Usirtasen I. made repeated campaigns against them, the earlier ones being undertaken in his father’s lifetime.  Afterwards he pressed on, and straightway “raised his frontiers” at the rapids of Wady Haifa; and the country was henceforth the undisputed property of his successors.  It was divided into nomes like Egypt itself; the Egyptian language succeeded in driving out the native dialects, and the local deities, including Didun, the principal god, were associated or assimilated with the gods of Egypt.  Khnumu was the favourite deity of the northern nomes, doubtless because the first colonists were natives of Elephantine, and subjects of its princes.  In the southern nomes, which had been annexed under the Theban kings and were peopled with Theban immigrants, the worship of Khnumu was carried on side by side with the worship of Amon, or Amon-Ra, god of Thebes.  In accordance with local affinities, now no longer intelligible, the other gods also were assigned smaller areas in the new territory—­Thot at Pselcis and Pnubsit, where a gigantic nabk tree was worshipped, Ra near Derr, and Horus at Miama and Bauka.  The Pharaohs who had civilized the country here received divine honours while still alive.  Usirtasen III. was placed in triads along with Didun, Amon, and Khnumu; temples were raised to him at Semneh, Shotaui, and Doshkeh; and the anniversary of a decisive victory which he had gained over the barbarians was still celebrated on the 21st of Pachons, a thousand years afterwards, under Thutmosis III.  The feudal system spread over the land lying between the two cataracts, where hereditary barons held their courts, trained their armies, built their castles, and excavated their superbly decorated tombs in the mountain-sides.  The only difference between Nubian Egypt and Egypt proper lay in the greater heat and smaller wealth of the former, where the narrower, less fertile, and less well-watered land supported a smaller population and yielded less abundant revenues.

The Pharaoh kept the charge of the more important strategical points in his own hands.  Strongholds placed at bends of the river and at the mouths of ravines leading into the desert, secured freedom of navigation, and kept off the pillaging nomads.  The fortress of Derr [Kubban?—­Ed.], which was often rebuilt, dates in part at least from the early days of the conquest of Nubia.  Its rectangular boundary—­a dry brick wall—­is only broken by easily filled up gaps, and with some repairs it would still resist an Ababdeh attack.*

* The most ancient bricks in the fortifications of Derr, easily distinguishable from those belonging to the later restorations, are identical in shape and size with those of the walls at Syene and El-Kab; and the wall at El-Kab was certainly built not later than the XIIth dynasty.

The most considerable Nubian works of the XIIth dynasty were in the three places from which the country can even now be most effectively commanded, namely, at