One room, a few feet square, and, if need be, one safe, would easily contain the entire revenue of one of our modern empires: the largest of our emporiums would not always have sufficed to hold the mass of incongruous objects which represented the returns of a single Egyptian province. As the products in which the tax was paid took various forms, it was necessary to have an infinite variety of special agents and suitable places to receive it; herdsmen and sheds for the oxen, measurers and granaries for the grain, butlers and cellarers for the wine, beer, and oils. The product of the tax, while awaiting redistribution, could only be kept from deteriorating in value by incessant labour, in which a score of different classes of clerks and workmen in the service of the treasury all took part, according to their trades. If the tax were received in oxen, it was led to pasturage, or at times, when a murrain threatened to destroy it, to the slaughter-house and the currier; if it were in corn, it was bolted, ground to flour, and made into bread and pastry; if it were in stuffs, it was washed, ironed, and folded, to be retailed as garments or in the piece. The royal treasury partook of the character of the farm, the warehouse, and the manufactory. Each of the departments which helped to swell its contents, occupied within the palace enclosure a building, or group of buildings, which was called its “house,” or, as we should say, its storehouse. [Illustration: 059.jpg THE PACKING OF THE LINEN AND ITS REMOVAL TO THE WHITE STOREHOUSE.] Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a chromolithograph in Lepsius, _Denhm._, ii. 96. There was the “White Storehouse,” where the stuffs and jewels were kept, and at times the wine; the “Storehouse of the Oxen,” the “Gold Storehouse,” the “Storehouse for Preserved Fruits,” the “Storehouse for Grain,” the “Storehouse for Liquors,” and ten other storehouses of the application of which we are not always sure. In the “Storehouse of Weapons” (or Armoury) were ranged thousands of clubs, maces, pikes, daggers, bows, and bundles of arrows, which Pharaoh distributed to his recruits whenever a war forced him to call out his army, and which were again warehoused after the campaign. The “storehouses” were further subdivided into rooms or store-chambers,* each reserved for its own category of objects.