1400-1300 than they are found to have been six centuries later, the false dawn having been succeeded by a time of darkness before the true dawn came.

However this may have been, it is certain that Menephthah, in the fifth year of his reign, had to meet a formidable, and apparently unprovoked, attack from a combination of nations, the like of which we do not again meet with in Egyptian history, either earlier or later.  Marmaiu, son of Deid, led against him a confederate army, consisting of three principal tribes of the Tahennu—–­ the Lubu (Libyans), the Mashuash (Maxyes), and the Kahaka—­together with auxiliaries from five other tribes or peoples, the Akausha, the Luku, the Tursha, the Shartana, and the Sheklusha.  The entire number of the army, as already stated, was probably not less than forty thousand; they had numerous chariots, and were armed with bows and arrows, cuirasses, and bronze or copper swords.  They had skin tents, and brought with them their wives and children, with the intention of settling in Egypt, as the Hyksos had done five hundred years earlier.  They had also with them a considerable number of cattle, as bulls, oxen, and goats.  The chiefs came provided with thrones, and both they and their officers had numerous drinking vessels of bronze, of silver, and of gold.

The attack was made on the western side of Egypt, towards the apex of the Delta.  It was at first completely successful.  The small frontier towns were taken by assault, and “turned Into heaps of rubbish;” the Delta was entered upon, and a position taken up In the nome of Paari-sheps, or Prosopis, which lay between the Canobic and Sebennytic branches of the Nile, commencing at the point of their separation.  From this position Memphis and Heliopolis were alike menaced.  Menephthah hastily fortified these cities, or rather, we must suppose, strengthened their existing defences.  Meanwhile the Libyans