it was in the hands of the Egyptians, it is the strongest
proof that they were either not distrusted or not feared by their Greek
rulers. The city of Apollinopolis stands on a grand and lofty situation,
overlooking the river and the valley; and this proud temple, rising
over all, can only have been planned by military skill as a fortress to
command the whole.

At this time the Greeks in Egypt were beginning to follow the custom of
their Egyptian brethren, to take upon themselves monastic vows, and
to shut themselves up in the temples in religious idleness. But these
foreigners were looked upon with jealousy by the Egyptian monks as
intruders on their endowments, and we meet with a petition addressed
to Philometor by Ptolemy, the son of Glaucias, a monk in the temple of
Serapis at Memphis, who styles himself a Macedonian, complaining that
his cell had been violently entered and himself ill-treated because
he was a Greek; and reminding the king that last year, when the king
visited the Serapium, he had addressed the same petition to him through
the bars of his window. The priests in temples of Egypt were maintained,
partly by their own estates, and partly by the offerings of the pious;
and we still possess a deed of sale made in this reign by the Theban
priests, of one-half of a third of their collections for the dead who
had been buried in Thynabunum, the Libyan suburb of Thebes. This sixth
share of the collections consisted of seven or eight families of slaves;
the price of it was four hundred pieces of brass; the bargain was made
in the presence of sixteen witnesses, whose names are given; and the
deed was registered and signed by a public notary in the city of Thebes.
The custom of giving offerings to the priests for the good of the dead
would seem to have been a cause of some wealth to the temples. It was
one among the many Egyptian customs forbidden by the law of Moses.

From this deed of sale we also gain some knowledge of the state of
slavery in Egypt. The names of the slaves and of their fathers are
Koptic, and in some cases borrowed from the names of the gods; hence
the slaves were probably of the same religion, and spoke nearly the same
language as their masters. They sunk into that low state rather by their
own want of mind than by their masters' power. In each case the slave
was joined in the same lot with his children; and the low price of four
hundred pieces of brass, perhaps about thirty-eight dollars for