poet, Pancrates, versified the accounts of this juridical
collection,* and the artists of the Imperial epoch drew from it motives
for mural decoration; they portrayed the king pronouncing judgment
between two mothers who disputed possession of an infant, between two
beggars laying claim to the same cloak, and between three men asserting
each of them his right to a wallet full of food.**

* Pancrates lived in the time of Hadrian, and Athenaeus, who
has preserved his memory for us, quotes the first book of
his Bocchoreidion.

** Considerable remains of this decorative cycle have been
discovered at Pompeii and at Rome, in a series of frescoes,
in which Lumbroso and E. Lowy recognise the features of the
legends of Bocchoris; the dispute between the two mothers
recalls the famous judgment of Solomon (1 Kings iii. 16-28).

A less favourable tradition represents the king as an avaricious
and irreligious sovereign: he is said one day to have conceived the
sacrilegious desire to bring about a conflict between an ordinary bull
and the Mnevis adored at Heliopolis. The gods, doubtless angered by his
crimes, are recorded to have called into being a lamb with eight feet,
which, suddenly breaking into articulate speech, predicted that Upper
and Lower Egypt would be disgraced by the rule of a stranger.*

* This legend, preserved by Manetho and Ulian is also known
from the fragments of a demotic papyrus at Vienna, which
contains the prophecy of the lamb.

[Illustration: 375.jpg SABACO]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Lepsius.

The monuments of his reign which have come down to us tell us nothing of
his deeds; we can only conjecture that after the defeat sustained by
his generals at Raphia, the discords which had ruined the preceding
dynasties again broke out with renewed violence. Indeed, if he succeeded
in preserving his crown for several years longer, he owed the fact more
to the feebleness of the Ethiopians than to his own vigour: no sooner
did an enterprising prince appear at Barkal and demand that he should
render an account of his usurpation, than his power came to an end.
Kashto having died about 716,* his son Shabaku, the Sabaco of the
Greeks, inherited the throne, and his daughter Amenertas the priesthood
and principality of Thebes, in right of her mother Shapenuapit.

* The date of the accession of Sabaco is here fixed at 716-
715, because I follow t