Here the shepherds or pastors made their predatory incursions, and conquered and subjected Lower Egypt; here the children of Israel began their exodus; and here, also, the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans found an easy portal for their hostile invasion. Eight miles away from Cairo, in the midst of a plot of sugar-cane, verdant with the luxuriance of its foliage, there stands forth against the sky a magnificent obelisk, the first that we have yet seen implanted on the spot where it was erected by its artificers. This obelisk bears the cartouche of Usertesen I.[19] (a Pharaoh of the twelfth dynasty, who ascended the throne 1,740 years before the Christian era), engraven on its face. It is not only the earliest and most ancient of all known obelisks, but it may be said to be the first page of the monumental history of Egypt: antecedent to it there is no record of monuments, save the pyramids and some ruined temples and tombs; but coeval with it, and illustrating the reign and acts of Usertesen, are the tombs of Beni Hassan, and the sanctuary, with its beautiful polygonal columns at Karnak, built by Usertesen himself. [19] In hieroglyphic writing the vowels are generally omitted, and a license is thereby given to insert them according to the taste or judgment of the translator: thus, if we assume the consonants s, r, ts, n, to represent a name, that name may be variously written, Usertesen, Ousertesen, Osertesen, Osirtasen, Osortasen, and so forth; and so much difference of opinion on this matter would seem to prevail among Egyptologists, that scarcely two can be found to precisely agree; and the same remark applies to other proper names:—for example, Thothmes, Thoutmes, Thothmosis; and Rameses, Ramses, Remeses, Ramisis, &c. Under these circumstances we have thought well to adopt the names sanctioned by the great British authority on Egyptology, Dr. Birch, of the British Museum. [Illustration: The obelisk of Usertesen at Heliopolis, the most ancient obelisk in existence. In the background may be seen the Mokattan range of mountains, the barrier between the valley of Egypt and the Red Sea. ] The cartouches of Usertesen, as seen on the obelisk, represent his first and second names: the former, which implies divinity, consists of the sun’s disk, a scarabæus, and a pair of human arms; and the oval is surmounted with two figures—a shoot of a plant and a bee, each supported on a hemisphere. These latter are royal titles, and imply the dominion of the king, or sun, over the south and the north, in addition to that part of the globe which is embraced by his own proper path, from east to west. The second oval contains the letters which constitute the word “Usertesen,” and is surmounted by a disk representing the sun and a goose, the latter being the hieroglyph for “son,” therefore, “son of the sun.” So that the entire emblem may be supposed to read thus:—“The king; born and being of the sun; son of the sun; Usertesen.”