Not that he had not his own power, and his own initiative. His headship of the State involved headship of the army in war, and this was no polite fiction, where Pharaoh reaped the glory while his soldiers had the danger. Seqenen-Ra’s mummy, with its ghastly wounds on head and face, tells us how real was the duty of Egyptian royalty in the day of battle. Thothmes III led the van of his army through the defile of Aaruna, when his chosen captains shirked the task, and though we need not believe all that Ramses II tells us about his share in the battle of Kadesh, there is no doubt that he fought hand to hand with the Hittites in the forefront of the battle, and at least proved himself a good trooper, whatever may be thought of his generalship. Much power also lay in his hands in respect of the selection and advancement of able men from the lower to the higher ranks of the public service, and of rewarding their work with grants of land, of initiating the great public works which were often of such untold benefit to the land, and of conducting the Foreign-Office business of the country, and the negotiation of treaties. In short, Pharaoh had no lack of work to do, and was probably like his modern successors in Kingship, one of the hardest-worked men in the land; but from start to finish, the Egyptian monarchy was a limited one. Two instances of the limitation of the royal power, and its strict subjection to law, may be given. When Queen Amtes was tried, in the reign of Pepy I of the VIth Dynasty, for some unspecified offence, the trial was conducted without even the presence of the king. “His Majesty,” says Una in his famous inscription, “caused me to enter in order to hear the case alone. No chief judge and vizier at all, no prince at all was there, but only I alone, because I was excellent, because I was pleasant to the heart of His Majesty.” Again, in the time of King Ramses III of the XXth Dynasty, there was a great palace conspiracy arising out of an intrigue in the harem to dethrone Ramses, and put the son of one of the harem ladies on the throne. In most other Oriental palaces the discovery of such a thing would have been the signal for a general massacre. Instead of executing summary justice, Ramses appointed a commission, giving them these remarkable instructions: “What the people have spoken, I do not know. Hasten to investigate it. You will go and question them, and those who must die, you will cause to die by their own hand, without my knowing anything of it. You will also cause the punishment awarded to the others to be carried out without my knowing anything of it.”