h-tillers
were tenants on lands belonging to the pharaohs, the priests, and the
aristocracy. The artisans, the people who made clothing, furniture,
vessels, and tools, were independent; those who worked at great
edifices formed, as it were, an army.

Each of those specialties, and particularly architecture, demanded
power of hauling and moving; some men had to draw water all day from
canals, or transport stones from the quarries to where they were
needed. These, the most arduous mechanical occupations, and above all
work in the quarries were carried on by criminals condemned by the
courts, or by prisoners seized in battle.

The genuine Egyptians had a bronze-colored skin, of which they were
very proud, despising the black Ethiopian, the yellow Semite, and the
white European. This color of skin, which enabled them to distinguish
their own people from strangers, helped to keep up the nation's unity
more strictly than religion, which a man may accept, or language, which
he may appropriate.

But in time, when the edifice of the state began to weaken, foreign
elements appeared in growing numbers. They lessened cohesion, they
split apart society, they flooded Egypt and absorbed the original
inhabitants.

The pharaohs governed the state by the help of a standing army and a
militia or police, also by a multitude of officials, from whom was
formed by degrees an aristocracy of family. By his office the pharaoh
was lawgiver, supreme king, highest judge, chief priest; he was the son
of a god, a god himself even. He accepted divine honors, not only from
officials and the people, but sometimes he raised altars to his own
person, and burnt incense before images of himself.

At the side of the pharaoh and very often above him were priests, an
order of sages who directed the destinies of the country.

In our day it is almost impossible to imagine the extraordinary role
which the priests played in Egypt. They were instructors of rising
generations, also soothsayers, hence the advisers of mature people,
judges of the dead, to whom their will and their knowledge guaranteed
immortality. They not only performed the minute ceremonies of religion
for the gods and the pharaohs, but they healed the sick as physicians,
they influenced the course of public works as engineers, and also
politics as astrologers, but above all they knew their own country and
its neighbors.

In Egyptian history the first place is occupied by the relations whic