All these various officials closely attached to the person of the sovereign—­heads of the wardrobe, chamberlains, cupbearers, bearers of the royal sword or of the flabella, commanders of the eunuchs or of the guards—­had, by the nature of their duties, daily opportunities of gaining a direct influence over their master and his government, and from among them he often chose the generals of his army or the administrators of his domains.  Here, again, as far as the few monuments and the obscurity of the texts permit of our judging, we find indications of a civil and military organization analogous to that of Egypt:  the divergencies which contemporaries may have been able to detect in the two national systems are effaced by the distance of time, and we are struck merely by the resemblances.  As all business transactions were carried on by barter or by the exchange of merchandise for weighed quantities of the precious metals, the taxes were consequently paid in kind:  the principal media being corn and other cereals, dates, fruits, stuffs, live animals and slaves, as well as gold, silver, lead, and copper, either in its native state or melted into bars fashioned into implements or ornamented vases.  Hence we continually come across fiscal storehouses, both in town and country, which demanded the services of a whole troop of functionaries and workmen:  administrators of corn, cattle, precious metals, wine and oil; in fine, as many administrators as there were cultures or industries in the country presided over the gathering of the products into the central depots and regulated their redistribution.  A certain portion was reserved for the salaries of the employes and the pay of the workmen engaged in executing public works:  the surplus accumulated in the treasury and formed a reserve, which was not drawn upon except in cases of extreme necessity.  Every palace, in addition to its living-rooms, contained within its walls large store-chambers filled with provisions and weapons, which made it more or less a fortress, furnished with indispensable requisites for sustaining a prolonged siege either against an enemy’s troops or the king’s own subjects in revolt.  The king always kept about him bodies of soldiers who perhaps were foreign mercenaries, like the Mazaiu of the armies of the Pharaohs, and who formed his permanent body-guard in times of peace.  When a war was imminent, a military levy was made upon his domains, but we are unable to find out whether the recruits thus raised were drawn indiscriminately from the population in general, or merely from a special class, analogous to that of the warriors which we find in Egypt, who were paid in the same way by grants of land.  The equipment of these soldiers was of the rudest kind:  they had no cuirass, but carried a rectangular shield, and, in the case of those of higher rank at all events, a conical metal helmet, probably of beaten copper, provided with a piece to protect the back of the neck; the heavy infantry were