Egypt had always kept up extensive commercial relations with certain northern countries lying beyond the Mediterranean. The reputation for wealth enjoyed by the Delta sometimes attracted bands of the Haiû-nîbû to come prowling in piratical excursions along its shores; but their expeditions seldom turned out successfully, and even if the adventurers escaped summary execution, they generally ended their days as slaves in the Fayûm, or in some village of the Said. At first their descendants preserved the customs, religion, manners, and industries of their distant home, and went on making rough pottery for daily use, which was decorated in a style recalling that of vases found in the most ancient tombs of the Ægean archipelago; but they were gradually assimilated to their surroundings, and their grandchildren became fellahîn like the rest, brought up from infancy in the customs and language of Egypt.
The relations with the tribes of the Libyan desert, the Tihûnû and the Timihû, were almost invariably peaceful; although occasional raids of one of their bands into Egyptian territory would provoke counter raids into the valleys in which they took refuge with their flocks and herds. Thus, in addition to the captive Haiû-nîbû, another heterogeneous element, soon to be lost in the mass of the Egyptian population, was supplied by detachments of Berber women and children.
The relations Egypt with her northern neighbours during the hundred years of the XIIth dynasty were chiefly commercial, but occasionally this peaceful intercourse was broken by sudden incursions or piratical expeditions which called for active measures of repression, and were the occasion of certain romantic episodes. The foreign policy of the Pharaohs in this connexion was to remain strictly on the defensive. Ethiopia attracted all their attention, and demanded all their strength. The same instinct which had impelled their predecessors to pass successively beyond Gebel-Silsileh and Elephantine now drove the XIIth dynasty beyond the second cataract, and even further. The nature of the valley compelled them to this course. From the Tacazze, or rather from the confluence of the two Niles down to the sea, the whole valley forms as it were a Greater Egypt; for although separated by the cataracts into different divisions, it is everywhere subject to the same physical conditions. In the course of centuries it has more than once been forcibly dismembered by the chances of war, but its various parts have always tended to reunite, and have coalesced at the first opportunity. The Amami, the Irittt, and the Sitiu, all those nations which wandered west of the river, and whom the Pharaohs of the VIth and subsequently of the XIth dynasty either enlisted into their service or else conquered, do not seem to have given much trouble to the successors of Amenemhâît I. The Ûaûaiû and the Mâzaiû were more turbulent, and it was necessary to subdue them in order to assure the tranquillity of the colonists scattered along the banks of the river from Philo to Korosko. They were worsted by Amenemhâît I. in several encounters.
Ûsirtasen I. made repeated campaigns against them, the earlier ones being undertaken in his father’s lifetime. Afterwards he pressed on, and straightway “raised his frontiers” at the rapids of Wady Haifa; and the country was henceforth the undisputed property of his successors. It was divided into nomes like Egypt itself; the Egyptian language succeeded in driving out the native dialects, and the local deities, including Didûn, the principal god, were associated or assimilated with the gods of Egypt. Khnûmû was the favourite deity of the northern nomes, doubtless because the first colonists were natives of Elephantine, and subjects of its princes. In the southern nomes, which had been annexed under the Theban kings and were peopled with Theban immigrants, the worship of Khnûmû was carried on side by side with the worship of Amon, or Amon-Ra, god of Thebes. In accordance with local affinities, now no longer intelligible, the other gods also were assigned smaller areas in the new territory—Thot at Pselcis and Pnûbsît, where a gigantic nabk tree was worshipped, Râ near Derr, and Horus at Miama and Baûka. The Pharaohs who had civilized the country here received divine honours while still alive. Ûsirtasen III. was placed in triads along with Didûn, Amon, and Khnûmû; temples were raised to him at Semneh, Shotaûi, and Doshkeh; and the anniversary of a decisive victory which he had gained over the barbarians was still celebrated on the 21st of Pachons, a thousand years afterwards, under Thutmosis III. The feudal system spread over the land lying between the two cataracts, where hereditary barons held their courts, trained their armies, built their castles, and excavated their superbly decorated tombs in the mountain-sides. The only difference between Nubian Egypt and Egypt proper lay in the greater heat and smaller wealth of the former, where the narrower, less fertile, and less well-watered land supported a smaller population and yielded less abundant revenues.
The Pharaoh kept the charge of the more important strategical points in his own hands. Strongholds placed at bends of the river and at the mouths of ravines leading into the desert, secured freedom of navigation, and kept off the pillaging nomads. The fortress of Derr [Kubbân?—Ed.], which was often rebuilt, dates in part at least from the early days of the conquest of Nubia. Its rectangular boundary—a dry brick wall—is only broken by easily filled up gaps, and with some repairs it would still resist an Ababdeh attack.*
* The most ancient bricks in the fortifications of Derr,
easily distinguishable from those belonging to the later
restorations, are identical in shape and size with those of
the walls at Syene and El-Kab; and the wall at El-Kab was
certainly built not later than the XIIth dynasty.
The most considerable Nubian works of the XIIth dynasty were in the three places from which the country can even now be most effectively commanded, namely, at the two cataracts, and in the districts extending from Derr to Dakkeh. Elephantine already possessed an entrenched camp which commanded the rapids and the land route from Syene to Philo. Usirtasen III. restored its great wall; he also cleared and widened the passage to Sériel, as did Papi I. to such good effect that easy and rapid communication between Thebes and the new towns was at all times practicable. Some little distance from Phihe he established a station for boats, and an emporium which he called Hirû Khâkerî—“the Ways of Khâkerî”—after his own throne name—Khâkerî.*
* The widening of the passage was effected in the VIIIth
year of his reign, the same year in which he established the
Egyptian frontier at Semneh. The other constructions are
mentioned, but not very clearly, in a stele of the same year
which came from Elephantine, and is now in the British
Museum. The votive tablet, engraved in honour of Anûkît at
Sehêl, in which the king boasts of having made for the
goddess “the excellent channel [called] ‘the Ways of
Khâkeûrî,’” probably refers to this widening and deepening
of the passage in the VIIIth year.