[Illustration:  SPEARING THE CROCODILE.]

Amenemhat I. is the only Egyptian king who makes a boast of his hunting prowess.  “I hunted the lion,” he says, “and brought back the crocodile a prisoner.”  Lions do not at the present time frequent Egypt, and, indeed, are not found lower down the Nile valley than the point where the Great Stream receives its last tributary, the Atbara.  But anciently they seem to have haunted the entire desert tracts on either side of the river.  The Roman Emperor Hadrian is said to have hunted one near Alexandria, and the monuments represent lions as tamed and used in the chase by the ancient inhabitants.  Sometimes they even accompanied their masters to the battlefield.  We know nothing of Amenemhat’s mode of hunting the king of beasts, but may assume that it was not very different from that which prevailed at a later date in Assyria.  There, dogs and beaters were employed to rouse the animals from their lairs, while the king and his fellow-sportsmen either plied them with flights of arrows, or withstood their onset with swords and spears.  The crocodile was certainly sometimes attacked while he was in the water, the hunters using a boat, and endeavouring to spear him at the point where the head joins the spine; but this could not have been the mode adopted by Amenemhat, since it would have resulted in instant death, whereas he tells us that he “brought the crocodile home a prisoner.”  Possibly, therefore, he employed the method which Herodotus says was in common use in his day.  This was to bait a hook with a joint of pork and throw it into the water at a point where the current would carry it out into mid-stream; then to take a live pig to the river-side, and belabour him well with a stick till he set up the squeal familiar to most ears.  Any crocodile within hearing was sure to come to the sound, and falling in with the pork on the way, would instantly swallow it down.  Upon this the hunters hauled at the rope to which the hook was attached, and, notwithstanding his struggles, drew “leviathan” to shore.  Amenemhat, having thus “made the crocodile a prisoner,” may have carried his captive in triumph to his capital, and exhibited him before the eyes of the people.

Amenemhat, having reigned as sole king for twenty years, was induced to raise his eldest son, Usurtasen, to the royal dignity, and associate him with himself in the government of the empire.  Usurtasen was a prince of much promise, He “brought prosperity to the affairs of his father.  He was, as a god, without fears; before him was never one like to him.  Most skilful in affairs, beneficent in his mandates, both in his going out and in his coming in he made Egypt flourish.”  His courage and his warlike capacity were great.  Already, in the lifetime of his father, he had distinguished himself in combats with the Petti and the Sakti.  When he was settled upon the throne, he made war upon the Cushite tribes who bordered Egypt upon the south, employing the services