We know, and the experience of the past is continually reiterating the lesson, that the most careful precautions and the most conscientious observation of customs were not sufficient to perpetuate the worship of ancestors.  The day was bound to come when not only the descendants of Khnumhotpu, but a crowd of curious or indifferent strangers, would visit his tomb:  he desired that they should know his genealogy, his private and public virtues, his famous deeds, his court titles and dignities, the extent of his wealth; and in order that no detail should be omitted, he relates all that he did, or he gives the representation of it upon the wall.  In a long account of two hundred and twenty-two lines, he gives a resume of his family history, introducing extracts from his archives, to show the favours received by his ancestors from the hands of their sovereigns.  Amoni and Khiti, who were, it appears, the warriors of their race, have everywhere recounted the episodes of their military career, the movements of their troops, their hand-to-hand fights, and the fortresses to which they laid siege.  These scions of the house of the Gazelle and of the Hare, who shared with Pharaoh himself the possession of the soil of Egypt, were no mere princely ciphers:  they had a tenacious spirit, a warlike disposition, an insatiable desire for enlarging their borders, together with sufficient ability to realize their aims by court intrigues or advantageous marriage alliances.  We can easily picture from their history what Egyptian feudalism really was, what were its component elements, what were the resources it had at its disposal, and we may well be astonished when we consider the power and tact which the Pharaohs must have displayed in keeping such vassals in check during two centuries.

Amenemhait I. had abandoned Thebes as a residence in favour of Heracleopolis and Memphis, and had made it over to some personage who probably belonged to the royal household.  The nome of Uisit had relapsed into the condition of a simple fief, and if we are as yet unable to establish the series of the princes who there succeeded each other contemporaneously with the Pharaohs, we at least know that all those whose names have come down to us played an important part in the history of their times.  Montunsisu, whose stele was engraved in the XXIVth year of Amenemhait I., and who died in the joint reign of this Pharaoh and his son Usirtasen I., had taken his share in most of the wars conducted against neighbouring peoples,—­the Anitiu of Nubia, the Monitu of Sinai, and the “Lords of the Sands:”  he had dismantled their cities and razed their fortresses.  The principality retained no doubt the same boundaries which it had acquired under the first Antufs, but Thebes itself grew daily larger, and gained in importance in proportion as its frontiers extended southward.  It had become, after the conquests of Usirtasen III., the very centre of the Egyptian world—­a centre from which