[Illustration:  454.jpg THE ISLE OF KONOSSO, WITH ITS INSCRIPTIONS]

It is very curious to find the pyramids reappearing in Egyptian tomb-architecture in the very latest period of Egyptian history.  We find them when Egyptian civilization was just entering upon its vigorous manhood, then they gradually disappear, only to revive in its decadent and exiled old age.  The Ethiopian pyramids are all of much more elongated form than the old Egyptian ones.  It is possible that they may be a survival of the archaistic movement of the XXVIth Dynasty, to which we have already referred.

These are not the latest Egyptian monuments in the Sudan, nor are the temples of Naga and Mesawwarat the most ancient, though they belong to the Roman period and are decidedly barbarian as to their style and, especially, as to their decoration.  The southernmost as well as latest relic of Egypt in the Sudan is the Christian church of Soba, on the Blue Mie, a few miles above Khartum.  In it was found a stone ram, an emblem of Amen-Ra, which had formerly stood in the temple of Naga and had been brought to Soba perhaps under the impression that it was the Christian Lamb.  It was removed to the garden of the governor-general’s palace at Khartum, where it now stands.

The church at Soba is a relic of the Christian kingdom of Alua, which succeeded the realm of the Candaces.  One of its chief seats was at Dongola, and all Nubia is covered with the ruins of its churches.  It was, of course, an offshoot of the Christianity of Egypt, but a late one, since Isis was still worshipped at Philse in the sixth century, long after the Edict of Theodosius had officially abolished paganism throughout the Roman world, and the Nubians were at first zealous votaries of the goddess of Philo.  So also when Egypt fell beneath the sway of the Moslem in the seventh century, Nubia remained an independent Christian state, and continued so down to the twelfth century, when the soldiers of Islam conquered the country.

Of late pagan and early Christian Egypt very much that is new has been discovered during the last few years.  The period of the Lower Empire has yielded much to the explorers of Oxyrrhynchus, and many papyri of interest belonging to this period have been published by Mr. Kenyon in his Catalogue of the Greek Papyri in the British Museum, especially the letters of Flavius Abinaeus, a military officer of the fourth century.  The papyri of this period are full of the high-flown titles and affected phraseology which was so beloved of Byzantine scribes.  “Glorious Dukes of the Thebaid,” “most magnificent counts and lieutenants,” “all-praiseworthy secretaries,” and the like strut across the pages of the letters and documents which begin “In the name of Our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, the God and Saviour of us all, in the year x of the reign of the most divine and praised, great, and beneficent Lord Flavius Heraclius (or other) the eternal Augustus and Auto-krator, month x, year x of the In diction.”  It is an extraordinary period, this of the sixth and seventh centuries, which we have now entered, with its bizarre combination of the official titulary of the divine and eternal Caesars Imperatores Augusti with the initial invocation of Christ and the Trinity.  It is the transition from the ancient to the modern world, and as such has an interest all its own.