and studied were pointed out to the traveller, to warm his love of knowledge and encourage him in the pursuit of virtue.  Memphis was the second city in Egypt, while Thebes and Abydos, the former capitals, had fallen to the size and rank of villages.  At Memphis Strabo saw the bull-fights in the circus, and was allowed to look at the bull Apis through a window of his stable.  At Crocodilopolis he saw the sacred crocodile caught on the banks of the lake and fed with cakes and wine.  Ptolemais, which was at first only an encampment of Greek soldiers, had risen under the sovereigns to whom it owed its name to be the largest city in the Thebaid, and scarcely less than Memphis.  It was built wholly by the Greeks, and, like Alexandria, it was under Greek laws, while the other cities in Egypt were under Egyptian laws and magistrates.  It was situated between Panopolis and Abydos; but, while the temples of Thebes, which were built so many centuries earlier, are still standing in awful grandeur, scarcely a trace of this Greek city can be found in the villages of El Menshieh and Girgeh (Cerkasoros), which now stand on the spot.  Strabo and the Roman generals did not forget to visit the broken colossal statue of Amenhothes, near Thebes, which sent forth its musical sounds every morning, as the sun, rising over the Arabian hills, first shone upon its face; but this inquiring traveller could not make up his mind whether the music came from the statue, or the base, or the people around it.  He ended his tour with watching the sunshine at the bottom of the astronomical well at Syene, which, on the longest day, is exactly under the sun’s northern edge, and with admiring the skill of the boatmen who shot down the cataracts in their wicker boats, for the amusement of the Roman generals.

In the earlier periods of Egyptian history Ethiopia was peopled, or, at least, governed, by a race of men, whom, as they spoke the same language and worshipped the same gods as their neighbours of Upper Egypt, we must call the Kopts.  But the Arabs, under the name of Troglodyte, and other tribes, had made an early settlement on the African side of the Red Sea.  So numerous were they in Upper Egypt that in the time of Strabo half the population of the city of Koptos were Arabs; they were the camel-drivers and carriers for the Theban merchants in the trade across the desert.  Some of the conquests of Ramses had been over that nation in southern Ethiopia, and the Arab power must have further risen after the defeat of the Ethiopians by Euergetes I. Ethiopia in the time of Augustus was held by Arabs; a race who thought peace a state of disgraceful idleness, and war the only employment worthy of men; and who made frequent hasty inroads into Nubia, and sometimes into Egypt.  They fought for plunder, not for conquest, and usually retreated as quickly as they came, with such booty as they laid their hands on.  To use words which were proverbial while the Nile swarmed with crocodiles, “They