o realize
their aims by court intrigues or advantageous marriage alliances. We can
easily picture from their history what Egyptian feudalism really was,
what were its component elements, what were the resources it had at its
disposal, and we may well be astonished when we consider the power and
tact which the Pharaohs must have displayed in keeping such vassals in
check during two centuries.

Amenemhait I. had abandoned Thebes as a residence in favour of
Heracleopolis and Memphis, and had made it over to some personage who
probably belonged to the royal household. The nome of Uisit had relapsed
into the condition of a simple fief, and if we are as yet unable to
establish the series of the princes who there succeeded each other
contemporaneously with the Pharaohs, we at least know that all those
whose names have come down to us played an important part in the history
of their times. Montunsisu, whose stele was engraved in the XXIVth year
of Amenemhait I., and who died in the joint reign of this Pharaoh and
his son Usirtasen I., had taken his share in most of the wars conducted
against neighbouring peoples,--the Anitiu of Nubia, the Monitu of Sinai,
and the "Lords of the Sands:" he had dismantled their cities and razed
their fortresses. The principality retained no doubt the same boundaries
which it had acquired under the first Antufs, but Thebes itself grew
daily larger, and gained in importance in proportion as its frontiers
extended southward. It had become, after the conquests of Usirtasen
III., the very centre of the Egyptian world--a centre from which the
power of the Pharaoh could equally well extend in a northerly direction
towards the Sinaitic Peninsula and Libya, or towards the Red Sea and
the "humiliated Kush" in the south. The influence of its lords increased
accordingly: under Amenemhait III. and Amenemhait IV. they were perhaps
the most powerful of the great vassals, and when the crown slipped from
the grasp of the XIIth dynasty, it fell into the hands of one of these
feudatories. It is not known how the transition was brought about which
transferred the sovereignty from the elder to the younger branch of the
family of Amenemhait I. When Amenemhait IV. died, his nearest heir was a
woman, his sister Sovkunofriuri: she retained the supreme authority
for not quite four years,* and then resigned her position to a certain
Sovkhotpu.**

* She reigned exactly three years, ten months, and eighteen
days,