possible by charms, incantations, and the use of waxen images, to bewitch men, or paralyse their limbs, or even to cause their deaths.  Hags were to be found about the court as wicked as Canidia, who were willing to sell their skill in the black art to the highest bidder.  The actual person of the monarch was not sacred from the plottings of this nefarious crew, who planned assassinations and hatched conspiracies in the very purlieus of the royal palace.  Ramesses himself would, apparently, have fallen a victim to a plot of the kind, had not the parties to it been discovered, arrested, tried by a Royal Commission, and promptly executed.

The descendants of Ramesses III. occupied the throne from his death (about B.C. 1280) to B.C. 1100.  Ten princes of the name of Ramesses, and one called Meri-Tum, bore sway during this interval, each of them showing, if possible, greater weakness than the last, and all of them sunk in luxury, idle, effeminate, sensual.  Ramesses III. provoked caricature by his open exhibition of harem-scenes on the walls of his Medinet-Abou palace.  His descendants, content with harem life, scarcely cared to quit the precincts of the royal abode, desisted from all war, and even devolved the task of government on other shoulders.  The Pharaohs of the twentieth dynasty became absolute faineants, and devolved their duties on the high-priests of the great temple of Ammon at Thebes, who “set themselves to play the same part which at a distant period was played by the Mayors of the Palace under the later French kings of the Merovingian line.”

In an absolute monarchy, the royal authority is the mainspring which controls all movements and all actions in every part of the State.  Let this source of energy grow weak, and decline at once shows itself throughout the entire body politic.  It is as when a fatal malady seizes on the seat of life in an individual—­instantly every member, every tissue, falls away, suffers, shrinks, decays, perishes.  Egyptian architecture is simply non-existent from the death of Ramesses III. to the age of Sheshonk; the “grand style” of pictorial art disappears; sculpture in relief becomes a wearisome repetition of the same stereotyped religious groups; statuary deteriorates and is rare; above all, literature declines, undergoing an almost complete eclipse.  A galaxy of literary talent had, as we have seen, clustered about the reigns of Ramesses II. and Menephthah, under whose encouragement authors had devoted themselves to history, divinity, practical philosophy, poetry, epistolary correspondence, novels, travels, legend.  From the time of Ramesses III.—­nay, from the time of Seti II.—­all is a blank:  “the true poetic inspiration appears to have vanished,” literature is almost dumb; instead of the masterpieces of Pentaour, Kakabu, Nebsenen, Enna, and others, which even moderns can peruse with pleasure, we have only documents in which “the dry official tone” prevails—­abstracts of trials, lists of functionaries, tiresome enumerations