Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph taken by Insinger.
This district was in a perpetual state of war—a war without danger, but full of trickery and surprises: here he prepared himself for the larger arena of the Syrian campaigns, learning the arts of generalship more perfectly than was possible in the manouvres of the parade-ground. Moreover, the appointment was dictated by religious as well as by political considerations. The presumptive heir to the throne was to his father what Horus had been to Osiris—his lawful successor, or, if need be, his avenger, should some act of treason impose on him the duty of vengeance: and was it not in Ethiopia that Horus had gained his first victories over Typhon? To begin like Horus, and flesh his maiden steel on the descendants of the accomplices of Sit, was, in the case of the future sovereign, equivalent to affirming from the outset the reality of his divine extraction.*
* In the Orbiney Papyrus the title of “Prince of Kûsh” was
assigned to the heir-presumptive to the throne.
As at the commencement of the Theban dynasties, it was the river valley only in these regions of the Upper Nile which belonged to the Pharaohs. From this time onward it gave support to an Egyptian population as far as the juncture of the two Niles: it was a second Egypt, but a poorer one, whose cities presented the same impoverished appearance as that which we find to-day in the towns of Nubia. The tribes scattered right and left in the desert, or distributed beyond the confluence of the two Niles among the plains of Sennar, were descended from the old indigenous races, and paid valuable tribute every year in precious metals, ivory, timber, or the natural products of their districts, under penalty of armed invasion.*
* The tribute of the Ganbâtiû, or people of the south, and
that of Kûsh and of the Ûaûaîû, is mentioned repeatedly
in the Annales de Thûtmosis III. for the year XXXI.,
for the year XXXIII., and for the year XXXIV. The
regularity with which this item recurs, unaccompanied by
any mention of war, following after each Syrian campaign,
shows that it was an habitual operation which was
registered as an understood thing. True, the inscription
does not give the item for every year, but then it only
dealt with Ethiopian affairs in so far as they were
subsidiary to events in Asia; the payment was none the
less an annual one, the amount varying in accordance with
local agreement.
Among these races were still to be found descendants of the Mazaiû and Ûaûaîû, who in days gone by had opposed the advance of the victorious Egyptians: the name of the Uaûaîû was, indeed, used as a generic term to distinguish all those tribes which frequented the mountains between the Nile and the Red Sea,* but the wave of conquest had passed far beyond the boundaries reached in early campaigns, and had brought the Egyptians into contact with nations with whom they had been in only indirect commercial relations in former times.
* The Annals of Thûtmosis III. mention the tribute of Pûanît
for the peoples of the coast, the tribute of Uaûaît for the
peoples of the mountain between the Nile and the sea, the
tribute of Kûsh for the peoples of the south, or Ganbâtiû.
