temporaneous line, so that for some time Upper and Lower Egypt were governed independently of each other. Lepsius gives only three Tanite sovereigns and seven Theban, from which it would appear that a union must have taken place under the latter, who, however, seem to have reigned somewhat ingloriously. The most vigorous of them appear to have been Piankh and Pinedjem, who was possibly the Pharaoh with whom Solomon "made affinity" by marriage; "for Pharaoh king of Egypt had gone up and taken Gezer, and burnt it with fire, and slain the Canaanites that dwelt in the city, and given it for a present unto his daughter, Solomon's wife." And we read further that Solomon built a house especially for her, because she seems to have retained the religion of her royal father, the high priest of Ammon; therefore "Solomon brought up the daughter of Pharaoh out of the city of David unto the house he had built for her for he said, My wife shall not dwell in the house of David king of Israel, because the places are holy whereunto the ark of the Lord hath come.' It seems odd that it should not have struck Solomon that

if his wife was too unholy even to live in a sacred city, she was too unholy to be his wife; meantime his father-in-law, who, if he was not Pinedjem, was undoubtedly one of the priest-kings of Ammon, was celebrating mysterious rites, possibly in this very temple. of Isis whose ruined walls we were now identifying. Nor did these religious scruples interfere with intimate relations being kept up between Egypt and Palestine during the reign. of Solomon and these pontiff-kings, for we hear that "Solomon had horses brought out of Egypt and linen yarn the king's merchants received the linen yarn at a price. And a chariot came up and went out of Egypt for six hundred shekels of silver, and an horse for an hundred and fifty." These commercial relations came to an end when Egypt was invaded by the Assyrians under Sheshong the First, and the dynasty of the Ammon monarchs was overthrown. This king is the Sesonchis of the Greeks, and the Shishak of the Bible, with whom Jeroboam took refuge when he fled from Rehoboam, and who afterwards "came up against Jerusalem, and took away the treasures of the

house of the Lord, and the treasures of the king's house; he took all he carried away also the shields of gold which Solomon had made." An inscription on one of the walls of the great hall at Karnak commemorates this campaign against Judah, and gives a list of the conquered towns and districts.

It is worthy of note that the modern name of bricks formed of clay, and not requiring straw, should be haybee, as we found no straw in the bricks of these ruins, which now bear the same name, though in some of the walls which formed its fortifications are layers of reeds in every fourth course, to serve as binders. The bricks on which we found the inscription of prophet of Pinedjem were burnt; so that Sir Gardner Wilkinson is mistaken when he says "that burnt bricks were not used in Egypt, and when found they are known to be of Roman time." The rest of his notice on Egyptian brickwork, however, applies so accurately to those at Haybee—which, with the exception of those stamped, were all crude-that it is worth quoting.

1 Wilkinson's Ancient Egyptians, ii. 194.

1

"Enclosures of gardens or granaries, sacred circuits surrounding the courts of temples, walls of fortresses or towns, dwelling-houses and tombs, and even some few of the temples themselves, were of crude brick, with stout columns and gateways; and so great was the demand, that the Government, foreseeing the profit to be obtained from a monopoly of them, undertook to supply the public at a moderate price, thus preventing all unauthorised persons from engaging in their manufacture. And in order more effectually to obtain this end, the seal of the king, or of some privileged person, was stamped upon the bricks at the time they were made; and bricks so marked are found both in public and private buildings, some having the ovals of a king, and some the names and titles of a priest, or other influential person. Those which bear no characters either form part of a tale, of which the first only were stamped, or were from the brick-fields of individuals who had obtained a licence from the Government to make them for their own consumption."

It is not unlikely that if excavations were prosecuted at Haybee on a more extensive

scale than those at which we were present a month later, some still more interesting discoveries might be made, and light thrown upon the legends concerning the pontiff-kings of whose dynasties so little is known. I believe that Brugsch Pasha has visited the ruins, and found a brick or tablet of Thotmes the Third. There are also some figures in the museum at Cairo, which have been sent from Haybee; but they are not the result of organised examination, but of quarrying operations, undertaken for the construction of the sugarfactories on the other side of the river. When we got back to the first tomb we had visited, where we had set a couple of men to dig, we found that they had reached some sarcophagi; but they were too tightly wedged in, and our time was too limited, to render it possible to get at their contents. We afterwards found some mortuary chambers hewn in the rock; and upon the lintel over the entrance of one there was an inscription, but it was too much defaced to be deciphered. What we had

done, however, seemed to Daninos Bey to be sufficiently encouraging to warrant his applying to Monsieur Maspero, director-gen