Thus equipped, the young man ended usually by succeeding his father or his patron: in most of the government administrations, we find whole dynasties of scribes on a small scale, whose members inherited the same post for several centuries. The position was an insignificant one, and the salary poor, but the means of existence were assured, the occupant was exempted from forced labour and from military service, and he exercised a certain authority in the narrow world in which he lived; it sufficed to make him think himself happy, and in fact to be so. “One has only to be a scribe,” said the wise man, “for the scribe takes the lead of all.” Sometimes, however, one of these contented officials, more intelligent or ambitious than his fellows, succeeded in rising above the common mediocrity: his fine handwriting, the happy choice of his sentences, his activity, his obliging manner, his honesty—perhaps also his discreet dishonesty—attracted the attention of his superiors and were the cause of his promotion. The son of a peasant or of some poor wretch, who had begun life by keeping a register of the bread and vegetables in some provincial government office, had been often known to crown his long and successful career by exercising a kind of vice-regency over the half of Egypt. His granaries overflowed with corn, his storehouses were always full of gold, fine stuffs, and precious vases, his stalls “multiplied the backs” of his oxen; the sons of his early patrons, having now become in turn his protégés, did not venture to approach him except with bowed head and bended knee.

No doubt the Amten whose tomb was removed to Berlin by Lepsius, and put together piece by piece in the museum, was a parvenu of this kind. He was born rather more than four thousand years before our era under one of the last kings of the IIIrd dynasty, and he lived until the reign of the first king of the IVth dynasty, Snofrûi. He probably came from the Nome of the Bull, if not from Xoïs itself, in the heart of the Delta. His father, the scribe Anûpûmonkhû, held, in addition to his office, several landed estates, producing large returns; but his mother, Nibsonît, who appears to have been merely a concubine, had no personal fortune, and would have been unable even to give her child an education. Anûpûmonkhû made himself entirely responsible for the necessary expenses, “giving him all the necessities of life, at a time when he had not as yet either corn, barley, income, house, men or women servants, or troops of asses, pigs, or oxen.” As soon as he was in a condition to provide for himself, his father obtained for him, in his native Nome, the post of chief scribe attached to one of the “localities” which belonged to the Administration of Provisions. On behalf of the Pharaoh, the young man received, registered, and distributed the meat, cakes, fruits, and fresh vegetables which constituted the taxes, all on his own responsibility, except that he had to give an account of them to the “Director of the Storehouse” who was nearest to him. We are not told how long he remained in this occupation; we see merely that he was raised successively to posts of an analogous kind, but of increasing importance. The provincial offices comprised a small staff of employés, consisting always of the same officials:—a chief, whose ordinary function was “Director of the Storehouse;” a few scribes to keep the accounts, one or two of whom added to his ordinary calling that of keeper of the archives; paid ushers to introduce clients, and, if need be, to bastinado them summarily at the order of the “director;” lastly, the “strong of voice,” the criers, who superintended the incomings and outgoings, and proclaimed the account of them to the scribes to be noted down forthwith. A vigilant and honest crier was a man of great value.

He obliged the taxpayer not only to deliver the exact number of measures prescribed as his quota, but also compelled him to deliver good measure in each case; a dishonest crier, on the contrary, could easily favour cheating, provided that he shared in the spoil. Amten was at once “crier” and “taxer of the colonists” to the civil administrator of the Xoïte nome: he announced the names of the peasants and the payments they made, then estimated the amount of the local tax which each, according to his income, had to pay. He distinguished himself so pre-eminently in these delicate duties, that the civil administrator of Xoïs made him one of his subordinates. He became “Chief of the Ushers,” afterwards “Master Crier,” then “Director of all the King’s flax” in the Xoïfce nome—an office which entailed on him the supervision of the culture, cutting, and general preparation of flax for the manufacture which was carried on in Pharaoh’s own domain. It was one of the highest offices in the Provincial Administration, and Amten must have congratulated himself on his appointment.

From that moment his career became a great one, and he advanced quickly. Up to that time he had been confined in offices; he now left them to perform more active service. The Pharaohs, extremely jealous of their own authority, usually avoided placing at the head of the nomes in their domain, a single ruler, who would have appeared too much like a prince; they preferred having in each centre of civil administration, governors of the town or province, as well as military commanders who were jealous of one another, supervised one another, counterbalanced one another, and did not remain long enough in office to become dangerous. Amten held all these posts successively in most of the nomes situated in the centre or to the west of the Delta. His first appointment was to the government of the village of Pidosû, an unimportant post in itself, but one which entitled him to a staff of office, and in consequence procured for him one of the greatest indulgences of vanity that an Egyptian could enjoy. The staff was, in fact, a symbol of command which only the nobles, and the officials associated with the nobility, could carry without transgressing custom; the assumption of it, as that of the sword with us, showed every one that the bearer was a member of a privileged class.

Amten was no sooner ennobled, than his functions began to expand; villages were rapidly added to villages, then towns to towns, including such an important one as Bûto, and finally the nomes of the Harpoon, of the Bull, of the Silurus, the western half of the Saïte nome, the nome of the Haunch, and a part of the Fayûm came within his jurisdiction. The western half of the Saïte nome, where he long resided, corresponded with what was called later the Libyan nome. It reached nearly from the apex of the Delta to the sea, and was bounded on one side by the Canopic branch of the Nile, on the other by the Libyan range; a part of the desert as well as the Oases fell under its rule. It included among its population, as did many of the provinces of Upper Egypt, regiments composed of nomad hunters, who were compelled to pay their tribute in living or dead game. Amten was metamorphosed into Chief Huntsman, scoured the mountains with his men, and thereupon became one of the most important personages in the defence of the country. The Pharaohs had built fortified stations, and had from time to time constructed walls at certain points where the roads entered the valley—at Syene, at Coptos, and at the entrance to the Wady Tûmilât. Amten having been proclaimed “Primate of the Western Gate,” that is, governor of the Libyan marches, undertook to protect the frontier against the wandering Bedouin from the other side of Lake Mareotis. His duties as Chief Huntsman had been the best preparation he could have had for this arduous task. They had forced him to make incessant expeditions among the mountains, to explore the gorges and ravines, to be acquainted with the routes marked out by wells which the marauders were obliged to follow in their incursions, and the pathways and passes by which they could descend into the plain of the Delta; in running the game to earth, he had gained all the knowledge needful for repulsing the enemy. Such a combination of capabilities made Amten the most important noble in this part of Egypt. When old age at last prevented him from leading an active life, he accepted, by way of a pension, the governorship of the nome of the Haunch: with civil authority, military command, local priestly functions, and honorary distinctions, he lacked only one thing to make him the equal of the nobles of ancient family, and that was permission to bequeath without restriction his towns and offices to his children.

His private fortune was not as great as we might be led to think. He inherited from his father only one estate, but had acquired twelve others in the nomes of the Delta whither his successive appointments had led him—namely, in the Saïte, Xoïte, and Letopolite nomes. He received subsequently, as a reward for his services, two hundred portions of cultivated land, with numerous peasants, both male and female, and an income of one hundred loaves daily, a first charge upon the funeral provision of Queen Hâpûnimâit. He took advantage of this windfall to endow his family suitably. His only son was already provided for, thanks to the munificence of Pharaoh; he had begun his administrative career by holding the same post of scribe, in addition to the office of provision registrar, which his father had held, and over and above these he received by royal grant, four portions of cornland with their population and stock. Amten gave twelve portions to his other children and fifty to his mother Nibsonît, by means of which she lived comfortably in her old age, and left an annuity for maintaining worship at her tomb. He built upon the remainder of the land a magnificent villa, of which he has considerately left us the description. The boundary wall formed a square of 350 feet on each face, and consequently contained a superficies of 122,500 square feet. The well-built dwelling-house, completely furnished with all the necessities of life, was surrounded by ornamental and fruit-bearing trees,—the common palm, the nebbek, fig trees, and acacias; several ponds, neatly bordered with greenery, afforded a habitat for aquatic birds; trellised vines, according to custom, ran in front of the house, and two plots of ground, planted with vines in full bearing, amply supplied the owner with wine every year.

It was there, doubtless, that Amten ended his days in peace and quietude of mind. The tableland whereon the Sphinx has watched for so many centuries was then crowned by no pyramids, but mastabas of fine white stone rose here and there from out of the sand: that in which the mummy of Amten was to be enclosed was situated not far from the modern village of Abûsîr, on the confines of the nome of the Haunch, and almost in sight of the mansion in which his declining years were spent.*

The number of persons of obscure origin, who in this manner had risen in a few years to the highest honours, and died governors of provinces or ministers of Pharaoh, must have been considerable. Their descendants followed in their fathers’ footsteps, until the day came when royal favour or an advantageous marriage secured them the possession of an hereditary fief, and transformed the son or grandson of a prosperous scribe into a feudal lord. It was from people of this class, and from the children of the Pharaoh, that the nobility was mostly recruited. In the Delta, where the authority of the Pharaoh was almost everywhere directly felt, the power of the nobility was weakened and much curtailed; in Middle Egypt it gained ground, and became stronger and stronger in proportion as one advanced southward. The nobles held the principalities of the Gazelle, of the Hare, of the Serpent Mountain, of Akhmîm, of Thinis, of Qasr-es-Sayad, of El-Kab, of Aswan, and doubtless others of which we shall some day discover the monuments.

They accepted without difficulty the fiction according to which Pharaoh claimed to be absolute master of the soil, and ceded to his subjects only the usufruct of their fiefs; but apart from the admission of the principle, each lord proclaimed himself sovereign in his own domain, and exercised in it, on a small scale, complete royal authority.

Everything within the limits of this petty state belonged to him—woods, canals, fields, even the desert-sand: after the example of the Pharaoh, he farmed a part himself, and let out the remainder, either in farms or as fiefs, to those of his followers who had gained his confidence or his friendship. After the example of Pharaoh, also, he was a priest, and exercised priestly functions in relation to all the gods—that is, not of all Egypt, but of all the deities of the nome. He was an administrator of civil and criminal law, received the complaints of his vassals and serfs at the gate of his palace, and against his decisions there was no appeal. He kept up a flotilla, and raised on his estate a small army, of which he was commander-in-chief by hereditary right. He inhabited a fortified mansion, situated sometimes within the capital of the principality itself, sometimes in its neighbourhood, and in which the arrangements of the royal city were reproduced on a smaller scale.

Side by side with the reception halls was the harem, where the legitimate wife, often a princess of solar rank, played the rôle of queen, surrounded by concubines, dancers, and slaves. The offices of the various departments were crowded into the enclosure, with their directors, governors, scribes of all ranks, custodians, and workmen, who bore the same titles as the corresponding employés in the departments of the State: their White Storehouse, their Gold Storehouse, their Granary, were at times called the Double White Storehouse, the Double Gold Storehouse, the Double Granary, as were those of the Pharaoh. Amusements at the court of the vassal did not differ from those at that of the sovereign: hunting in the desert and the marshes, fishing, inspection of agricultural works, military exercises, games, songs, dancing, doubtless the recital of long stories, and exhibitions of magic, even down to the contortions of the court buffoon and the grimaces of the dwarfs.

It amused the prince to see one of these wretched favourites leading to him by the paw a cynocephalus larger than himself, while a mischievous monkey slyly pulled a tame and stately ibis by the tail. From time to time the great lord proceeded to inspect his domain: on these occasions he travelled in a kind of sedan chair, supported by two mules yoked together; or he was borne in a palanquin by some thirty men, while fanned by large flabella; or possibly he went up the Nile and the canals in his beautiful painted barge. The life of the Egyptian lords may be aptly described as in every respect an exact reproduction of the life of the Pharaoh on a smaller scale.

Inheritance in a direct or indirect line was the rule, but in every case of transmission the new lord had to receive the investiture of the sovereign either by letter or in person. The duties enforced by the feudal state do not appear to have been onerous. In the first place, there was the regular payment of a tribute, proportionate to the extent and resources of the fief. In the next place, there was military service: the vassal agreed to supply, when called upon, a fixed number of armed men, whom he himself commanded, unless he could offer a reasonable excuse such as illness or senile incapacity.*

Attendance at court was not obligatory: we notice, however, many nobles about the person of Pharaoh, and there are numerous examples of princes, with whose lives we are familiar, filling offices which appear to have demanded at least a temporary residence in the palace, as, for instance, the charge of the royal wardrobe. When the king travelled, the great vassals were compelled to entertain him and his suite, and to escort him to the frontier of their domain. On the occasion of such visits, the king would often take away with him one of their sons to be brought up with his own children: an act which they on their part considered a great honour, while the king on his had a guarantee of their fidelity in the person of these hostages. Such of these young people as returned to their fathers’ roof when their education was finished, were usually most loyal to the reigning dynasty. They often brought back with them some maiden born in the purple, who consented to share their little provincial sovereignty, while in exchange one or more of their sisters entered the harem of the Pharaoh. Marriages made and marred in their turn the fortunes of the great feudal houses. Whether she were a princess or not, each woman received as her dowry a portion of territory, and enlarged by that amount her husband’s little state; but the property she brought might, in a few years, be taken by her daughters as portions and enrich other houses. The fief seldom could bear up against such dismemberment; it fell away piecemeal, and by the third or fourth generation had disappeared. Sometimes, however, it gained more than it lost in this matrimonial game, and extended its borders till they encroached on neighbouring nomes or else completely absorbed them. There were always in the course of each reign several great principalities formed, or in the process of formation, whose chiefs might be said to hold in their hands the destinies of the country. Pharaoh himself was obliged to treat them with deference, and he purchased their allegiance by renewed and ever-increasing concessions.

Their ambition was never satisfied; when they were loaded with favours, and did not venture to ask for more for themselves, they impudently demanded them for such of their children as they thought were poorly provided for. Their eldest son “knew not the high favours which came from the king. Other princes were his privy counsellers, his chosen friends, or foremost among his friends!” he had no share in all this. Pharaoh took good care not to reject a petition presented so humbly: he proceeded to lavish appointments, titles, and estates on the son in question; if necessity required it, he would even seek out a wife for him, who might give him, together with her hand, a property equal to that of his father. The majority of these great vassals secretly aspired to the crown: they frequently had reason to believe that they had some right to it, either through their mother or one of their ancestors. Had they combined against the reigning house, they could easily have gained the upper hand, but their mutual jealousies prevented this, and the overthrow of a dynasty to which they owed so much would, for the most part, have profited them but little: as soon as one of them revolted, the remainder took arms in Pharaoh’s defence, led his armies and fought his battles. If at times their ambition and greed harassed their suzerain, at least their power was at his service, and their self-interested allegiance was often the means of delaying the downfall of his house.

Two things were specially needful both for them and for Pharaoh in order to maintain or increase their authority—the protection of the gods, and a military organization which enabled them to mobilize the whole of their forces at the first signal. The celestial world was the faithful image of our own; it had its empires and its feudal organization, the arrangement of which corresponded to that of the terrestrial world. The gods who inhabited it were dependent upon the gifts of mortals, and the resources of each individual deity, and consequently his power, depended on the wealth and number of his worshippers; anything influencing one had an immediate effect on the other. The gods dispensed happiness, health, and vigour;* to those who made them large offerings and instituted pious foundations, they lent their own weapons, and inspired them with needful strength to overcome their enemies. They even came down to assist in battle, and every great encounter of armies involved an invisible struggle among the immortals. The gods of the side which was victorious shared with it in the triumph, and received a tithe of the spoil as the price of their help; the gods of the vanquished were so much the poorer, their priests and their statues were reduced to slavery, and the destruction of their people entailed their own downfall.

It was, therefore, to the special interest of every one in Egypt, from the Pharaoh to the humblest of his vassals, to maintain the good will and power of the gods, so that their protection might be effectively ensured in the hour of danger. Pains were taken to embellish their temples with obelisks, colossi, altars, and bas-reliefs; new buildings were added to the old; the parts threatened with ruin were restored or entirely rebuilt; daily gifts were brought of every kind—animals which were sacrificed on the spot, bread, flowers, fruit, drinks, as well as perfumes, stuffs, vases, jewels, bricks or bars of gold, silver, lapis-lazuli, which were all heaped up in the treasury within the recesses of the crypts.* If a dignitary of high rank wished to perpetuate the remembrance of his honours or his services, and at the same time to procure for his double the benefit of endless prayers and sacrifices, he placed “by special permission” ** a statue of himself on a votive stele in the part of the temple reserved for this purpose,—in a courtyard, chamber, encircling passage, as at Karnak,*** or on the staircase of Osiris as in that leading up to the terrace in the sanctuary of Abydos; he then sealed a formal agreement with the priests, by which the latter engaged to perform a service in his name, in front of this commemorative monument, a stated number of times in the year, on the days fixed by universal observance or by local custom.

For this purpose he assigned to them annuities in kind, charges on his patrimonial estates, or in some cases, if he were a great lord, on the revenues of his fief,—such as a fixed quantity of loaves and drinks for each of the celebrants, a fourth part of the sacrificial victim, a garment, frequently also lands with their cattle, serfs, existing buildings, farming implements and produce, along with the conditions of service with which the lands were burdened. These gifts to the god—“notir hotpûû”—were, it appears, effected by agreements analogous to those dealing with property in mortmain in modern Egypt; in each nome they constituted, in addition to the original temporalities of the temple, a considerable domain, constantly enlarged by fresh endowments. The gods had no daughters for whom to provide, nor sons among whom to divide their inheritance; all that fell to them remained theirs for ever, and in the contracts were inserted imprecations threatening with terrible ills, in this world and the next, those who should abstract the smallest portion from them. Such menaces did not always prevent the king or the lords from laying hands on the temple revenues: had this not been the case, Egypt would soon have become a sacerdotal country from one end to the other. Even when reduced by periodic usurpations, the domain of the gods formed, at all periods, about one-third of the whole country.*

Its administration was not vested in a single body of Priests, representing the whole of Egypt and recruited or ruled everywhere in the same fashion. There were as many bodies of priests as there were temples, and every temple preserved its independent constitution with which the clergy of the neighbouring temples had nothing to do: the only master they acknowledged was the lord of the territory on which the temple was built, either Pharaoh or one of his nobles. The tradition which made Pharaoh the head of the different worships in Egypt* prevailed everywhere, but Pharaoh soared too far above this world to confine himself to the functions of any one particular order of priests: he officiated before all the gods without being specially the minister of any, and only exerted his supremacy in order to make appointments to important sacerdotal posts in his domain.**

He reserved the high priesthood of the Memphite Phtah and that of Râ of Heliopolis either for the princes of his own family or more often for his most faithful servants; they were the docile instruments of his will, through whom he exerted the influence of the gods, and disposed of their property without having the trouble of administrating it. The feudal lords, less removed from mortal affairs than the Pharaoh, did not disdain to combine the priesthood of the temples dependent on them with the general supervision of the different worships practised on their lands. The princes of the Gazelle nome, for instance, bore the title of “Directors of the Prophets of all the Gods,” but were, correctly speaking, prophets of Horus, of Khnûmû master of Haoîrît, and of Pakhît mistress of the Speos-Artemidos. The religious suzerainty of such princes was the complement of their civil and military power, and their ordinary income was augmented by some portion at least of the revenues which the lands in mortmain furnished annually. The subordinate sacerdotal functions were filled by professional priests whose status varied according to the gods they served and the provinces in which they were located. Although between the mere priest and the chief prophet there were a number of grades to which the majority never attained, still the temples attracted many people from divers sources, who, once established in this calling of life, not only never left it, but never rested until they had introduced into it the members of their families. The offices they filled were not necessarily hereditary, but the children, born and bred in the shelter of the sanctuary, almost always succeeded to the positions of their fathers, and certain families thus continuing in the same occupation for generations, at last came to be established as a sort of sacerdotal nobility.*

The sacrifices supplied them with daily meat and drink; the temple buildings provided them with their lodging, and its revenues furnished them with a salary proportionate to their position. They were exempted from the ordinary taxes, from military service, and from forced labour; it is not surprising, therefore, that those who were not actually members of the priestly families strove to have at least a share in their advantages. The servitors, the workmen and the employés who congregated about them and constituted the temple corporation, the scribes attached to the administration of the domains, and to the receipt of offerings, shared de facto if not de jure in the immunity of the priesthood; as a body they formed a separate religious society, side by side, but distinct from, the civil population, and freed from most of the burdens which weighed so heavily on the latter.

The soldiers were far from possessing the wealth and influence of the clergy. Military service in Egypt was not universally compulsory, but rather the profession and privilege of a special class of whose origin but little is known. Perhaps originally it comprised only the descendants of the conquering race, but in historic times it was not exclusively confined to the latter, and recruits were raised everywhere among the fellahs,* the Bedouin of the neighbourhood, the negroes,** the Nubians,*** and even from among the prisoners of war, or adventurers from beyond the sea.****

This motley collection of foreign mercenaries composed ordinarily the body-guard of the king or of his barons, the permanent nucleus round which in times of war the levies of native recruits were rallied. Every Egyptian soldier received from the chief to whom he was attached, a holding of land for the maintenance of himself and his family. In the fifth century B.C. twelve aruræ of arable land was estimated as ample pay for each man,* and tradition attributes to the fabulous Sesostris the law which fixed the pay at this rate. The soldiers were not taxed, and were exempt from forced labour during the time that they were away from home on active service; with this exception they were liable to the same charges as the rest of the population. Many among them possessed no other income, and lived the precarious life of the fellah,—tilling, reaping, drawing water, and pasturing their cattle,—in the interval between two musters. Others possessed of private fortunes let their holdings out at a moderate rental, which formed an addition to their patrimonial income.**

Lest they should forget the conditions upon which they possessed this military holding, and should regard themselves as absolute masters of it, they were seldom left long in possession of the same place: Herodotus asserts that their allotments were taken away-yearly and replaced by others of equal extent. It is difficult to say if this law of perpetual change was always in force; at any rate, it did not prevent the soldiers from forming themselves in time into a kind of aristocracy, which even kings and barons of highest rank could not ignore. They were enrolled in special registers, with the indication of the holding which was temporarily assigned to them. A military scribe kept this register in every royal nome or principality.

He superintended the redistribution of the lands, the registration of privileges, and in addition to his administrative functions, he had in time of war the command of the troops furnished by his own district; in which case he was assisted by a “lieutenant,” who as opportunity offered acted as his substitute in the office or on the battle-field. Military service was not hereditary, but its advantages, however trifling they may appear to us, seemed in the eyes of the fellahs so great, that for the most part those who were engaged in it had their children also enrolled. While still young the latter were taken to the barracks, where they were taught not only the use of the bow, the battle-axe, the mace, the lance, and the shield, but were all instructed in such exercises as rendered the body supple, and prepared them for manoeuvring, regimental marching, running, jumping, and wrestling either with closed or open hand. They prepared themselves for battle by a regular war-dance, pirouetting, leaping, and brandishing their bows and quivers in the air. Their training being finished, they were incorporated into local companies, and invested with their privileges. When they were required for service, part or the whole of the class was mustered; arms kept in the arsenal were distributed among them, and they were conveyed in boats to the scene of action. The Egyptians were not martial by temperament; they became soldiers rather from interest than inclination.

The power of Pharaoh and his barons rested entirely upon these two classes, the priests and the soldiers; the remainder, the commonalty and the peasantry, were, in their hands, merely an inert mass, to be taxed and subjected to forced labour at will. The slaves were probably regarded as of little importance; the bulk of the people consisted of free families who were at liberty to dispose of themselves and their goods. Every fellah and townsman in the service of the king, or of one of his great nobles, could leave his work and his village when he pleased, could pass from the domain in which he was born into a different one, and could traverse the country from one end to the other, as the Egyptians of to-day still do.

His absence entailed neither loss of goods, nor persecution of the relatives he left behind, and he himself had punishment to fear only when he left the Nile Valley without permission, to reside for some time in a foreign land.* But although this independence and liberty were in accordance with the laws and customs of the land, yet they gave rise to inconveniences from which it was difficult to escape in practical life. Every Egyptian, the King excepted, was obliged, in order to get on in life, to depend on one more powerful than himself, whom he called his master. The feudal lord was proud to recognize Pharaoh as his master, and he himself was master of the soldiers and priests in his own petty state.