in triumph as its rightful sovereign, but his
successors, Shabak, Shabatak, and Tirha-kah, had to contend constantly
with the Assyrians. Finally ITrdamaneh, Tirhakah's successor, returned
to Nubia, leaving Egypt, in the decadence of the Assyrian might, free to
lead a quiet existence under Psametik I and the succeeding monarchs of
the XXVIth Dynasty. When Cambyses conquered Egypt he aspired to conquer
Nubia also, but his army was routed and destroyed by the Napatan king,
who tells us in an inscription how he defeated "the man Kambasauden,"
who had attacked him. At Napata the Nubian monarchs, one of the greatest
of whom in Ptolemaic times was Ergam-enes, a contemporary of Ptolemy
Philopator, continued to reign. But the first Roman governor of Egypt,
AElius Gallus, destroyed Napata, and the Nubians removed their capital
to Meroe, where the Candaces reigned.

The monuments of this Nubian kingdom, the temples of Jebel Barkal, the
pyramids of Nure close by, the pyramids of Bagarawiya, the temples of
Wadi Ben Naga, Mesawwarat en-Naga, and Mesawwarat es-Sufra ("Mesawwarat"
proper), were originally investigated by Cailliaud and afterwards by
Lepsius. During the last few years they and the pyramids excavated by
Dr. E. A. Wallis-Budge, of the British Museum, for the Sudan government,
have been again explored. As the results of his work are not yet
fully published, it is possible at present only to quote the following
description from Cook's _Handbook for Egypt and the Sudan_ (by Dr.
Budge), p. 6, of work on the pyramids of Jebel Barkal: "the writer
excavated the shafts of one of the pyramids here in 1897, and at the
depth of about twenty-five cubits found a group of three chambers, in
one of which were a number of bones of the sheep which was sacrificed
there about two thousand years ago, and also portions of a broken
amphora which had held Rho-dian wine. A second shaft, which led to the
mummy-chamber, was partly emptied, but at a further depth of twenty
cubits water was found. The high-water mark of the reservoir when full
is ------ and, as there were no visible means for pumping it out, the
mummy-chamber could not be entered." With regard to the Bagarawiya
pyramids, Dr. Budge writes, on p. 700 of the same work, a propos of the
story of the Italian Ferlini that he found Roman jewelry in one of these
pyramids: "In 1903 the writer excavated a number of the pyramids of
Meroe for the Governor-General of the Sudan, Sir F. R. Wingate,