s of Syene to stop their marching
northward and laying waste the Thebaid. While the larger part of the
Roman legions was withdrawn into Arabia on an unsuccessful quest for
treasure, a body of thirty thousand of these men, whom we may call
either Arabs, from their blood and language, or Ethiopians, from their
country, marched northward into Egypt, and overpowered the three
Roman cohorts at Elephantine, Syene, and Philas. Badly armed and badly
trained, they were led on by the generals of Candace, Queen of Napata,
to the fourth cataract. They were, however, easily driven back when
Gallus led against them an army of ten thousand men, and drove them to
Ethiopian Pselchis, now remaining as the modern village of Dakkeh. There
he defeated them again, and took the city by storm. From Pselchis he
marched across the Nubian desert two hundred and fifty miles to Premnis,
on the northerly bend of the river, and then made himself master of
Napata, the capital. A guard was at the moment left in the country to
check any future inroads; but the Romans made no attempts to hold it.

[Illustration: 016.jpg ON THE EDGE OF THE DESERT]

Of the state of the Ethiopie Arabs under Queen Candace we learn but
little from this hasty inroad; but some of the tribes must have been
very far from the barbarians that, from their ignorance of the arts
of war, the Romans judged them to be. Those nearest to the Egyptian
frontiers, the Troglodyte and Blemmyes, were unsettled, wandering, and
plundering; but the inhabitants of Meroe were of a more civilised race.
The Jews had settled in southern Ethiopia in large numbers, and for
a long time; Solomon's trade had made them acquainted with Adule and
Auxum; some of them were employed in the highest offices, and must have
brought with them the arts of civilised life. A few years later (Acts
VIII. 27) we meet with a Jewish eunuch, the treasurer of Queen Candace,
travelling with some pomp from Ethiopia to the religious festivals at
Jerusalem. The Egyptian coins of Augustus and his successors are all
Greek; the conquest of the country by the Romans made no change in its
language. Though the chief part of the population spoke Koptic, it was
still a Greek province of the Roman empire; the decrees of the prefects
of Alexandria and of the upper provinces were written in Greek; and
every Roman traveller, who, like a schoolboy, has scratched his name
upon the foot of the musical statue of Amenhothes, to let the world know
t