The City of the Caliphs. A popular study of Cairo and its environs and the Nile and its antiquities ... Illustrated

Front matter

THE CITY OF THE CALIPHS General View of Cairo. THE CITY OF THE CALIPHS Popular £>tuog of Cairo anb Its lEnbirong ano tfje Nile ano Uts antiquities BY EUSTACE A. REYNOLDS-BALL B. A. (Oxd.), F. R. G. S. AUTHOR OF "MEDITERRANEAN WINTER RESORTS" Illustrate!) BOSTON ESTES AND LAURIAT PUBLISHERS Copyright, 1897, By Estes and Laukiat. Colonial $mss : Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Slmonds & Co. Boston. Mass., U.S.A. "He who hath not seen Cairo hath not seen the world: its soil is gold; its Nile is a wonder ; its women are like the black eyed virgins of Paradise ; its houses are palaces ; and its air is soft — its odours surpassing that of aloes-wood, and cheering the heart: and how can Cairo be otherwise when it is the Mother of the World? " — " The Thousand and One Nights." CONTENTS. CHAPTER PAGE7 Introduction 1 I. Egypt under the Pharaohs .... 5 II.

The Empire of the Ptolemies .... 22 III. The Rule of the Caliphs 42 IV. The Making of Egypt 55 V. Alexandria and the Nile Delta ... 90 VI. The Story of the Suez Canal .... 105 VII. Cairo as a Resort for Invalids . . . 114 VIII. Cairo in Its Social Aspect .... 122 IX. The Bazaars and Street Life .... 132s X. The Mosques 139 XI. The Tombs of the Caliphs .... 149 XII. The National Museum 157 XIII. The Acropolis of Cairo 169 XIV. Old Cairo and the Coptic Churches . . 181 XV. Some Side-shows of Cairo ..... 191. XVI. The Pyramids of Ghizeh 202 XVII. The City of the Sacred Bulls . . . 215 XVIII. The City of the Sun 227 XIX. Minor Excursions . ... . . . 235 XX. The Nile as a Health-resort .... 249 XXI. The Nile from Cairo to Thebes . . . 261 XXII. "The City of a Hundred Gates" . . . 277 XXIII. Assouan and Philæ 294 XXIV.

From the First to the Second Cataract . 304 XXV. Recent Egyptological Discoveries . . . LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE General View of Cairo ..... Frontispiece. View in Alexandria 90 General View of Port Said ...... 105 The Suez Canal ......... 110 The Route to the Pyramids 116 Interior of the Mosque of Kait Bey .... 141 The Tombs of the CalIphs ...... 149 The Mosque of Kait Bey 152 The Tombs of the Mamelukes 154 Pyramid, Sphinx, and Temple of Ghizeh . . . 202 Ascending the Great Pyramid 206 The Sphinx 212 Statue of Rameses II 217 Obelisk of Heliopolis 227 View of Edfu 276 Statue at the Entrance of the Temple of Rameses IH. 286 Luxor 292 The Island of Philae 301 General View of Dar-El-Bahari 314 Colonnades, Temple of Isis

Introduction

. IF a plebiscite were taken among travellers in general as to the dozen most interesting and striking cities of the globe, it is probable that Cairo would be included in the list. It is inferior in world-wide interest, of course, to Jerusalem or Rome, or even Athens, but it would probably take a higher rank than many historic capitals. No doubt Cairo, compared with the great capitals of Europe, is mod ern, or, at any rate, mediæval, and, indeed, historically of little importance ; but it cannot be denied that to the average traveller Cairo is not easily dissociated from Egypt, — the cradle of the oldest civilisation and culture in the world. The proximity of the Pyramids and the Sphinx have no doubt something to do with this vague and erro neous view, and with the fictitious antiquity ignorantly attributed to the City of the Caliphs.

The most elemen tary history, handbook or guide-book will, of course, correct this general impression ; but it is not, perhaps, an exaggera tion to say that some casual visitors to Egypt begin their sightseeing with a vague, if unformulated, impression that Cairo was once the capital of the Pharaohs, and the Pyra mids its cemetery. The historic and artistic interest of Cairo is, in short, purely mediæval and Saracenic ; and, perhaps, no Eastern city, except Damascus, in the beaten track of tourist travel, embodies so many of the typical characteristics of an Oriental city. Mehemet Ali and Ismail may be considered by the artist and antiquarian to have done their best to vulgarise, that is, Europeanise, the City of the Mamelukes ; but the rebuilding and enlarging under Mehemet, and the hausmannising tendencies of Ismail, have done little more than touch the surface.

The native quarter of Cairo still remains a magnificent field of study for the intelligent visitor, especially if he ignores the hackneyed and limited programme of the guides and interpreters; and the artist who knows his Cairo will find the Moslem city full of the richest material for his sketch-book. " Every step," observes Mr. Stanley Lane-Poole, " tells a story of the famous past. The stout remnant of a fortified wall, a dilapidated mosque, a carved door, a Kusic text, — each has its history, which carries us back to the days when Saladin went forth from the gates of Cairo to meet Richard in the plain of Acre, or when Beybars rode at the head of his Mamelukes in the charge which trampled upon the Crusaders of Saint Louis. A cloistered court recalls the ungodly memory of the prophet of the Druses ; a spacious quadrangle, closely filled by picturesque, albeit scowling, groups of students, reminds us of the conquering Caliphs of 'Aly's heretical line, who, disdaining the mere dominion of Roman ' Africa,' carried their triumphant arms into Egypt and Syria, Sicily and Sardinia, whilst their fleets disputed the command of the Mediterranean with the galleys of Moorish Spain."

Cairo is full of these picturesque associations connected with the magnificent age of the Mameluke Sultans, but most visitors know little about them. Probably this is mainly attributable to the fact that most of the books on Egypt rather ignore its capital ; and the age of the Sara cens is a period as much overlooked by modern historians as that of the Ptolemies.

INTRODUCTION.

. There are, of course, the standard guide-books, — a most skilful condensation of a mass of erudition, — but the compilers find the Upper Nile, with its antiquities, of such surpassing interest, that little room can be found for Cairo itself. Besides, guide-books are read of necessity, and not for pleasure or continuously ; and in the wealth of dry detail it is difficult sometimes to " see the wood for the trees." There is, however, another aspect besides the sentimen tal or devotional one, which should not be disregarded ; and in the chapter dealing with the regeneration of Egypt under British influence, I have attempted to show how modern Egypt strikes the political observer and the man of practical affairs. Egypt, with its wealth of antiquities and artistic relics, is, no doubt, of the highest importance to the tourist and sight-seer.

Regarded, however, as a community or modern state, the Egypt of to-day holds a very low rank among semicivilised countries. There is a certain amount of reason in the complaint of some modern historians that Western minds seem to lose all sense of proportion and historic perspective when describing this Land of Paradox, which is, after all, but a tenth-rate territory, with an acreage less than that of Belgium, and a population hardly more numerous than that of Ireland. These indisputable facts will, perhaps, come as a surprise to the tourist, who takes several weeks to sail along the thousand miles of its mighty river, — its one and only highway, — from Cairo to the Soudan frontier. One is apt to forget that, above the Delta, Egypt simply means a narrow fringe of desert stretching for a few miles on each side of the Nile.

This, no doubt, is true ; and visitors are perhaps too apt to " see the country looming in a mist of mirage," and are unable to resist the weird charm of this unique land. At the same time, one cannot deny the enormous international importance of Egypt in spite of its small acreage and population. This importance, no doubt, is to some extent fictitious, and is due partly to its peculiar geographi cal position, which makes it the great highway between the Eastern and Western hemispheres, and partly to its climate, which has converted it into the great winter residence and playground of civilised nations. Besides, magnitude is not, of course, an absolutely reliable test of a country's greatness. Little states, as we all know, have filled a most important part in the world's history, — Athens, Sparta, Venice, Florence, Genoa, for instance.

Then, the Holy Land itself is about the size of Wales, and the area of Attica was no wider than that of Cornwall. In preparing this book, I have consulted many of the standard English and French works which have been recently published ; and I am especially indebted to the val uable information to be found in the works of Professor Flinders Petrie, Professor Mahaffy, the late Miss A. B. Edwards, Sir Alfred Milner, and Mr. Stanley Lane-Poole. For the preliminary chapter on Alexandria and the Nile Delta, I have utilised portions of an article on Alexandria which I contributed to " The Picturesque Mediterranean," published by Cassell & Co., Ltd., London, and my grateful acknowledgments are due to this firm for permission to reproduce these portions. E. A. R. B.

Chapter I. Egypt Under The Pharaohs

THE history of the City of Cairo, as distinct from that of Egypt, is simple and easily mastered, being con fined within reasonable limits. It does not go back further than mediæval times. Unlike the history of Egypt, which is concerned mainly with the rise and fall of alien states, Cairo, whether Arabic or Turkish, is a wholly Mohamme dan creation. It is, indeed, more Mohammedan in some respects than any city in the world, just as Rome is more Roman than any other city. Constantinople, of course, is a decidedly hybrid city in comparison, and its very name recalls an alien civilisation ; while its chief temple, Justin ian's great church of St. Sophia, is a Christian building, dedicated to a Christian saint, although the Turks naturally try to disguise its heretical origin by calling it Agia Sophia (Holy Wisdom).

The history of Cairo, then, falls naturally into two periods: that of Arab rule when it was virtually the seat of the Caliphate ; and the period of Turkish dominion, from its capture by the Ottoman Turks in 1517 down to the present time. In short, we need consider it under two aspects merely, — first as the capital of the Caliphs, and next as the chief city of a Turkish pachalic. The history of Egypt, on the other hand, is that of the oldest civilised country in the world, — though as a com munity it is perhaps one of the newest. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that all literature, ancient and modern, from the works of Homer and Aristotle down to the mas terpieces of Dante and Shakespeare, is indirectly due to the ancient Egyptian civilisation. Philologists of the high est authority are agreed that the Phœnician origin of the alphabet cannot be substantiated.

Even Tacitus seems to have suspected that this nation had won a spurious renown as the inventors of letters, — tanquam repererint quæ ac ceperant. The Egyptian cursive characters to be found in the Prisse" papyrus of the eleventh dynasty — " the oldest book in the world " — are pronounced by the best philo logical scholars to be the prototype of the letters after wards copied by the Greeks from the Phœnicians, and thence transmitted to the Latins. Though Egypt, as the cradle of the alphabet, may be considered the foster-mother of all literature, yet it must be allowed that the one thing needful to history, namely, literary material in documentary form, is wanting in the case of Egypt. We have nothing but the fossilised history of the monuments. Only the baldest annals (pace Brugsch Bey) can be compiled from stone inscriptions.

Then, as Mr. David Hogarth, in his " Wanderings of a Scholar in the Levant," pertinently observes, contemporary documents carved on stone, whether in Greece or in the Nile Valley, have often been accepted far too literally. The enthusiasm of archæologists has inclined them to regard insuffi ciently the fact that to lie monumentally to posterity is a failing to which the Pharaohs, prompted by their colossal vanity, were particularly subject. From the Hyksos invasion down to the conquest of the country by the Ottomans, — a period of nearly five thousand years, — Egyptian history is simply that of foreign conquests, and is inseparably bound up with that of alien nations, its conquerors, — Semitic (Hyksos kings), Ethio pian, Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Saracen, and Turk ish. A cardinal fact in the history of this remarkable country is its perpetual subjection to foreign influences.

Yet, in spite of this, the Egyptians have, during these thousands of years of foreign dominion, preserved their national characteristics, and the same unvarying physical types. This racial continuity, in spite of all these adverse circumstances and interminable succession of alien immi grations, which might be supposed to modify materially the uniformity of the Egyptian type, is one of the greatest puzzles in ethnography. What is known as the prehistoric period of Egypt can be dismissed in a paragraph. This history is based, of course, on mythical legend, and is purely conjectural. It is supposed that the country was divided into a number of small, independent states, each with its own tutelary chief; or, according to some writers, these sovereigns were deities and kings in one, and they have been termed god-kings.

To emphasise the distinction, Menes and the kings of the first dynasty are designated as the first earthly kings of Egypt. As to the origin of the Egyptians, scholars are di vided into two schools ; for though there are innumerable theories, if we eliminate the more fanciful ones it will be found that all historians of note have adopted one or other of the two following theories. Those who adopt the Biblical narrative have come to the conclusion that the ancestors of the Egyptians came originally from Asia, and that, in short, the tide of civilisation flowed up the Nile. Philologists, too, who have discovered many points of resemblance in the roots of the ancient Egyptian and Semitic languages, have adopted this theory. Ethnogra phists and anthropologists, however, hold an opposite view, and consider that a study of the customs of the ancient Egyptians, and an examination of their implements and utensils, which are very similar to those of the tribes living on the banks of the Niger and Zambesi, rather point to an Ethiopian or South African origin ; and that civilisation began in the Upper Nile Valley and spread northwards and downwards.

It is probable, however, that each of these historical schools may be partly right ; and possibly the true explanation is that, whether an Asiatic or African origin be granted, the immigrants found an aboriginal race settled on the banks of the Nile, whose racial characteristics and distinctive physical types were probably as little modified by these alien invaders as they have been by their Mohammedan conquerors in the seven teenth century. Most modern historians, then, fortified by the opinion of ethnographical authorities, after the scientific examination of the ancient monumental sculptures and drawings, are satisfied that the ancient Egyptians differed in all essen tial racial characteristics from the African negroes, and belonged to a branch of the great Caucasian family. It would be futile to attempt here anything but the barest summary of the chief facts of Egyptian history.

A very slight thread of narrative may, however, connect the most important historical landmarks under which the lead ing facts of Egyptian history may be grouped. Without attempting, then, anything of the nature of a scientific chronological precis, a practical and rough-and-ready division, ignoring, of course, the dynasties and Ancient, Middle, and New Empires, and other conventional divi sions of historians, would be something as follows : — 1. The age of the Pharaohs, which would include the first twenty-six dynasties, down to the first Persian invasion under Cambyses. 2. The Empire of the Ptolemies, which includes the prosperous reigns of the dynasty founded by Alexander the Great. 3. The Saracenic era, during which Egypt became once more a centre of arts and sciences, in spite of the internecine feuds of the rival Caliphs.

This period closes with the conquest by the Ottoman Turks. 4. The Political Renaissance of Egypt under Mehemet Ali. 5. Modern Egypt, when the country of the Pharaohs entered upon its latest phase, after the fall of the Khedive Ismail, as a kind of protege" of the Great Powers, under the stewardship, first of Great Britain and France, and finally of Great Britain alone. The division of Egyptian history into Ancient, Middle, and New Empires is as artificial and arbitrary as the popu lar divisions into dynasties. The Ancient Empire begins with Menes, the first really historical king of Egypt. Little is known of this monarch's achievements, but he at any rate affords us a sure starting-place for our survey of the early monarchy. The sources from wTiich we derive our knowledge of these primeval kings are from the monumental inscriptions, lists (more or less imperfect or undecipherable) in the Turin papyrus, and the history of the Ptolemaic priest, Manetho.

Mena, or Menes, is supposed to have been de scended from a line of local chiefs at This, near Abydos, the traditional burying-place of Osiris. Coming south, he made Memphis the capital of his new united kingdom. This was the chief centre of the worship of the god Ptah, creator of gods and men ; and it was here that the cult of the Apis bull (the Serapis of the Greeks) was first in stituted. The kings of the first three dynasties, with the exception of Menes, have left few records, though certain inscriptions on the cliffs at Sinai have been attributed to one of the kings of the third dynasty, and the Pyramid of Medum, in the opinion of Doctor Petrie, was built by Seneferu. These three dynasties cover the period B. c. 4400 to 3766, according to Brugsch. But Egyptian chronology is one of the most disputed departments of Egyptology, and the dates given are, of course, only ap proximate.

With the fourth dynasty we come to the familiar names of the great pyramid-builders, Cheops, Chephren, and My cerinos. It is not till the age of the Theban Pharaohs that we find sovereigns who have left such lasting records of a highly developed civilisation. Cheops and Chephren, in the Egyptian traditions, probably coloured a good deal by the biassed accounts of Herodotus and other Greek his torians, have been held up to the execration of posterity as heartless tyrants and profligate despisers of the gods. Mycerinos's memory is, however, revered by Herodotus as a just and merciful king. " To him his father's deeds were displeasing, and he both opened the temples and gave liberty to the people, who were ground down to the last extremity of evil, to return to their own business and sac rifices ; also he gave decision of their causes juster than those of all the other kings."

The actual bones of this king can be seen in the British Museum, so that this pane gyric has a peculiar interest for English people. To the fifth dynasty, known as the Elephantine from the place of origin, belongs Unas, whose pyramid-tomb was discovered by Professor Maspero in 1881. The sovereigns of the sixth dynasty distinguished themselves by various foreign conquests. To this family belongs the famous Queen Nitokris, the original of the fabled Rhodopis of the Greeks. It is permissible to skip a period of some six hundred years, during which four dynasties reigned, whose history is almost entirely lost. So far as we can judge, it was a period of struggle between weak titular sovereigns and powerful feudal chiefs who left the kings a merely nominal sovereignty, having apparently acquired the control of the civil and military authority.

Egypt during this period was invaded by Libyan and Ethiopian tribes. With the eleventh dynasty, founded by powerful princes from Thebes, begins the Middle Empire, with Thebes as its capital. It will be noticed that the seat of government is often shifted during the thirty dynasties which comprise Egyptian history from Menes to Nectanebo I. Under the Ancient Empire, Memphis, as we have seen, was the seat of government, and may be regarded as the first historic capital of Egypt. This, near Abydos, no doubt can boast of an earlier history ; but this was merely the cradle of the first Egyptian kings, of whom we have no records more authentic than those semi-mythical tradi tions which centre round the prehistoric god-kings, and it cannot, of course, be considered as a seat of government. The political centre was shifted, under different kings, for dynastic, strategic, or political motives, to various places in Egypt, from the Upper Nile Valley to the Delta.

As the power of the kings increased, the capital was fixed at Abydos, Elephantine, and other southern cities. Under the Middle Empire, the period of Egypt's greatest splendour, the great city of Thebes was the capital. Then, during a period of internal disturbance or foreign invasions, it was transferred again to the north, to Memphis, Tel-El -Amarna, and other cities of Lower Egypt. From the thirteenth to the seventeenth dynasties, Egyptian his tory is intricate and difficult to follow. The Shepherd Kings had conquered Lower Egypt, and held sway in the Delta, while the old Theban royal race still maintained the chief authority in Upper Egypt. So, during these five dynasties, there were two capitals, Tanis (Zoan) and Thebes. During the later Asiatic wars the political centre was shifted towards the Asiatic frontier, and Rameses the Great and his successors held their court principally in the northern city of Tanis.

Under the New Empire, — the period of decadence and foreign oppression, — the centre was continually transferred, and it was shifted with each political change, — now to Thebes, now to Memphis, and finally to Bubastis and Sais. The twelfth dynasty is an important period in Egyp tian history. The reigns of Usertsen I. and III. and Amen-Em-Het III. are renowned for the famous perma nent engineering achievements which did more, perhaps, for the prosperity of the country than many of the architectural enterprises and foreign conquests of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties. Amen-Em-Het III. conferred the greatest benefit on Egypt by his vast en gineering works for regulating the inundations of the Nile. His most famous work, by which Egypt has benefited even down to the present day, was the construction of the great artificial lake, called by the Greeks Moeris, now called by the Arabs El-Fayyum.

This monarch also gave later sovereigns the idea of a Nilometer, as on the cliffs at Semni he made regular measurements of the rise in the Nile inundation. We now enter a dark period of about five hundred years, when Egypt passed under the foreign domination — inciden tally referred to above, from which she freed herself only after a long and severe struggle. The thirteenth dynasty appears at first to have carried on the government with the success inherited from its predecessors ; but there are indications that the reigns of its later kings were disturbed by internal troubles, and it is probable that actual revolution transferred power to the fourteenth dynasty, whose seat was Sais in the Delta. The new dynasty probably never succeeded in making its sway paramount ; and Lower Egypt, in particular, seems to have been torn by civil wars, and to have fallen an easy prey to the invader.

Forced on by a wave of migration of the peoples of Western Asia, in connection, perhaps, with the conquests of the Elamites, or set in motion by some internal cause, the nomad tribes of Syria made a sudden irruption into the northeastern border of Egypt, and, con quering the country as they advanced, apparently without difficulty, finally established themselves in power at Mem phis. Their course of conquest was undoubtedly made smooth for them by the large foreign element in the population of the Lower country, where, on this account, they may have been welcomed as a kindred people, or at least not opposed as a foreign enemy. The dynasties which the newcomers founded we know as those of the Hyksos, or Shepherd Kings, — a title, however, which is nowhere given to them in genuine Egyptian texts.

It has been conjec tured that the name Hyksos (which first occurs in the fragment of Manetho) is derived from " Hek-Shasu," King of the Shasu, an Egyptian name for the thieving nomad race. After the rough work of conquest had been accom plished, the Hyksos gradually conformed to Egyptian customs, adopted Egyptian forms of worship, and gov erned the country just as it had been governed by the native kings. The fifteenth and sixteenth dynasties are Hyksos dynasties, probably at first holding sway over Lower Egypt alone, but gradually bringing the Upper country into subjection, or at least under tribute. The period of the seventeenth dynasty, whether we are to call it Hyksos or native Theban, or to count it as being occupied by kings of both races, was a period of revolt. The Theban under-king, Sekenen Ra, refused tribute, and the war of liberation began, which, after a struggle of nearly a century, was brought to a happy conclusion by the final expulsion of the Hyksos by Aahmes, or Amasis I., the founder of the eighteenth dynasty.

The period of the foreign domination has a particular interest on account of its connection with Bible history. It appears from chronological calculations, which are fairly conclusive, that it was towards the end of the Hyksos rule that the Patriarch Joseph was sold into Egypt. A king named Nubti (B. c. 1750) is supposed to have occupied the throne at the time ; and the famous Hyksos king, Apepa II., is said to have been the Pharaoh who raised Joseph to high rank, and welcomed the Patriarch Jacob and his family into Egypt.1 Aahmes I. (Amasis), the conqueror of the Hyksos usurp ers, was the son of Ka-mes, the last of the royal race of Thebes of the seventeenth dynasty ; and his mother was Queen Aah-hetep, whose jewels in the National Museum at Cairo are only exceeded in beauty and interest by those of the Princess Hathor.

This monarch is the first of the eighteenth dynasty, in which the history of Egypt enters upon a new phase, and what may be called the " Expansion of Egypt" begins. Hitherto the Egyptian sovereigns had been satisfied with waging war only with their immediate neigh bours. Now begins an active foreign policy, and we note an expansion of the national spirit. An Egyptian Empire was founded, which, by the end of the reign of Thotmes I., extended from the Euphrates in the north to Berber in the Soudan. This policy of foreign conquest was, no doubt, forced upon Aahmes and his successors by circumstances. It was essential to find employment for their large armies, whose energies had been hitherto confined to overthrowing the Hyksos dynasty. But this foreign policy, which brought Egypt into collision with the great Asiatic empires, even tually proved a source of danger, when Egypt was no longer ruled by the warrior-kings of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth dynasties.

Thotmes II. and his sister, the famous Hatasu (Hatshep set), whose achievements are more fully referred to in the chapter on Thebes, followed up the Asiatic victories of Thotmes I. with successful expeditions into Arabia. It 1 E. A. Wallis-Budge. was, however, reserved for her son Thotmes III. to bring the neighbouring nations into complete subjection ; and Egypt, under this famous monarch, perhaps the greatest prototype of Alexander the Great in history, reached the period of its greatest material prosperity. It was his proud boast that he planted the frontiers of Egypt where he pleased ; and this was, indeed, no hyper bolical figure. " Southwards, as far, apparently, as the great Equatorial Lakes, which have been rediscovered in our time ; northwards to the Islands of the Ægean and the upper waters of the Euphrates ; over Syria and Sinai, Mesopotamia and Arabia in the East; over Libya and the North African coast as far as Cherchell in Algeria on the West, he carried fire and sword, and the terrors of the Egyptian name." 1 Queen Hatasu was one of the most famous royal build ers of Egypt.

" Numerous and stately as were the obelisks erected in Egypt from the period of the twelfth dynasty down to the time of Roman rule," remarks Miss Edwards, " those set up by Hatasu in advance of the fourth pylon of the Great Temple of Karnak are the loftiest, the most admirably engraved, and the best proportioned. One has fallen ; the other stands alone, one hundred and nine feet high in the shaft, cut from a single flawless block of red granite." Thotmes III. was famed as much for his achievements of peace as for his foreign conquests, and some of the finest monuments at Thebes and Luxor testify to his merits as an architect. In fact, his cartouche occurs more frequently even than that of Rameses II. on antiquities of every kind, from temples and tombs down to scarabs. The fame of Thotmes's successors, Amen-hetep II., and Amen hetep III., though vigorous and warlike kings, has been eclipsed by that of their great ancestor, though their campaigns in Syria and Nubia were equally successful. 1 " Pharaohs, Fellahs, and Explorers." reign of Amen-hetep IV. is noteworthy for an im portant religious reform or revolution.