u and at Ascalon. When he was still very young he had been invested
with the office of high priest of the Memphite Phtah, and thus had
secured to him the revenues of the possessions of the god, which were
the largest in all Egypt after those of the Theban Anion. He had a great
reputation for his knowledge of abstruse theological questions and of
the science of magic--a later age attributing to him the composition of
several books on magic giving directions for the invocation of spirits
belonging to this world and the world beyond. He became the hero also of
fantastic romances, in which it was related of him how, in consequence
of his having stolen from the mummy of an old wizard the books of
Thot, he became the victim of possession by a sort of lascivious and
sanguinary ghoul. Ramses relieved himself of the cares of state by
handing over to Khamoisifc the government of the country, without,
however, conferring upon him the titles and insignia of royalty. The
chief concern of Khamoisit was to secure the scrupulous observance
of the divine laws. He celebrated at Silsilis the festivals of the
inundation; he presided at the commemoration of his father's apotheosis,
and at the funeral rites of the Apis who died in the XXXth year of the
king's reign. Before his time each sacred bull had its separate tomb
in a quarter of the Memphite Necropolis known to the Greeks as the
Serapeion. The tomb was a small cone-roofed building erected on a square
base, and containing only one chamber. Khamoisit substituted for this a
rock-tomb similar to those used by ordinary individuals. He had a tunnel
cut in the solid rock to a depth of about a hundred yards, and on either
side of this a chamber was prepared for each Apis on its death, the
masons closing up the wall after the installation of the mummy. His
regency had lasted for nearly a quarter of a century, when, the burden
of government becoming too much for him, he was succeeded in the LVth
year of Ramses by his younger brother Minephtah, who was like himself
a son of Isitnofrit.* Minephtah acted, during the first twelve years of
his rule, for his father, who, having now almost attained the age of
a hundred, passed peacefully away at Thebes in the LXVIII year of his
reign, full of days and sated with glory.** He became the subject of
legend almost before he had closed his eyes upon the world.

* Minephtah was in the order of birth the thirteenth son of
Ramses II.

** A pass