my land (i.e. they died of the plague), and there was no working of copper; and this was, my brother, not pleasing unto thy heart.  Thy messenger with my messenger swiftly will I send, and whatsoever amount of copper thou hast asked for, O my brother, I, even I, will send it unto thee.”  The mention by Herhor’s envoy of Nesibinebdad (Smendes), the King of Tanis, a powerful ruler who in reality constantly threatened the existence of the priestly monarchy at Thebes, as “him to whom Amen has committed the wardship of his North-land,” is distinctly amusing.  The hard fact of the independence of Lower Egypt had to be glozed somehow.

The days of Theban power were coming to an end and only the prestige of the god Amen remained strong for two hundred years more.  But the alliance of Amen and his priests with a band of predatory and destroying foreign conquerors, the Ethiopians (whose rulers were the descendants of the priest-kings, who retired to Napata on the succession of the powerful Bubastite dynasty of Shishak to that of Tanis, abandoning Thebes to the Northerners), did much to destroy the prestige of Amen and of everything connected with him.  An Ethiopian victory meant only an Assyrian reconquest, and between them Ethiopians and Assyrians had well-nigh ruined Egypt.  In the Saite period Thebes had declined greatly in power as well as in influence, and all its traditions were anathema to the leading people of the time, although not of course in Akhunaten’s sense.

With the Saite period we seem almost to have retraced our steps and to have reentered the age of the Pyramid Builders.  All the pomp and glory of Thothmes, Amenhetep, and Ramses were gone.  The days of imperial Egypt were over, and the minds of men, sickened of foreign war, turned for peace and quietness to the simpler ideals of the IVth and Vth Dynasties.  We have already seen that an archaistic revival of the styles of the early dynasties is characteristic of this late period, and that men were buried at Sakkara and at Thebes in tombs which recall in form and decoration those of the courtiers of the Pyramid Builders.  Everywhere we see this fashion of archaism.  A Theban noble of this period named Aba was buried at Thebes.  Long ago, nearly three thousand years before, under the VIth Dynasty, there had lived a great noble of the same name, who was buried in a rock-tomb at Der el-Gebrawi, in Middle Egypt.  This tomb was open and known in the days of the second Aba, who caused to be copied and reproduced in his tomb in the Asasif at Thebes most of the scenes from the bas-relief with which it had been decorated.  The tomb of the VIth Dynasty Aba has lately been copied for the Archaeological Survey of Egypt (Egypt Exploration Fund) by Mr. de Garis Davies, who has found the reliefs of the XXVIth Dynasty Aba of considerable use to him in reconstituting destroyed portions of their ancient originals.