on
the monarch than on their own estates, and whose authority continued to
diminish to the profit of the absolute rule of the king. There would
be nothing astonishing in the "count" becoming nothing more than a
governor, hereditary or otherwise, in Thebes itself; he could hardly be
anything higher in the capital of the empire.* But the same restriction
of authority was evidenced in all the provinces: the recruiting of
soldiers, the receipt of taxes, most of the offices associated with the
civil or military administration, became more and more affairs of the
State, and passed from the hands of the feudal lord into those of the
functionaries of the Crown. The few barons who still lived on their
estates, while they were thus dispossessed of the greater part of their
prerogatives, obtained some compensation, on the other hand, on the side
of religion. From early times they had been by birth the heads of the
local cults, and their protocol had contained, together with those
titles which justified their possession of the temporalities of the
nome, others which attributed to them spiritual supremacy. The sacred
character with which they were invested became more and more prominent
in proportion as their political influence became curtailed, and we find
scions of the old warlike families or representatives of a new lineage
at Thinis, at Akhmim,** in the nome of Baalu, at Hieraconpolis,***
at El-Kab,**** and in every place where we have information from the
monuments as to their position, bestowing more concern upon their
sacerdotal than on their other duties.

* Rakhmiri and his son Manakhpirsonbu were both "counts "of
Thebes under Thutmosis III., and there is nothing to show
that there was any other person among them invested with the
same functions and belonging to a different family.

** For example, the tomb of Anhurimosu, high priest of
Anhuri-Shu and prince of Thinis, under Minephtah, where the
sacerdotal character is almost exclusively prominent. The
same is the case with the tombs of the princes of Akhmim in
the time of Khuniatonu and his successors: the few still
existing in 1884-5 have not been published. The stelae
belonging to them are at Paris and Berlin.

*** Horimosu, Prince of Hieraconpolis under Thutmosis III.,
is, above everything else, a prophet of the local Horus.

**** The princes of El-Kab during the XIXth and XXth
dynasties we