before
long, if he failed to prove sufficiently tractable, they claimed the
right to dispense with him altogether; they sent him an order to commit
suicide, and he obeyed. The boundaries of this theocratic state varied
at different epochs; originally it was confined to the region between
the First Cataract and the mouth of the Blue Nile. The bulk of the
population consisted of settlers of Egyptian extraction and Egyptianised
natives; but isolated, as they were, from Egypt proper by the rupture of
the political ties which had bound them to the metropolis, they ceased
to receive fresh reinforcements from the northern part of the valley as
they had formerly done, and daily became more closely identified with
the races of various origin which roamed through the deserts of Libya or
Arabia. This constant infiltration of free or slavish Bedawin blood and
the large number of black women found in the harems of the rich, and
even in the huts of the common people, quickly impaired the purity of
the race, even among the tipper classes of the nation, and the type came
to resemble that of the negro tribes of Equatorial Africa.*

* Taharqa furnishes us with a striking example of this
degeneration of the Egyptian type. His face shows the
characteristic features of the black race, both on the
Egyptian statue as well as on the Assyrian stele of
Sinjirli.

[Illustration: 260a.jpg A NEARLY PURE ETHIOPIAN TYPE]

[Illustration: 260b.jpg mixed negro and Ethiopian TYPE]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Lepsius.

The language fared no better in the face of this invasion, and the
written character soon became as corrupt as the language; words foreign
to the Egyptian vocabulary, incorrect expressions, and barbarous errors
in syntax were multiplied without stint. The taste for art decayed,
and technical ability began to deteriorate, the moral and intellectual
standard declined, and the mass of the people showed signs of relapsing
into barbarism: the leaders of the aristocracy and the scribes alone
preserved almost intact their inheritance from an older civilisation.
Egypt still attracted them: they looked upon it as their rightful
possession, torn from them by alien usurpers in defiance of all sense
of right, and they never ceased to hope that some day, when the god saw
fit, they would win back their heritage. Were not their kings of the
posterity of Sibu, the true representatives of the Ramessides and the
solar r