rs, with bitter resentment. When the hated
dynasty was at an end, the Egyptians obliterated, as far as they
could, every sign of its supremacy, chiselled out the names of its
kings on their monuments, and destroyed their records, so that few
traces of this revolution remain to dispel the strange mystery in
which it is involved. They could never bear to hear the detested names
of the Shepherd Kings; and this circumstance throws light upon the
passage in Genesis which says that the occupation of a shepherd was an
abomination to the Egyptians. Under the patronage of the new dynasty
the arts which had been destroyed were again restored, the monuments
of the suppressed religion were freed from their indignities, and
once more reinstated with the old honours, and the whole country was
reconstructed. But, while the temples were re-erected, and the old
worship established with even greater splendour, there can be no doubt
that many of the earlier obelisks, owing to their smaller size, as
compared with the other gigantic monuments of Egypt, had been
destroyed past all reconstruction; and some of them remain in the land
at the present day on the sites where, and in the exact manner in
which, they were overturned by the Shepherd Kings.

But greater changes still happened to the Egyptian obelisks after
this. Previously they had been devastated and overturned on their own
soil. But now they excited the cupidity of the foreign invaders of
Egypt, and were carried away to distant lands as trophies of their
victories. The first obelisks that were removed in this way were two
of the principal ones that adorned one of the temples of Thebes. After
the capture of Thebes by Assurbanipal, the Assyrian king, the famous
Sardanapalus of the Greeks, they were transported to the conqueror's
palace at Nineveh, and were afterwards lost for ever in the
destruction of that city, about sixty years later, or about six
hundred years before Christ. The transportation of these enormous
masses of stone across the country to the seashore, down the Red Sea,
over the Indian Ocean, up the Persian Gulf, and the river Tigris, to
their destination in the palace of Nineveh, nearly two thousand miles,
must have been a feat of engineering skill at that early period of the
world's history, far more wonderful in regard to the difficulties
overcome, without any precedent to guide, and considering the rudeness
of the means of transport, than anything that has ever been a