Behind these classes, which, so to speak, formed the backbone of the nation, came the shepherds, hunters, artificers, traders, and workers at other subsidiary occupations. These held no land, and their occupations appear to have been mainly hereditary, no artisan being allowed to pass from one trade to another, or to have his children reckoned in any other class than his own. The various trades must have been organised more or less after the plan of the mediæval trade-guilds, though in the case of Egypt the organisation was apparently a national, and not a local affair. Beneath the tradesmen came the slave class, whose number varied pretty much according to the wars on which the nation was engaged, and their fruitfulness, or the opposite, in yielding captives. Slave labour was never a prominent feature of Egyptian life, and Petrie estimates the slave population of the land at its maximum at no more than a quarter of a million out of a possible population of twelve millions. To the imagination of most folk probably the mention of “Pharaoh, King of Egypt,” suggests a typical Oriental tyrant, responsible to nothing but his own passions, and governing according to the whim of the moment. Such a picture may have been true of an Assyrian or Babylonian king, like Ashurbanipal or Nebuchadnezzar, and perhaps the frequency of assassination in the records of the Assyrian kings hints that it was; but it certainly was not true of ancient Egypt. Pharaoh’s own grandiose inscriptions, and the fiction which regarded him as a god incarnate, may suggest unbridled power; but as a matter of fact, Pharaoh was anything but the rampant and romantic despot whom we imagine distributing life and death at his own capricious will, but rather a somewhat humdrum constitutional monarch, whose every action was regulated for him centuries before he was born, by an unchanging custom, and who could no more step beyond the limits which immemorial laws had assigned to him than he could jump out of his skin, or off his own shadow. The thing which amazed the Greeks, with their experience of irresponsible tyrants, was the fact that so great a king as Pharaoh was not the master, but the servant of the laws. “He could not do any public business, condemn or punish any man to gratify his own humour or revenge, or for any other unjust cause; but was bound to do according as the laws had ordered in every particular case.... The kings, therefore, carrying this even hand towards all their subjects, were more beloved by them than by their own kindred.”