eek writers took them down from their lips
with the respect which they offered to everything emanating from the
wise men of Egypt.

What they related of the human kings was not more detailed, as we see,
than their accounts of the gods. Whether the legends dealt with deities
or kings, all that we know took its origin, not in popular imagination,
but in sacerdotal dogma: they were invented long after the times they
dealt with, in the recesses of the temples, with an intention and a
method of which we are enabled to detect flagrant instances on the
monuments. Towards the middle of the third century before our era, the
Greek troops stationed on the southern frontier, in the forts at the
first cataract, developed a particular veneration for Isis of Philae.
Their devotion spread to the superior officers who came to inspect them,
then to the whole population of the Thebaid, and finally reached the
court of the Macedonian kings. The latter, carried away by force
of example, gave every encouragement to a movement which attracted
worshippers to a common sanctuary, and united in one cult the two races
over which they ruled. They pulled down the meagre building of the
Sa'ite period which had hitherto sufficed for the worship of Isis,
constructed at great cost the temple which still remains almost intact,
and assigned to it considerable possessions in Nubia, which, in
addition to gifts from private individuals, made the goddess the richest
landowner in Southern Egypt. Khnumu and his two wives, Anukit and Satit,
who, before Isis, had been the undisputed suzerains of the cataract,
perceived with jealousy their neighbour's prosperity: the civil wars
and invasions of the centuries immediately preceding had ruined their
temples, and their poverty contrasted painfully with the riches of the
new-comer.

[Illustration: 350.jpg SATIT PRESENTS THE PHARAOH AMENOTHES III. TO
KHNOMU.1]

1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from one of the bas-reliefs of the
temple of Khnumu, at Elephantine. This bas-relief is now
destroyed.

The priests resolved to lay this sad state of affairs before King
Ptolemy, to represent to him the services which they had rendered and
still continued to render to Egypt, and above all to remind him of the
generosity of the ancient Pharaohs, whose example, owing to the poverty
of the times, the recent Pharaohs had been unable to follow.

[Illustration: 351.jpg ANUKIT]

Doubtless authentic documents were wanti