[Illustration:  063.jpg ETHIOPIAN ARABS]

During these reigns the Ethiopian Arabs kept up their irregular warfare against the southern frontier.  The tribe most dreaded were the Blemmyes, an uncivilised people, described by the affrighted neighbours as having no heads, but with eyes and mouth on the breast; and it was under that name that the Arabs spread during each century farther and farther into Egypt, separating the province from the more cultivated tribes of Upper Ethiopia or Meroe.  The cities along the banks of the Nile in Lower Ethiopia, between Nubia and Meroe, were ruined by being in the debatable land between the two nations.  The early Greek travellers had counted about twenty cities on each side of the Nile between Syene and Meroe; but when, in a moment of leisure, the Roman government proposed to punish and stop the inroads of these troublesome neighbours, and sent forward a tribune with a guard of soldiers, he reported on his return that the whole country was a desert, and that there was scarcely a city inhabited on either side of the Nile beyond Nubia.  But he had not marched very far.  The interior of Africa was little known; and to seek for the fountain of the Nile was another name for an impossible or chimerical undertaking.

But Egypt itself was so quiet as not to need the presence of so large a Roman force as usual to keep it in obedience; and when Vespasian, who commanded Nero’s armies in Syria, found the Jews more obstinate in their rebellion and less easily crushed than he expected, the emperor sent the young Titus to Alexandria, to lead to his father’s assistance all the troops that could be spared.  Titus led into Palestine through Arabia two legions, the Fifth and the Tenth, which were then in Egypt.

We find a temple of this reign in the oasis of Dakleh, or the Western Oasis, which seems to have been a more flourishing spot in the time of the Romans than when Egypt itself was better governed.  It is so far removed from the cities in the valley of the Nile that its position, and even existence, was long unknown to Europeans, and to such hiding-places as this many of the Egyptians fled, to be farther from the tyranny of the Roman tax-gatherers.

Hitherto the Roman empire had descended for just one hundred years through five emperors like a family inheritance; but, on the death of Nero, the Julian and Claudian families were at an end, and Galba, who was raised to the purple by the choice of the soldiers, endeavoured to persuade the Romans and their dependent provinces that they had regained their liberties.  The Egyptians may have been puzzled by the word freedom, then struck upon the coins by their foreign masters, but must have been pleased to find it accompanied with a redress of grievances.