he was at the head of many warriors, chosen from among the bravest,” which was the cause of his success in the enterprise with which his Holiness had deigned to entrust him.  Once, however, the king employed him in regions which were not so familiar to him as those of Nubia, and fate was against him.  He had received orders to visit the Amu, the Asiatic tribes inhabiting the Sinaitic Peninsula, and to repeat on a smaller scale in the south the expedition which Uni had led against them in the north; he proceeded thither, and his sojourn having come to an end, he chose to return by sea.  To sail towards Puanit, to coast up as far as the “Head of Nekhabit,” to land there and make straight for Elephantine by the shortest route, presented no unusual difficulties, and doubtless more than one traveller or general of those times had safely accomplished it; Papinakhiti failed miserably.  As he was engaged in constructing his vessel, the Hiru-Shaitu fell upon him and massacred him, as well as the detachment of troops who accompanied him:  the remaining soldiers brought home his body, which was buried by the side of the other princes in the mountain opposite Syene.  Papi II. had ample leisure to avenge the death of his vassal and to send fresh expeditions to Iritit, among the Amamit and even beyond, if, indeed, as the author of the chronological Canon of Turin asserts,* he really reigned for more than ninety years; but the monuments are almost silent with regard to him, and give us no information about his possible exploits in Nubia.  An inscription of his second year proves that he continued to work the Sinaitic mines, and that he protected them from the Bedouin.

* The fragments of Manetho and the Canon of Eratosthenes agree in assigning to him a reign of a hundred years—­a fact which seems to indicate that the missing unit in the Turin list was nine:  Papi II. would have thus died in the hundreth year of his reign.  A reign of a hundred years is impossible:  Mihtimsauf I. having reigned fourteen years, it would be necessary to assume that Papi II., son of Papi I., should have lived a hundred and fourteen years at the least, even on the supposition that he was a posthumous child.  The simplest solution is to suppose (1) that Papi II. lived a hundred years, as Ramses II. did in later times, and that the years of his life were confounded with the years of his reign; or (2) that, being the brother of Mihtimsauf I., he was considered as associated with him on the throne, and that the hundred years of his reign, including the fourteen of the latter prince, were identified with the years of his life.  We may, moreover, believe that the chronologists, for. lack of information on the VIth dynasty, have filled the blanks in their annals by lengthening the reign of Papi II., which in any case must have been very long.

On the other hand, the number and beauty of the tombs in which mention is made of him, bear witness to the fact that Egypt enjoyed continued prosperity.  Recent discoveries have done much to surround this king and his immediate predecessors with an air of reality which is lacking in many of the later Pharaohs.