unishment was sometimes commuted by a mandate from the king.

Sabaco, indeed, during the fifty years of his reign, "made it a rule
not to punish his subjects with death," whether guilty of murder or
any other capital offence, but, "according to the magnitude of their
crimes, he condemned the culprits to raise the ground about the town
to which they belonged. By these means the situation of the different
cities became greatly elevated above the reach of the inundation, even
more than in the time of Sesostris;" and either on account of a
greater proportion of criminals, or from some other cause, the mounds
of Bubastis were raised considerably higher than those of any other
city.

The same laws that forbade a master to punish a slave with death took
from a father every right over the life of his offspring; and the
Egyptians deemed the murder of a child an odious crime, that called
for the direct interposition of justice. They did not, however, punish
it as a capital offence, since it appeared inconsistent to take away
life from one who had given it to the child, but preferred inflicting
such a punishment as would induce grief and repentance. With this view
they ordained that the corpse of the deceased should be fastened to
the neck of its parent, and that he should be obliged to pass three
whole days and nights in its embrace, under the surveillance of a
public guard.

But parricide was visited with the most cruel of chastisements; and
conceiving, as they did, that the murder of a parent was the most
unnatural of crimes, they endeavored to prevent its occurrence by the
marked severity with which it was avenged. The criminal was,
therefore, sentenced to be lacerated with sharpened reeds, and, after
being thrown on thorns, he was burned to death.

When a woman was guilty of a capital offence, and judgment had been
passed upon her, they were particularly careful to ascertain if the
condemned was in a state of pregnancy; in which case her punishment
was deferred till after the birth of the child, in order that the
innocent might not suffer with the guilty, and thus the father be
deprived of that child to which he had at least an equal right.

But some of their laws regarding the female sex were cruel and
unjustifiable; and even if, which is highly improbable, they succeeded
by their severity in enforcing chastity, and in putting an effectual
stop to crime, yet the punishment rather reminds us of the laws of a
barbarous p