ver widely felt.

In the south, Siut disputed their supremacy, and Heracleopolis stopped
their road to the north. These three cities thwarted and neutralized one
another, and not one of them ever succeeded in obtaining a lasting
authority over Upper Egypt. Each of the two kingdoms had its own natural
advantages and its system of government, which gave to it a peculiar
character, and stamped it, as it were, with a distinct personality down
to its latest days. The kingdom of Upper Egypt was more powerful,
richer, better populated, and was governed apparently by more active and
enterprising rulers. It is to one of the latter, Mini or Menes of
Thinis, that tradition ascribes the honor of having fused the two Egypts
into a single empire, and of having inaugurated the reign of the human
dynasties.

Thinis figured in the historic period as one of the least of Egyptian
cities. It barely maintained an existence on the left bank of the Nile,
if not on the exact spot now occupied by Girgeh, at least only a short
distance from it. The principality of the Osirian Reliquary, of which it
was the metropolis, occupied the valley from one mountain to the other,
and gradually extended across the desert as far as the Great Theban
Oasis. Its inhabitants worshipped a sky-god, Anhuri, or rather two twin
gods, Anhuri-shu, who were speedily amalgamated with the solar deities
and became a warlike personification of Ra.

Anhuri-shu, like all other solar manifestations, came to be associated
with a goddess having the form or head of a lioness--a Sokhit, who took
for the occasion the epithet of Mihit, the northern one. Some of the
dead from this city are buried on the other side of the Nile, near the
modern village of Mesheikh, at the foot of the Arabian chain, whose deep
cliffs here approach somewhat near the river: the principal necropolis
was at some distance to the east, near the sacred town of Abydos. It
would appear that, at the outset, Abydos was the capital of the country,
for the entire nome bore the same name as the city, and had adopted for
its symbol the representation of the reliquary in which the god reposed.

In very early times Abydos fell into decay, and resigned its political
rank to Thinis, but its religious importance remained unimpaired. The
city occupied a long and narrow strip between the canal and the first
slopes of the Libyan mountains. A brick fortress defended it from the
incursions of the Bedouin, and beside it the t