“Queen Tera was of the Eleventh, or Theban Dynasty of Egyptian Kings which held sway between the twenty-ninth and twenty-fifth centuries before Christ.  She succeeded as the only child of her father, Antef.  She must have been a girl of extraordinary character as well as ability, for she was but a young girl when her father died.  Her youth and sex encouraged the ambitious priesthood, which had then achieved immense power.  By their wealth and numbers and learning they dominated all Egypt, more especially the Upper portion.  They were then secretly ready to make an effort for the achievement of their bold and long-considered design, that of transferring the governing power from a Kingship to a Hierarchy.  But King Antef had suspected some such movement, and had taken the precaution of securing to his daughter the allegiance of the army.  He had also had her taught statecraft, and had even made her learned in the lore of the very priests themselves.  He had used those of one cult against the other; each being hopeful of some present gain on its own part by the influence of the King, or of some ultimate gain from its own influence over his daughter.  Thus, the Princess had been brought up amongst scribes, and was herself no mean artist.  Many of these things were told on the walls in pictures or in hieroglyphic writing of great beauty; and we came to the conclusion that not a few of them had been done by the Princess herself.  It was not without cause that she was inscribed on the Stele as ‘Protector of the Arts’.

“But the King had gone to further lengths, and had had his daughter taught magic, by which she had power over Sleep and Will.  This was real magic—­“black” magic; not the magic of the temples, which, I may explain, was of the harmless or “white” order, and was intended to impress rather than to effect.  She had been an apt pupil; and had gone further than her teachers.  Her power and her resources had given her great opportunities, of which she had availed herself to the full.  She had won secrets from nature in strange ways; and had even gone to the length of going down into the tomb herself, having been swathed and coffined and left as dead for a whole month.  The priests had tried to make out that the real Princess Tera had died in the experiment, and that another girl had been substituted; but she had conclusively proved their error.  All this was told in pictures of great merit.  It was probably in her time that the impulse was given in the restoring the artistic greatness of the Fourth Dynasty which had found its perfection in the days of Chufu.