the temple each year without hindrance from the Roman guards.  The treaty was written on papyrus and nailed up in this temple.  But friendship in the desert, says the proverb, is as weak and wavering as the shade of the acacia tree; this truce was no sooner agreed upon than Maximinus fell ill and died; and the Nubades at once broke the treaty, regained by force their hostages, who had not yet been carried out of the Thebaid, and overran the province as they had done before their defeat.

[Illustration:  279.jpg ISIS AS THE DOG-STAR]

By this success of the Nubians, Christianity was largely driven out of Upper Egypt; and about seventy years after the law of Thedosius L, by which paganism was supposed to be crushed, the religion of Isis and Serapis was again openly professed in the Thebaid, where it had perhaps always been cultivated in secret.  A certain master of the robes in one of the Egyptian temple came at this time to the temple of Isis in the island of Philae, and his votive inscription there declares that he was the son of Pachomius, a prophet, and successor by direct descent from a yet more famous Pachomius, a prophet, who we may easily believe was the Christian prophet who gathered together so many followers in the island of Tabenna, near Thebes, and there founded an order of Christian monks.  These Christians now all returned to their paganism.  Nearly all the remains of Christian architecture which we meet with in the The-baid were built during the hundred and sixty years between the defeat of the Nubians by Diocletian, and their victories in the reign of Marcian.

The Nubians were far more civilised than their neighbours, the Blemmyes, whom they were usually able to drive back into their native deserts.  We find an inscription in bad Greek, in the great temple at Talmis, now the village of Kalabshe, which was probably written about this time.  A conqueror of the name of Silco there declares that he is king of the Nubians and all the Ethiopians; that in the upper part of his kingdom he is called Mars, and in the lower part Lion; that he is as great as any king of his day; that he has defeated the Blemmyes in battle again and again; and that he has made himself master of the country between Talmis and Primis.  While such were the neighbours and inhabitants of the Thebaid, the fields were only half-tilled, and the desert was encroaching on the paths of man.  The sand was filling up the temples, covering the overthrown statues, and blocking up the doors to the tombs; but it was at the same time saving, to be dug out in after ages, those records which the living no longer valued.