The revival of the monarchy, first under the Antefs and Mentuhoteps of the XIth Dynasty, and then under the Senuserts and Amenemhats of the XIIth Dynasty, however, soon curbed the pretensions of these petty princelets, and the changes of the Hyksos invasion and the War of Independence wiped out the last relics of the Egyptian feudal system, which never revived under the New Empire. Even under strong kings like the Pharaohs of the Middle Kingdom, the courts of the local nomarchs were no small things, as they might employ anything from fifty to a hundred officials, from the steward down to the “mat-spreader.” [Illustration: 28. Vth DYNASTY RELIEF-WORK, TOMB OF PTAH-HETEP.] Tomb-inscriptions are not perhaps the most trustworthy sources as to the personal character of a class of men, nor are we to expect that Ameny or Khnemhotep will tell us anything of the shady side of their administration. Yet it must be confessed that Ameny’s story of his administration of the Oryx Nome gives a pleasant picture of the relations of a great local noble and official to the people of his province; and we may say that if Egypt in the time of the Middle Kingdom had many nomarchs of his stamp, she was a fortunate land. “There was no citizen’s daughter whom I misused,” says the great man, “there was no widow whom I oppressed, there was no peasant whom I repulsed, there was no shepherd whom I repelled, there was not a foreman of five from whom I took his men for forced work. There was not a pauper around me; there was not a hungry man of my time. When there came years of famine, I arose, I ploughed all the fields of the Oryx Nome to its southern and its northern boundary, I kept its inhabitants alive, making provision so that there was not a hungry man in it. I gave to the widow as to her that possessed a husband; nor did I exalt the great above the small in all that I gave. Thereafter great rises of the Nile took place, producing wheat and barley and all things; but I did not exact the arrears of the farm.” “I gave bread to the hungry,” says another noble, “and clothes to the naked, and gave a passage in my own boat to those who could not cross. I was a father to the orphan, a husband to the widow, a protection from the wind to the shivering; I am one who spake what was good, and related what was good. I acquired my possessions in a just manner.” All this may savour a little of Pharisaic self-righteousness to us; but at least it shows that there was a recognised idea, among the governing class, of the duties which a great man owed to those under him, and the possession of such an ideal must have made bad government more difficult.