s
with the respect which they offered to everything emanating from the
wise men of Egypt.

What they related of the human kings was not more detailed, as we see,
than their accounts of the gods. Whether the legends dealt with deities
or kings, all that we know took its origin, not in popular imagination,
but in sacerdotal dogma: they were invented long after the times they
dealt with, in the recesses of the temples, with an intention and a
method of which we are enabled to detect flagrant instances on the
monuments.

Toward the middle of the third century before our era the Greek troops
stationed on the southern frontier, in the forts at the first cataract,
developed a particular veneration for Isis of Philae. Their devotion
spread to the superior officers who came to inspect them, then to the
whole population of the Thebaid, and finally reached the court of the
Macedonian kings. The latter, carried away by force of example, gave
every encouragement to a movement which attracted worshippers to a
common sanctuary, and united in one cult two races over which they
ruled. They pulled down the meagre building of the Saite period, which
had hitherto sufficed for the worship of Isis, constructed at great cost
the temple which still remains almost intact, and assigned to it
considerable possessions in Nubia, which, in addition to gifts from
private individuals, made the goddess the richest land-owner in Southern
Egypt. Knumu and his two wives, Anukit and Satit, who, before Isis, had
been the undisputed suzerains of the cataract, perceived with jealousy
their neighbor's prosperity: the civil wars and invasions of the
centuries immediately preceding had ruined their temples, and their
poverty contrasted painfully with the riches of the new-comer.

The priests resolved to lay this sad state of affairs before King
Ptolemy, to represent to him the services which they had rendered and
still continued to render to Egypt, and above all to remind him of the
generosity of the ancient Pharaohs, whose example, owing to the poverty
of the times, the recent Pharaohs had been unable to follow. Doubtless
authentic documents were wanting in their archives to support their
pretensions: they therefore inscribed upon a rock, in the island of
Sehel, a long inscription which they attributed to Zosiri of the III
dynasty. This sovereign had left behind him a vague reputation for
greatness. As early as the XII dynasty Usirtasen III had claimed him a