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sions for his death are valuable as showing the manner in which a king's decease was regarded; under the emblem of a hawk—the bird of Ra—he flew up and joined the sun. Sometime before his death Amenemhat had been in retirement; after twenty years of reign (which was probably rather late in his life, as he seems to have forced his way to the front as a successful man and founder of a family) he had associated his son, the first Usertesen, on the throne, and apparently resigned active life; for in the third year of Usertesen we find the coregent summoning his court and decreeing the founding of the temple of Heliopolis without any mention of his father. The old king, however, lived yet ten years after his retirement, and died (as this narrative shows us) during an expedition of his son Usertesen. The time of year mentioned here would fall in about the middle of the inundation in those days. Hence it seems that the military expeditions were made after the harvest was
132 THE ADVENTURES OF SANEHAT
secured, and while the country was under water and the population disengaged from other labour. The course of Sanehat's flight southward, reaching the Nile at Cairo after two days' haste, indicates that the army was somewhere west of the Delta. This would point to its being on the road to the oasis of the Natron Lakes, which would be the natural course for a body of men needing water supply. His throwing himself between two bushes to hide from the army shows that the message came early in the day, otherwise he would have fled in the dark. He then fled a day's journey to the south, turning his back on the sycamore, and slept in the open field at Shi-Seneferu somewhere below the Barrage. The second day he reached the Nile opposite Old Cairo in the afternoon, and ferried himself over, passed the quarries at Gebel Mokattam, and the red hill of Gebel Ahmar, and came to a frontier wall before dark. This cannot have been far from Old Cairo, by the time;
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and as Heliopolis was in course of building by Usertesen, it would be probably on the desert near there, for the protection of the town. Passing the desert guards by night he pushed on and reached Peten, near Belbeis, by dawn, and turned east toward the valley of Kemur, or Wady Tumilat. Here in his extremity he was found by the Sati or Asiatics, and rescued. This shows that the eastern desert was left to the wandering tribes, and was without any regular government at this period; though all the eastern Delta was already well in Egyptian hands, as we know by the monuments at Bubastis, Dedamun, and Tanis. The land of Adim to which Sanehat fled appears to be the same as Edom or the southeast corner of Syria. It was evidently near the upper Tenu, or Rutennu, who seem to have dwelt on the hill country of Palestine. The hill and the plain of Palestine are so markedly different, that in all ages they have tended to be held by opposing people. In