[Illustration: 092.jpg A GREAT EGYPTIAN LORD, TI, AND HIS WIFE. 1] 1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Dumichen, _Resultate_, vol. ii. pl. vit The country was divided among communities, whose members were supposed to be descended from the same seed (_pait_) and to belong to the same family (_paitu_): the chiefs of them were called _ropaitu_, the guardians, or pastors of the family, and in later times their name became a title applicable to the nobility in general. Families combined and formed groups of various importance under the authority of a head chief--_ropaitu-ha_. They were, in fact, hereditary lords, dispensing justice, levying taxes in kind on their subordinates, reserving to themselves the redistribution of land, leading their men to, battle, and sacrificing to the gods.[*] The territories over which they exercised authority formed small states, whose boundaries even now, in some places, can be pointed out with certainty. The principality of the Terebinth[**] occupied the very heart of Egypt, where the valley is widest, and the course of the Nile most advantageously disposed by nature--a country well suited to be the cradle of an infant civilization. Siaut (Siut), the capital, is built almost at the foot of the Libyan range, on a strip of land barely a mile in width, which separates the river from the hills. A canal surrounds it on three sides, and makes, as it were, a natural ditch about its walls; during the inundation it is connected with the mainland only by narrow causeways--shaded with mimosas--and looking like a raft of verdure aground in the current.[***] * These prerogatives were still exercised by the princes of the nomes under the Middle and New Empires; they only enjoyed them then by the good will of the reigning sovereign. ** The Egyptian word for the tree which gives its name to this principality is _atf, iatf, iotf_: it is only by a process of elimination that I have come to identify it with the _Pistacia Terebinthus_, L., which furnished the Egyptians with the scented resin _snutir_. *** Boudier's drawing, reproduced on p. 31, and taken from a photograph by Beato, gives most faithfully the aspect presented by the plain and the modern town of Siout during the inundation. [Illustration: 094.jpg NOMES OF MIDDLE EGYPT] The site is as happy as it is picturesque; not only does the town command the two arms of the river, opening or closing the waterway at will, but from time immemorial the most frequented of the routes into Central Africa has terminated at its gates, bringing to it the commerce of the Soudan. It held sway, at the outset, over both banks, from range to range, northward as far as Deyrut, where the true Bahr Yusuf leaves the Nile, and southward to the neighbourhood of Gebel Sheikh Haridi. The extent and original number of the other principalities is not so easily determined.