* Examples of the subdivision of ancient nomes and the creation of fresh nomes are met with long after primitive times. We find, for example, the nome of the Western Harpoon divided under the Greeks and Romans into two districts--that of the Harpoon proper, of which the chief town was Sonti- nofir; and that of Ranunr, with the Onuphis of classical geographers for its capital. The Greeks called them nomes, and we have borrowed the word from them; the natives named them in several ways, the most ancient term being "nuit," which may be translated _domain_, and the most common appellation in recent times being "hospu," which signifies _district_. The number of the nomes varied considerably in the course of centuries: the hieroglyphic monuments and classical authors fixed them sometimes at thirty-six, sometimes at forty, sometimes at forty-four, or even fifty. The little that we know of their history, up to the present time, explains the reason of this variation. Ceaselessly quarrelled over by the princely families who possessed them, the nomes were alternately humbled and exalted by civil wars, marriages, and conquest, which caused them continually to pass into fresh hands, either entire or divided. The Egyptians, whom we are accustomed to consider as a people respecting the established order of things, and conservative of ancient tradition, showed themselves as restless and as prone to modify or destroy the work of the past, as the most inconstant of our modern nations. The distance of time which separates them from us, and the almost complete absence of documents, gives them an appearance of immobility, by which we are liable to be unconsciously deceived; when the monuments still existing shall have been unearthed, their history will present the same complexity of incidents, the same agitations, the same instability, which we suspect or know to have been characteristic of most other Oriental nations. One thing alone remained stable among them in the midst of so many revolutions, and which prevented them from losing their individuality and from coalescing in a common unity. This was the belief in and the worship of one particular deity. If the little capitals of the petty states whose origin is lost in a remote past--Edfu and Denderah, Nekhabit and Buto, Siufc, Thinis, Khmunu, Sais, Bubastis, Athribis--had only possessed that importance which resulted from the presence of an ambitious petty prince, or from the wealth of their inhabitants, they would never have passed safe and sound through the long centuries of existence which they enjoyed from the opening to the close of Egyptian history. Fortune raised their chiefs, some even to the rank of rulers of the world, and in turn abased them: side by side with the earthly ruler, whose glory was but too often eclipsed, there was enthroned in each nome a divine ruler, a deity, a god of the domain, "nutir nuiti," whose greatness never perished. The princely families