Amenemhâît I. had abandoned Thebes as a residence in favour of Heracleopolis and Memphis, and had made it over to some personage who probably belonged to the royal household. The nome of Ûisît had relapsed into the condition of a simple fief, and if we are as yet unable to establish the series of the princes who there succeeded each other contemporaneously with the Pharaohs, we at least know that all those whose names have come down to us played an important part in the history of their times. Montûnsîsû, whose stele was engraved in the XXIVth year of Amenemhâît I., and who died in the joint reign of this Pharaoh and his son Usirtasen I., had taken his share in most of the wars conducted against neighbouring peoples,--the Anîtiû of Nubia, the Monîtû of Sinai, and the “Lords of the Sands:” he had dismantled their cities and razed their fortresses. The principality retained no doubt the same boundaries which it had acquired under the first Antûfs, but Thebes itself grew daily larger, and gained in importance in proportion as its frontiers extended southward. It had become, after the conquests of Usirtasen III., the very centre of the Egyptian world--a centre from which the power of the Pharaoh could equally well extend in a northerly direction towards the Sinaitic Peninsula and Libya, or towards the Red Sea and the “humiliated Kûsh” in the south. The influence of its lords increased accordingly: under Amenemhâît III. and Amenemhâît IV. they were perhaps the most powerful of the great vassals, and when the crown slipped from the grasp of the XIIth dynasty, it fell into the hands of one of these feudatories. It is not known how the transition was brought about which transferred the sovereignty from the elder to the younger branch of the family of Amenemhâît I. When Amenemhâît IV. died, his nearest heir was a woman, his sister Sovkûnofriûrî: she retained the supreme authority for not quite four years,* and then resigned her position to a certain Sovkhotpû.** * She reigned exactly three years, ten months, and eighteen days, according to the fragments of the “Royal Canon of Turin” (Lepsius, Auswahl der wichtigten Urkunden, pl. v. col. vii. 1. 2).