of Turah, as is well known, enjoyed the privilege of furnishing the finest materials to the royal architects; nowhere else could be found limestone of such whiteness, so easy to cut, or so calculated to lend itself to the carving of delicate inscriptions and bas-reliefs.  The commoner veins had never ceased to be worked by private enterprise, gangs of quarrymen being always employed, as at the present day, in cutting small stone for building purposes, or in ruthlessly chipping it to pieces to burn for lime in the kilns of the neighbouring villages; but the finest veins were always kept for State purposes.  Contemporary chroniclers might have formed a very just estimate of national prosperity by the degree of activity shown in working these royal preserves; when the amount of stone extracted was lessened, prosperity was on the wane, and might be pronounced to be at its lowest ebb when the noise of the quarryman’s hammer finally ceased to be heard.

[Illustration:  132.jpg A CONVOY OF TURAH QUARRYMEN DRAWING STONE]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a sketch by Vyse-Perring.

Every dynasty whose resources were such as to justify their resumption of the work proudly recorded the fact on stelae which lined the approaches to the masons’ yards.  Ahmosis reopened the Turah quarry-chambers, and procured for himself “good stone and white” for the temples of Anion at Thebes and of Phtah at Memphis.  No monument has as yet been discovered to throw any light on the fate of Memphis subsequent to the time of the Amenemhaits.  It must have suffered quite as much as any city of the Delta from the Shepherd invasion, and from the wars which preceded their expulsion, since it was situated on the highway of an invading army, and would offer an attraction for pillagers.  By a curious turn of fortune it was the “Fankhui,” or Asiatic prisoners, who were set to quarry the stone for the restoration of the monuments which their own forefathers had reduced to ruins.* The bas-reliefs sculptured on the stelae of Ahmosis show them in full activity under the corvee; we see here the stone block detached from the quarry being squared by the chisel, or transported on a sledge drawn by oxen.

* The Fankhui are, properly speaking, all white prisoners, without distinction of race.  Their name is derived from the root fokhu, fankhu = to bind, press, carry off, steal, destroy; if it is sometimes used in the sense of Phoenicians, it is only in the Ptolemaic epoch.  Here the term “Fankhui” refers to the Shepherds and Asiatics made prisoners in the campaign of the year V. against Sharuhana.

Ahmosis had several children by his various wives; six at least owned Nofritari for their mother and possessed near claims to the crown, but she may have borne him others whose existence is unrecorded.  The eldest appears to have been a son, Sipiri; he received all the honours due to an hereditary prince, but died without having reigned, and his second brother, Amenhotpu—­called by the Greeks Amenothes*—­took his place.