locks, still preserving its white colour beneath the yellow balsams
of his last toilet. The forehead is low, the supra-orbital ridges
accentuated, the eyebrows thick, the eyes small and set close to the
nose, the temples hollow, the cheek-bones prominent; the ears, finely
moulded, stand out from the head, and are pierced, like those of a
woman, for the usual ornaments pendant from the lobe. A strong jaw and
square chin, together, with a large thick-lipped mouth, which reveals
through the black paste within it a few much-worn but sound teeth, make
up the features of the mummied king. His moustache and beard, which were
closely shaven in his lifetime, had grown somewhat in his last sickness
or after his death; the coarse and thick hairs in them, white like those
of the head and eyebrows, attain a length of two or three millimetres.
The skin shows an ochreous yellow colour under the black bituminous
plaster. The mask of the mummy, in fact, gives a fair idea of that of
the living king; the somewhat unintelligent expression, slightly brutish
perhaps, but haughty and firm of purpose, displays itself with an air
of royal majesty beneath the sombre materials used by the embalmer.
The disappearance of the old hero did not produce many changes in the
position of affairs in Egypt: Minephtah from this time forth possessed
as Pharaoh the power which he had previously wielded as regent. He was
now no longer young. Born somewhere about the beginning of the reign of
Ramses II., he was now sixty, possibly seventy, years old; thus an old
man succeeded another old man at a moment when Egypt must have needed
more than ever an active and vigorous ruler. The danger to the country
did not on this occasion rise from the side of Asia, for the relations
of the Pharaoh with his Kharu subjects continued friendly, and, during a
famine which desolated Syria,* he sent wheat to his Hittite allies.

* A document preserved in the _Anastasi Papyrus III._ shows
how regular the relations with Syria had become. It is the
journal of a custom-house officer, or of a scribe placed at
one of the frontier posts, who notes from day to day the
letters, messengers, officers, and troops which passed from
the 15th to the 25th of Pachons, in the IIIrd year of the
reign.

The nations, however, to the north and east, in Libya and in the
Mediterranean islands, had for some time past been in a restless
condition, which boded little good