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CHAPTER III—­THE FIRST THEBAN EMPIRE

The two Heracleopolitan dynasties and the XIIth dynasty—­The conquest of Ethiopia, and the making of Greater Egypt by the Theban kings.

The principality of the Oleander—­Naru—­was bounded on the north by the Memphite nome; the frontier ran from the left bank of the Nile to the Libyan range, from the neighbourhood of Riqqah to that of Medum.  The principality comprised the territory lying between the Nile and the Bahr Yusuf, from the above-mentioned two villages to the Harabshent Canal—­a district known to Greek geographers as the island of Heracleopolis;—­it moreover included the whole basin of the Fayum, on the west of the valley.  In very early times it had been divided into three parts:  the Upper Oleander—­Naru Khoniti—­the Lower Oleander—­Naru Pahui—­and the lake land—­To-shit; and these divisions, united usually under the supremacy of one chief, formed a kind of small state, of which Heracleopolis was always the capital.  The soil was fertile, well watered, and well tilled, but the revenues from this district, confined between the two arms of the river, were small in comparison with the wealth which their ruler derived from his hands on the other side of the mountain range.  The Fayum is approached by a narrow and winding gorge, more than six miles in length—­a depression of natural formation, deepened by the hand of man to allow a free passage to the waters of the Nile.  The canal which conveys them leaves the Bahr Yusuf at a point a little to the north of Heracleopolis, carries them in a swift stream through the gorge in the Libyan chain, and emerges into an immense amphitheatre, whose highest side is parallel to the Nile valley, and whose terraced slopes descend abruptly to about a hundred feet below the level of the Mediterranean.  Two great arms separate themselves from this canal to the right and left—­the Wady Tamieh and the Wady Nazleh; they wind at first along the foot of the hills, and then again approaching each other, empty themselves into a great crescent or horn-shaped lake, lying east and west—­the Moeris of Strabo, the Birket-Kerun of the Arabs.  A third branch penetrates the space enclosed by the other two, passes the town of Shodu, and is then subdivided into numerous canals and ditches, whose ramifications appear on the map as a network resembling the reticulations of a skeleton leaf.  The lake formerly extended beyond its present limits, and submerged districts from which it has since withdrawn.*

* Most of the specialists who have latterly investigated the Fayum have greatly exaggerated the extent of the Birket- Kerun in historic times.  Prof.  Petrie states that it covered the whole of the present province throughout the time of the Memphite kings, and that it was not until the reign of Amenemhait I. that even a very small portion was drained.