y provoked the envy of Asiatic courts.
Egypt had, however, strangely declined from her former greatness, and
the line of princes who governed her had little in common with the
Pharaohs who had rendered her name so formidable under the XIIth
dynasty. She was now under the rule of the Xoites, whose influence was
probably confined to the Delta, and extended merely in name over
the Said and Nubia. The feudal lords, ever ready to reassert their
independence as soon as the central power waned, shared between them the
possession of the Nile valley below Memphis: the princes of Thebes, who
were probably descendants of Usirtasen, owned the largest fiefdom, and
though some slight scruple may have prevented them from donning
the pschent or placing their names within a cartouche, they assumed
notwithstanding the plenitude of royal power. A favourable opportunity
was therefore offered to an invader, and the Chaldaeans might have
attacked with impunity a people thus divided among themselves.* They
stopped short, however, at the southern frontier of Syria, or if they
pushed further forward, it was without any important result: distance
from head-quarters, or possibly reiterated attacks of the Elamites,
prevented them from placing in the field an adequate force for such a
momentous undertaking. What they had not dared to venture, others more
audacious were to accomplish. At this juncture, so runs the Egyptian
record, "there came to us a king named Timaios. Under this king, then,
I know not wherefore, the god caused to blow upon us a baleful wind, and
in the face of all probability bands from the East, people of ignoble
race, came upon us unawares, attacked the country, and subdued it easily
and without fighting."

* The theory that the divisions of Egypt, under the XIVth
dynasty, and the discords between its feudatory princes,
were one of the main causes of the success of the Shepherds,
is now admitted to be correct.

It is possible that they owed this rapid victory to the presence
in their armies of a factor hitherto unknown to the African--the
war-chariot--and before the horse and his driver the Egyptians gave way
in a body.* The invaders appeared as a cloud of locusts on the banks of
the Nile. Towns and temples were alike pillaged, burnt, and ruined;
they massacred all they could of the male population, reduced to slavery
those of the women and children whose lives they spared, and then
proclaimed as king Salat