assembled around the Pharaoh; like him they had their palaces at Thebes, and when they died they were anxious to be buried there beside him.** * These symbolical modes of adoption were first pointed out by Maspero. Legend has given examples of them: as, for instance, where Isis fosters the child of Malkander, King of Byblos, by inserting the tip of her finger in its mouth. ** The tomb of a prince of Tobui, the lesser Aphroditopolis, was discovered at Thebes by Maspero. The rock-out tombs of two Thinite princes were noted in the same necropolis. These two were of the time of Thutmosis III. I have remarked in tombs not yet made public the mention of princes of El-Kab, who played an important part about the person of the Pharaohs down to the beginning of the XXth dynasty. Many of the old houses had become extinct, while others, owing to marriages, were absorbed into the royal family; the fiefs conceded to the relations or favourites of the Pharaoh continued to exist, indeed, as of old, but the ancient distrustful and turbulent feudality had given place to an aristocracy of courtiers, who lived oftener in attendance on the monarch than on their own estates, and whose authority continued to diminish to the profit of the absolute rule of the king. There would be nothing astonishing in the "count" becoming nothing more than a governor, hereditary or otherwise, in Thebes itself; he could hardly be anything higher in the capital of the empire.* But the same restriction of authority was evidenced in all the provinces: the recruiting of soldiers, the receipt of taxes, most of the offices associated with the civil or military administration, became more and more affairs of the State, and passed from the hands of the feudal lord into those of the functionaries of the Crown. The few barons who still lived on their estates, while they were thus dispossessed of the greater part of their prerogatives, obtained some compensation, on the other hand, on the side of religion. From early times they had been by birth the heads of the local cults, and their protocol had contained, together with those titles which justified their possession of the temporalities of the nome, others which attributed to them spiritual supremacy. The sacred character with which they were invested became more and more prominent in proportion as their political influence became curtailed, and we find scions of the old warlike families or representatives of a new lineage at Thinis, at Akhmim,** in the nome of Baalu, at Hieraconpolis,*** at El-Kab,**** and in every place where we have information from the monuments as to their position, bestowing more concern upon their sacerdotal than on their other duties.