The head, which is bald on the top, is somewhat long, and small in relation to the bulk of the body; there is but little hair on the forehead, but at the back of the head it is thick, and in smooth stiff locks, still preserving its white colour beneath the yellow balsams of his last toilet.  The forehead is low, the supra-orbital ridges accentuated, the eyebrows thick, the eyes small and set close to the nose, the temples hollow, the cheek-bones prominent; the ears, finely moulded, stand out from the head, and are pierced, like those of a woman, for the usual ornaments pendant from the lobe.  A strong jaw and square chin, together, with a large thick-lipped mouth, which reveals through the black paste within it a few much-worn but sound teeth, make up the features of the mummied king.  His moustache and beard, which were closely shaven in his lifetime, had grown somewhat in his last sickness or after his death; the coarse and thick hairs in them, white like those of the head and eyebrows, attain a length of two or three millimetres.  The skin shows an ochreous yellow colour under the black bituminous plaster.  The mask of the mummy, in fact, gives a fair idea of that of the living king; the somewhat unintelligent expression, slightly brutish perhaps, but haughty and firm of purpose, displays itself with an air of royal majesty beneath the sombre materials used by the embalmer.  The disappearance of the old hero did not produce many changes in the position of affairs in Egypt:  Minephtah from this time forth possessed as Pharaoh the power which he had previously wielded as regent.  He was now no longer young.  Born somewhere about the beginning of the reign of Ramses II., he was now sixty, possibly seventy, years old; thus an old man succeeded another old man at a moment when Egypt must have needed more than ever an active and vigorous ruler.  The danger to the country did not on this occasion rise from the side of Asia, for the relations of the Pharaoh with his Kharu subjects continued friendly, and, during a famine which desolated Syria,* he sent wheat to his Hittite allies.

* A document preserved in the Anastasi Papyrus III. shows how regular the relations with Syria had become.  It is the journal of a custom-house officer, or of a scribe placed at one of the frontier posts, who notes from day to day the letters, messengers, officers, and troops which passed from the 15th to the 25th of Pachons, in the IIIrd year of the reign.

The nations, however, to the north and east, in Libya and in the Mediterranean islands, had for some time past been in a restless condition, which boded little good to the empires of the old world.  The Tirnihu, some of them tributaries from the XIIth, and others from the first years of the XVIIIth dynasty, had always been troublesome, but never really dangerous neighbours.  From time to time it was necessary to send light troops against them, who, sailing along the coast or following