beasts, and the administration of justice; while the other preferred to confine himself to the _rôle_ of adviser or benevolent counsellor. Even this precaution, however, was insufficient to prevent disasters. The women of the seraglio, encouraged from without by their relations or friends, plotted secretly for the removal of the irksome sovereign.* Those princes who had been deprived by their father’s decision of any legitimate hope of reigning, concealed their discontent to no purpose; they were arrested on the first suspicion of disloyalty, and were massacred wholesale; their only chance of escaping summary execution was either by rebellion** or by taking refuge with some independent tribe of Libya or of the desert of Sinai. * The passage of the Uni inscription, in which mention is made of a lawsuit carried on against Queen Amîtsi, probably refers to some harem conspiracy. The celebrated lawsuit, some details of which are preserved for us in a papyrus of Turin, gives us some information in regard to a conspiracy which was hatched in the harem against Ramses II. ** A passage in the “Instructions of Amenemhâît” describes in somewhat obscure terms an attack on the palace by conspirators, and the wars which followed their undertaking. [Illustration: 044.jpg The Island and Temple of Philæ] Did we but know the details of the internal history of Egypt, it would appear to us as stormy and as bloody as that of other Oriental empires: intrigues of the harem, conspiracies in the palace, murders of heirs-apparent, divisions and rebellions in the royal family, were the almost inevitable accompaniment of every accession to the Egyptian throne.