island of Malta; and
such perhaps would have been the case with the ship which they before
found on the coast of Lycia, had it been able to reach a safe harbour,
and not been wrecked at Malta.

[Illustration: 056.jpg EGYPTIAN THRESHING MACHINE]

The rocky island of Malta, with the largest and safest harbour in
the Mediterranean, was a natural place for ships to touch at between
Alexandria and Italy. Its population was made up of those races which
had sailed upon its waters first from Carthage and then from Alexandria;
it was a mixture of Phoenicians, Egyptians, and Graeco-Egyptians. To
judge from the skulls turned up in the burial-places, the Egyptians
were the most numerous, and here as elsewhere the Egyptian superstitions
conquered and put down all the other superstitions. While the island was
under the Phoenicians, the coins had the head of the Sicilian goddess
on one side, and on the other the Egyptian trinity of Isis, Osiris, and
Nepthys. When it was under the Greek rule the head on the coins received
an Egyptian head-dress, and became that of the goddess Isis, and on the
other side of the coin was a winged figure of Osiris. It was at
this time governed by a Roman governor. The large temple, built with
barbarian rudeness, and ornamented with the Phoenician palm-branch, was
on somewhat of a Roman plan, with a circular end to every room. But it
was dedicated to the chief god of Egypt, and is even yet called by its
Greek name Hagia Chem, _the temple of Chem_. The little neighbouring
island of Cossyra, between Sicily and Carthage, also shows upon its
coins clear traces of its taste for Egyptian customs.

[Illustration: 057.jpg MALTESE COIN]

The first five years of this reign, the _quinquennium Neronis_, while
the emperor was under the tutorship of the philosopher Seneca, became in
Rome proverbial for good government, and on the coinage we see marks of
Egypt being equally well treated. In the third year we see on a coin the
queen sitting on a throne with the word _agreement_, as if to praise
the young emperor's good feeling in following the advice of his mother
Agrippina. On another the emperor is styled the young good genius, and
he is represented by the sacred basilisk crowned with the double crown
of Egypt. The new prefect, Balbillus, was an Asiatic Greek, and no doubt
received his Roman names of Tiberius Claudius on being made a freedman
of the late emperor. He governed the country mildly and justly; and
the g