ratical excursions along its shores; but their
expeditions seldom turned out successfully, and even if the adventurers
escaped summary execution, they generally ended their days as slaves in
the Fayum, or in some village of the Said. At first their descendants
preserved the customs, religion, manners, and industries of their
distant home, and went on making rough pottery for daily use, which was
decorated in a style recalling that of vases found in the most ancient
tombs of the AEgean archipelago; but they were gradually assimilated
to their surroundings, and their grandchildren became fellahin like the
rest, brought up from infancy in the customs and language of Egypt.

The relations with the tribes of the Libyan desert, the Tihunu and the
Timihu, were almost invariably peaceful; although occasional raids of
one of their bands into Egyptian territory would provoke counter raids
into the valleys in which they took refuge with their flocks and herds.
Thus, in addition to the captive Haiu-nibu, another heterogeneous
element, soon to be lost in the mass of the Egyptian population, was
supplied by detachments of Berber women and children.

[Illustration: 338.jpg MAP]

The relations Egypt with her northern neighbours during the hundred
years of the XIIth dynasty were chiefly commercial, but occasionally
this peaceful intercourse was broken by sudden incursions or piratical
expeditions which called for active measures of repression, and were
the occasion of certain romantic episodes. The foreign policy of the
Pharaohs in this connexion was to remain strictly on the defensive.
Ethiopia attracted all their attention, and demanded all their strength.
The same instinct which had impelled their predecessors to pass
successively beyond Gebel-Silsileh and Elephantine now drove the XIIth
dynasty beyond the second cataract, and even further. The nature of the
valley compelled them to this course. From the Tacazze, or rather from
the confluence of the two Niles down to the sea, the whole valley forms
as it were a Greater Egypt; for although separated by the cataracts
into different divisions, it is everywhere subject to the same physical
conditions. In the course of centuries it has more than once been
forcibly dismembered by the chances of war, but its various parts have
always tended to reunite, and have coalesced at the first opportunity.
The Amami, the Irittt, and the Sitiu, all those nations which wandered
west of the river, and