[Illustration:  322.jpg MANUSCRIPT ON PAPYRUS IN HIEROGLYPHICS]

It is possible that he was a son of Pionkhi, and may have been placed in supreme power by his father when the latter reinstated the city in its place as capital.  With all their partiality for real or supposed descendants of the Ramesside dynasty, the Thebans were, before all things, proud of their former greatness, and eagerly hoped to regain it without delay.  When, therefore, they accepted this Kushite king who, to their eyes, represented the only family possessed of a legitimate claim to the throne, it was mainly because they counted on him to restore them to their former place among the cities of Egypt.  They must have been cruelly disappointed when he left them for the Sacred Mountain.  His invasion, far from reviving their prosperity, merely served to ratify the suppression of that pontificate of Amon-Ra which was the last remaining evidence of their past splendour.

[Illustration:  323.jpg CONE BEARING THE NAME of kashta and of his DAUGHTER AMENERTAS]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, after Prisse d’Avennes.

All hope of re-establishing it had now to be abandoned, since the sovereign who had come to them from Napata was himself by birth and hereditary privelege and hereditary sole priest of Anion:  in his absence the actual head of the Theban religion could lay claim only to an inferior office, and indeed, even then, the only reason for accepting a second prophet was that he might direct the worship of the temple at Karnak.  The force of circumstances compelled the Ethiopians to countenance in the Thebaid what their Tanite or Bubastite predecessors had been obliged to tolerate at Hermopolis, Heracleopolis, Sais, and in many another lesser city; they turned it into a feudatory kingdom, and gave it a ruler who, like Auiti, half a century earlier, had the right to use the cartouches.  Once installed, Kashta employed the usual methods to secure his seat on the throne, one of the first being a marriage alliance.  The disappearance of the high priests had naturally increased the importance of the princesses consecrated to the service of Amon.  From henceforward they were the sole visible intermediaries between the god and his people, the privileged guardians of his body and his double, and competent to perpetuate the line of the solar kings.  The Theban appanage constituted their dowry, and even if their sex prevented them from discharging all those civil, military, and religious duties required by their position, no one else had the right to do so on their behalf, unless he was expressly chosen by them for the purpose.  When once married they deputed their husbands to act for them; so long as they remained either single or widows, some exalted personage, the prophet of Amon or Montu, the ruler of Thebes, or the administrator of the Said, managed their houses and fiefs for them with such show of authority that strangers were at times deceived, and took him for the reigning monarch of the country.*