n found in the ports
of the Delta, where the barges of the Nile met the ships of the
Mediterranean. What used to be Egypt was an inland kingdom, surrounded by
the desert; but Egypt under Ptolemy was country on the sea-coast; and,
on the conquest of Phoenicia and Coele-Syria, he was master of the
forests of Lebanon and Antilibanus, and stretched his coast from Cyrene
to Antioch, a distance of twelve hundred miles. The wise and mild plans
which were laid down by Alexander for the government of Egypt when a
province were easily followed by Ptolemy when it became his own kingdom.
The Greek soldiers lived in their garrisons or in Alexandria under the
Macedonian laws, while the Egyptian laws were administered by their own
priests, who were upheld in all the rights of their order and in their
freedom from land-tax. The temples of Phtah, of Amon-Ra, and the other
gods of the country were not only kept open, but were repaired and even
built at the cost of the king; the religion of the people, and not that
of their rulers, was made the established religion of the state. On
the death of the god Apis, the sacred bull of Memphis, the chief of the
animals which were kept and fed at the cost of the several cities, and
who had died of old age soon after Ptolemy came to Egypt, he spent the
sum of fifty talents, or $42,500, on its funeral; and the priests, who
had not forgotten that Cambyses, their former conqueror, had wounded the
Apis of his day with his own sword, must have been highly pleased with
this mark of his care for them. The burial-place for the bulls is an
arched gallery tunnelled into the hill behind Memphis for more than two
thousand feet, with a row of cells on each side of it. In every cell is
a huge granite sarcophagus, within which were placed the remains of a
bull that had once been the Apis of its day, which, after having for
perhaps twenty years received the honours of a god, was there buried
with more than kingly state. The cell was then walled up, and ornamented
on the outside with various tablets in honour of the deceased
animal, which were placed in these dark passages by the piety of his
worshippers. The priests of Thebes were now at liberty to cut out from
their monuments the names of usurping gods, and to restore those that
had been before cut out. They also rebuilt the inner room, or the holy
of holies, in the great temple of Karnak.

It had been overthrown by the Persians in wantonness, or in hatred
of the