in his accounts.

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 _proteges_, 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, Snofrui. He probably came from the
Nome of the Bull, if not from Xois itself, in the heart of the Delta.
His father, the scribe Anupumonkhu, held, in addition to his office,
several landed estates, producing large returns; but his mother,
Nibsonit, who appears to have been merely a concubine, had no personal
fortune, and would have been unable even to give her child an education.
Anupumonkhu made himself entirely responsible for the necessary
expenses, "giving him all the necessities of life, at a time when he had
not a