The consequences of this last Ethiopian invasion of Egypt appear to have been transient. Mi-Ammon-Nut did not live very long to enjoy his conquest, and in Egypt he had no successor. He was not even recognized by the Egyptians among their legitimate kings. Egypt at his death reverted to her previous position of dependence upon Assyria, feeling herself still too weak to stand alone, and perhaps not greatly caring, so that she had peace, which of the two great powers she acknowledged as her suzerain. She had now (about B.C. 650) for above twenty years been fought over by the two chief kingdoms of the earth--each of them had traversed with huge armies, as many as five or six times, the Nile valley from one extremity to the other; the cities had been half ruined, harvest after harvest destroyed, trees cut down, temples rifled, homesteads burnt, villas plundered. Thebes, the Hundred-gated, probably for many ages quite the most magnificent city in the world, had become a by-word for desolation (Nahum iii. 8, 9); Memphis, Heliopolis, Tanis, Saïs, Mendes, Bubastis, Heracleopolis, Hermopolis; Crocodilopolis, had been taken and retaken repeatedly; the old buildings and monuments had been allowed to fall into decay; no king had been firmly enough established on his throne to undertake the erection of any but insignificant new ones. Egypt was "fallen, fallen, fallen--fallen from her high estate;" an apathy, not unlike the stillness of death, brooded over her; literature was silent, art extinct; hope of recovery can scarcely have lingered in many bosoms. As events proved, the vital spark was not actually fled; but the keenest observer would scarcely have ventured to predict, at any time between B.C. 750 and B.C. 650, such a revival as marked the period between B.C. 650 and B.C. 530. XXII. THE CORPSE COMES TO LIFE AGAIN--PSAMATIK I. AND HIS SON NECO.