boys were sometimes beaten without the ceremony of prostration, the
hands being tied behind their back while the punishment was applied.

The character of some of the Egyptian laws was quite consonant with
the notions of a primitive age. The punishment was directed more
particularly against the offending member; and adulterators of money,
falsifiers of weights and measures, forgers of seals or signatures,
and scribes who altered any signed document by erasures or additions,
without the authority of the parties, were condemned to lose both
their hands.

But their laws do not seem to have sanctioned the gibbet, or the
exposure of the body of an offender; for the conduct of Rhampsinitus,
in the case of the robbery of his treasure, is mentioned by Herodotus
as a singular mode of discovering an accomplice, and not as an
ordinary punishment; if, indeed, the whole story be not the invention
of a Greek _cicerone_.

Thefts, breach of trust, and petty frauds were punished with the
bastinado; but robbery and house-breaking were sometimes considered
capital crimes, and deserving of death; as is evident from the conduct
of the thief when caught by the trap in the treasury of Rhampsinitus,
and from what Diodorus states respecting Actisanes.

This monarch, instead of putting robbers to death, instituted a novel
mode of punishing them, by cutting off their noses and banishing them
to the confines of the desert, where a town was built, called
Rhinocolura, from the peculiar nature of their punishment; and thus,
by removing the bad, and preventing their corrupting the good, he
benefited society, without depriving the criminals of life; at the
same time that he punished them severely for their crimes, by
obliging them to live by their labors, and derive a precarious
sustenance from quails, or whatever they could catch, in that barren
region. Commutation of punishment was the foundation of this part of
the convict system of Egypt, and Rhinocolura was their Norfolk Island,
where a sea of sand separated the worst felons from those guilty of
smaller crimes; who were transported to the mines in the desert, and
condemned to work for various terms, according to their offence.

The Egyptians had a singular custom respecting theft and burglary.
Those who followed the _profession_ of thief gave in their names to
the chief of the robbers; and agreed that he should be informed of
every thing they might thenceforward steal, the moment it was in t