of heaven, and yielded without fighting.  Tosorthros, the successor of Necherophes, brought the hieroglyphs and the art of stone-cutting to perfection.  He composed, as Teti did, books of medicine, a fact which caused him to be identified with the healing god Imhotpu.  The priests related these things seriously, and the Greek writers took them down from their lips with the respect which they offered to everything emanating from the wise men of Egypt.

What they related of the human kings was not more detailed, as we see, than their accounts of the gods.  Whether the legends dealt with deities or kings, all that we know took its origin, not in popular imagination, but in sacerdotal dogma:  they were invented long after the times they dealt with, in the recesses of the temples, with an intention and a method of which we are enabled to detect flagrant instances on the monuments.

Toward the middle of the third century before our era the Greek troops stationed on the southern frontier, in the forts at the first cataract, developed a particular veneration for Isis of Philae.  Their devotion spread to the superior officers who came to inspect them, then to the whole population of the Thebaid, and finally reached the court of the Macedonian kings.  The latter, carried away by force of example, gave every encouragement to a movement which attracted worshippers to a common sanctuary, and united in one cult two races over which they ruled.  They pulled down the meagre building of the Saite period, which had hitherto sufficed for the worship of Isis, constructed at great cost the temple which still remains almost intact, and assigned to it considerable possessions in Nubia, which, in addition to gifts from private individuals, made the goddess the richest land-owner in Southern Egypt.  Knumu and his two wives, Anukit and Satit, who, before Isis, had been the undisputed suzerains of the cataract, perceived with jealousy their neighbor’s prosperity:  the civil wars and invasions of the centuries immediately preceding had ruined their temples, and their poverty contrasted painfully with the riches of the new-comer.

The priests resolved to lay this sad state of affairs before King Ptolemy, to represent to him the services which they had rendered and still continued to render to Egypt, and above all to remind him of the generosity of the ancient Pharaohs, whose example, owing to the poverty of the times, the recent Pharaohs had been unable to follow.  Doubtless authentic documents were wanting in their archives to support their pretensions:  they therefore inscribed upon a rock, in the island of Sehel, a long inscription which they attributed to Zosiri of the III dynasty.  This sovereign had left behind him a vague reputation for greatness.  As early as the XII dynasty Usirtasen III had claimed him as “his father”—­his ancestor—­and had erected a statue to him; the priests knew that, by invoking him, they had a chance of obtaining a hearing.