there awaited permission to sail below the rapids, and to
enter Egypt with their cargoes. At once a military station and a river
custom-house, Semneh was the necessary bulwark of the new Egypt, and
Usirtasen III. emphatically proclaimed the fact, in two decrees, which
he set up there for the edification of posterity. "Here is," so runs the
first, "the southern boundary fixed in the year VIII. under his Holiness
of Khakeri, Usirtasen, who gives life always and for ever, in order that
none of the black peoples may cross it from above, except only for the
transport of animals, oxen, goats, and sheep belonging to them." The
edict of the year XVI. reiterates the prohibition of the year VIII.,
and adds that "His Majesty caused his own statue to be erected at the
landmarks which he himself had set up." The beds of the first and second
cataracts were then less worn away than they are now; they are therefore
more efficacious in keeping back the water and forcing it to rise to a
higher level above. The cataracts acted as indicators of the inundation,
and if their daily rise and fall were studied, it was possible to
announce to the dwellers on the banks lower down the river the progress
and probable results of the flood.

[Illustration: 353.jpg THE CHANNEL OF THE NILE BETWEEN THE TWO
FORTRESSES OF SEMNEH AND KUMMEH]

Reproduction by Faucher-Gudin of a sketch published by
Cailliaud, _Voyage a Meroe, Atlas_, vol. ii. pl. xxx.

As long as the dominion of the Pharaohs reached no further than Philae,
observations of the Nile were always taken at the first cataract; and
it was from Elephantine that Egypt received the news of the first
appearance and progress of the inundation. Amenemhait III. set up a
new nilometer at the new frontier, and gave orders to his officers to
observe the course of the flood. They obeyed him scrupulously, and every
time that the inundation appeared to them to differ from the average
of ordinary years, they marked its height on the rocks of Semneh and
Kummeh, engraving side by side with the figure the name of the king and
the date of the year. The custom was continued there under the XIIIth
dynasty; afterwards, when the frontier was pushed further south, the
nilometer accompanied it.

The country beyond Semneh was virgin territory, almost untouched and
quite uninjured by previous wars. Its name now appears for the first
time upon the monuments, in the form of Kaushu--the humbled Kush. It
comprised