or
undertakings which did not come to a standstill every month on account
of the exhaustion of the workmen, and help had to be provided for the
starving in order to avoid popular seditions. Their improvidence,
like their cheerfulness, was perhaps an innate trait in the national
character: it was certainly fostered and developed by the system of
government adopted by Egypt from the earliest times. What incentive was
there for a man of the people to calculate his resources and to lay up
for the future, when he knew that his wife, his children, his cattle,
his goods, all that belonged to him, and himself to boot, might be
carried off at any moment, without his having the right or the power
to resent it? He was born, he lived, and he died in the possession of a
master.

[Illustration: 147.jpg A FLOCK OF GOATS AND THE SONG OF A GOATHERD]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Emil Brugsch-
Bey. The picture is taken from the tomb of Ti.

The lands or houses which his father had left him, were his merely on
sufferance, and he enjoyed them only by permission of his lord. Those
which he acquired by his own labour went to swell his master's domain.
If he married and had sons, they were but servants for the master from
the moment they were brought into the world. Whatever he might enjoy
to-day, would his master allow him possession of it to-morrow? Even life
in the world beyond did not offer him much more security or liberty:
he only entered it in his master's service and to do his bidding; he
existed in it on tolerance, as he had lived upon this earth, and he
found there no rest or freedom unless he provided himself abundantly
with "respondents" and charmed statuettes. He therefore concentrated his
mind and energies on the present moment, to make the most of it as of
almost the only thing which belonged to him: he left to his master the
task of anticipating and providing for the future. In truth, his masters
were often changed; now the lord of one town, now that of another; now a
Pharaoh of the Memphite or Theban dynasties, now a stranger installed
by chance upon the throne of Horns. The condition of the people never
changed; the burden which crushed them was never lightened, and whatever
hand happened to hold the stick, it never fell the less heavily upon
their backs.

[Illustration: 148.jpg TAILPIECE]

Volume II., Part B.

_THE MEMPHITE EMPIRE_

_THE ROYAL PYRAMID BUILDERS: KHEOPS, KHEPHREN, MY