* The fact of the marriage is known to us by the decree of Phtah Totunen at Abu Simbel in the XXXVth year of the king’s reign.  The account of it in the text is taken from the stele at Abu Simbel.  The last lines are so mutilated that I have been obliged to paraphrase them.  The stele of the Princess of Bakhtan has preserved the romantic version of this marriage, such as was current about the Saite period.  The King of the Khati must have taken advantage of the expedition which the Pharaoh made into Asia to send him presents by an embassy, at the head of which he placed his eldest daughter:  the princess found favour with Ramses, who married her.

Ramses, unwilling to relegate a princess of such noble birth to the companionship of his ordinary concubines, granted her the title of queen, as if she were of solar blood, and with the cartouche gave her the new name of Uirimaunofiruri—­“She who sees the beauties of the Sun.”  She figures henceforth in the ceremonies and on the monuments in the place usually occupied by women of Egyptian race only, and these unusual honours may have compensated, in the eyes of the young princess, for the disproportion in age between herself and a veteran more than sixty years old.  The friendly relations between the two courts became so intimate that the Pharaoh invited his father-in-law to visit him in his own country.  “The great Prince of Khati informed the Prince of Qodi:  ’Prepare thyself that we may go down into Egypt.  The word of the king has gone forth, let us obey Sesostris.  He gives the breath of life to those who love him; hence all the earth loves him, and Khati forms but one with him.’” They were received with pomp at Ramses-Anakhitu, and perhaps at Thebes.  It was with a mixture of joy and astonishment that Egypt beheld her bitterest foe become her most faithful ally, “and the men of Qimit having but one heart with the chiefs of the Khati, a thing which had not happened since the ages of Pa.”

The half-century following the conclusion of this alliance was a period of world-wide prosperity.  Syria was once more able to breathe freely, her commerce being under the combined protection of the two powers who shared her territory.  Not only caravans, but isolated travellers, were able to pass through the country from north to south without incurring any risks beyond those occasioned by an untrustworthy guide or a few highwaymen.  It became in time a common task in the schools of Thebes to describe the typical Syrian tour of some soldier or functionary, and we still possess one of these imaginative stories in which the scribe takes his hero from Qodshu across the Lebanon to Byblos, Berytus, Tyre, and Sidon, “the fish” of which latter place “are more numerous than the grains of sand;” he then makes him cross Galilee and the forest of oaks to Jaffa, climb the mountains of the Dead Sea, and following the maritime route by Raphia, reach Pelusium.  The Egyptian galleys thronged the Phoenician ports, while those