with the natives and had families:  at the end of two or three generations their descendants became assimilated with the indigenous race, and were neither more nor less than actual serfs attached to the soil, who were made over or exchanged with it.* The landed proprietors, lords, kings, or gods, accommodated this population either in the outbuildings belonging to their residences, or in villages built for the purpose, where everything belonged to them, both houses and people.

* This is the status of serfs, or miritiu, as shown in the texts of every period.  They are mentioned along with the fields or cattle attached to a temple or belonging to a noble.  Ramses II. granted to the temple of Abydos “an appanage in cultivated lands, in serfs (miritiu), in cattle.”  The scribe Anna sees in his tomb “stalls of bulls, of oxen, of calves, of milch cows, as well as serfs, in the mortmain of Amon.”  Ptolemy I. returned to the temple at Buto “the domains, the boroughs, the serfs, the tillage, the water supply, the cattle, the geese, the flocks, all the things” which Xerxes had taken away from Kabbisha.  The expression passed into the language, as a word used to express the condition of a subject race:  “I cause,” said Thutmosis III., “Egypt to be a sovereign (hirit) to whom all the earth is a slave” (miritu).

[Illustration:  123.jpg PART OF THE MODERN VILLAGE OF KARNAK, TO THE WEST OF THE TEMPLE OF APIT]

     Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Beato, taken in 1886.

The condition of the free agricultural labourer was in many respects analogous to that of the modern fellah.  Some of them possessed no other property than a mud cabin, just large enough for a man and his wife, and hired themselves out by the day or the year as farm servants.  Others were emboldened to lease land from the lord or from a soldier in the neighbourhood.  The most fortunate acquired some domain of which they were supposed to receive only the product, the freehold of the property remaining primarily in the hands of the Pharaoh, and secondarily in that of lay or religious feudatories who held it of the sovereign:  they could, moreover, bequeath, give, or sell these lands and buy fresh ones without any opposition.  They paid, besides the capitation tax, a ground rent proportionate to the extent of their property, and to the kind of land of which it consisted.*

* The capitation tax, the ground rent, and the house duty of the time of the Ptolemies, already existed under the rule of the native Pharaohs.  Brugsch has shown that these taxes are mentioned in an inscription of the time of Ameuothes III.

It was not without reason that all the ancients attributed the invention of geometry to the Egyptians.  The perpetual encroachments of the Nile and the displacements it occasioned, the facility with which it effaced the boundaries of the fields, and in one summer modified