the head of the entire country:  doubtless the kings did not at once forsake Heracleopolis and the Fayum, but they made merely passing visits to these royal residences at considerable intervals, and after a few generations even these were given up.  Most of these sovereigns resided and built their Pyramids at Thebes, and the administration of the kingdom became centralized there.  The actual capital of a king was determined not so much by the locality from whence he ruled, as by the place where he reposed after death.  Thebes was the virtual capital of Egypt from the moment that its masters fixed on it as their burying-place.

Uncertainty again shrouds the history of the country after Sovkhotpu I.:  not that monuments are lacking or names of kings, but the records of the many Sovkhotpus and Nonrhotpus found in a dozen places in the valley, furnish as yet no authentic means of ascertaining in what order to classify them.  The XIIIth dynasty contained, so it is said, sixty kings, who reigned for a period of over 453 years.*

* This is the number given in one of the lists of Manetho, in Muller-Didot, Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum, vol. ii. p. 565.  Lepsius’s theory, according to which the shepherds overran Egypt from the end of the XIIth dynasty and tolerated the existence of two vassal dynasties, the XIIIth and XIVth, was disputed and refuted by E. de Rouge as soon as it appeared; we find the theory again in the works of some contemporary Egyptologists, but the majority of those who continued to support it have since abandoned their position.

The succession did not always take place in the direct line from father to son:  several times, when interrupted by default of male heirs, it was renewed without any disturbance, thanks to the transmission of royal rights to their children by princesses, even when their husbands did not belong to the reigning family.  Monthotpu, the father of Sovkhotpu III., was an ordinary priest, and his name is constantly quoted by his son; but solar blood flowed in the veins of his mother, and procured for him the crown.  The father of his successor, Nofirhotpu IL, did not belong to the reigning branch, or was only distantly connected with it, but his mother Kamait was the daughter of Pharaoh, and that was sufficient to make her son of royal rank.  With careful investigation, we should probably find traces of several revolutions which changed the legitimate order of succession without, however, entailing a change of dynasty.  The Nofirhotpus and Sovkhotpus continued both at home and abroad the work so ably begun by the Amenemhaits and the Usirtasens.

[Illustration:  410.jpg THE COLOSSAL STATUE OF KING SOVKHOTPU IN THE LOUVRE]