traversed with huge armies, as many as five or six times, the Nile
valley from one extremity to the other; the cities had been half ruined,
harvest after harvest destroyed, trees cut down, temples rifled,
homesteads burnt, villas plundered. Thebes, the Hundred-gated, probably
for many ages quite the most magnificent city in the world, had become a
by-word for desolation (Nahum iii. 8, 9); Memphis, Heliopolis, Tanis,
Saïs, Mendes, Bubastis, Heracleopolis, Hermopolis; Crocodilopolis, had
been taken and retaken repeatedly; the old buildings and monuments had
been allowed to fall into decay; no king had been firmly enough
established on his throne to undertake the erection of any but
insignificant new ones. Egypt was "fallen, fallen, fallen--fallen from
her high estate;" an apathy, not unlike the stillness of death, brooded
over her; literature was silent, art extinct; hope of recovery can
scarcely have lingered in many bosoms. As events proved, the vital spark
was not actually fled; but the keenest observer would scarcely have
ventured to predict, at any time between B.C. 750 and B.C. 650, such a
revival as marked the period between B.C. 650 and B.C. 530.








XXII.

THE CORPSE COMES TO LIFE AGAIN--PSAMATIK I. AND HIS SON NECO.