His predecessors had in reality been merely Pharaohs on sufferance, ruling in the south within the confines of their Theban principality, gaining in power, it is true, with every generation, but never able to attain to the suzerainty of the whole country. They were reckoned in the XVIIth dynasty together with the Hyksos sovereigns of uncontested legitimacy, while their successors were chosen to constitute the XVIIIth, comprising Pharaohs with full powers, tolerating no competitors, and uniting under their firm rule the two regions of which Egypt was composed--the possessions of Sit and the possessions of Horus.* * Manetho, or his abridgers, call the king who drove out the Shepherds Amosis or Tethmosis. Lepsius thought he saw grounds for preferring the second reading, and identified this Tethmosis with Thutmosi Manakhpirri, the ihutmosis III. of our lists; Ahmosis could only have driven out the greater part of the nation. This theory, to which Naville still adheres, as also does Stindorff, was disputed nearly fifty years ago by E. de Rouge; nowadays we are obliged to admit that, subsequent to the Vth year of Ahmosis, there were no longer Shepherd-kings in Egypt, even though a part of the conquering race may have remained in the country in a state of slavery, as we shall soon have occasion to observe. The war of deliverance broke out on the accession of Ahmosis, and continued during the first five years of his reign.* One of his lieutenants, the king's namesake--Ahmosi-si-Abina--who belonged to the family of the lords of Nekhabit, has left us an account, in one of the inscriptions in his tomb, of the numerous exploits in which he took part side by side with his royal master, and thus, thanks to this fortunate record of his vanity, we are not left in complete ignorance of the events which took place during this crucial struggle between the Asiatic settlers and their former subjects. Nekhabit had enjoyed considerable prosperity in the earlier ages of Egyptian history, marking as it did the extreme southern limit of the kingdom, and forming an outpost against the barbarous tribes of Nubia. As soon as the progress of conquest had pushed the frontier as far south as the first cataract, it declined in importance, and the remembrance of its former greatness found an echo only in proverbial expressions or in titles used at the Pharaonic court.* The nomes situated to the south of Thebes, unlike those of Middle Egypt, did not comprise any extensive fertile or well-watered territory calculated to enrich its possessors or to afford sufficient support for a large population: they consisted of long strips of alluvial soil, shut in between the river and the mountain range, but above the level of the inundation, and consequently difficult to irrigate.