Such an assertion is easily made. _Hieratic_ is one of those convenient adjectives whose vagueness discourages critical examination. What evidence is there that ancient Egypt was ever a theocracy, in the proper sense of the word? Only once, during so many centuries, did the Egyptian priests attempt to encroach upon the privileges of the king. Towards the close of the twentieth dynasty the prophets of Amen, at Thebes, tried hard to substitute their own authority for that of the last of the Rameses,[297] but the success of their usurpation was very shortlived. In Ethiopia alone, among a people much less highly civilized, sacerdotalism seems to have acquired an uncontested pre-eminence. In Egypt the king was always the first of the priests. With the help of an army of scribes and officials he governed the country and made war; he initiated and carried on great public works; he developed the industry and commerce of his subjects. Trade and conquest brought him into relation with surrounding peoples, and from them he recruited his armies and obtained agents of every kind. [297] MASPERO, _Histoire Ancienne_, p. 272. The active and warlike heads of a great empire like this were never the slaves of a despotic clergy. Such a society never allowed the mechanical reproduction of orthodox types to be forced upon its artists, until, indeed, its final decadence deprived it of all power to invent new forms. We have seen how great was the variety of plan and decoration in Egyptian religious architecture, from the marked simplicity of the temple near the sphinx, to the sumptuous majesty of the Theban buildings and the elegance of those of Sais. The style and taste of Egyptian sculpture underwent a change at each renascence of art. Why, then, did its practitioners remain faithful to certain conventional methods of interpretation, whose falsity they must have perceived, while they modified their work in so many other particulars? No text has ever been put before us, I will not say from a Greek, but from an Egyptian source, which suggests that their hands were less free from religious prescription than those of the architects.