is home-life had prepared him for the sight of
respectable women coming and going as they pleased, without escort and
unveiled, carrying burdens on their shoulders (whereas the men carried
them on their heads), going to market, keeping stalls or shops, while
their husbands or fathers stayed comfortably at home, wove cloth,
kneaded the potter's clay or turned the wheel, and worked at their
trades; no wonder that they were ready to believe that the man was the
slave, and the wife the mistress of the family. Some historians traced
the origin of these customs back to Osiris, others only as far as
Sesostris: Sesostris was the last resource of Greek historians when they
got into difficulties. The city was crowded with monuments; there was
the temple of the Phoenician Astarte, in which priests of Syrian descent
had celebrated the mysteries of the great goddess ever since the days
of the XVIIIth dynasty; then there was the temple of Ra, the temple of
Amon, the temple of Tamu, the temple of Bastit, and the temple of Isis.*

* This list is taken mainly from one of the mutilated
letters found on the back of the _Sallier Papyrus_. The
Phoenician Astarte, called a foreign Aphrodite by Herodotus,
was regarded by the Egyptians as a counterpart of Bastit,
lady of Onkhtoui.

The temple of Phtah, as yet intact, provided the visitor with a
spectacle scarcely less admirable than that offered by the temple of the
Theban Amon at Karnak. The kings had modified the original plan as each
thought best, one adding obelisks or colossal statues, another a pylon,
a third a pillared hall. Completed in this way by the labours of a score
of dynasties, it formed, as it were, a microcosm of Egyptian history, in
which each image, inscription and statue, aroused the attention of the
curious. They naturally desired to learn who were the strangely dressed
races shown struggling in a battle scene, the name of the king who had
conquered them, and the reasons which had led him to construct this or
that part of a monument, and there were plenty of busybodies ready to
satisfy, as far as they could, the curiosity of visitors. Interpreters
were at hand who bartered such information as they possessed, and
the modern traveller who has had occasion to employ the services of a
dragoman will have no difficulty in estimating the value of intelligence
thus hawked about in ancient times. Priests of the lower class,
doorkeepers and sacristans were