Whole tribes of slaves were brought into the country by means of the border raids which were always taking place, and their opportune arrival helped to fill up the vacancies which repeated wars had caused among the rural and urban population; such a strong impetus to agriculture was also given by this importation, that when, towards the middle of the reign, the minister Khamhaifc presented the tax-gathers at court, he was able to boast that he had stored in the State granaries a larger quantity of corn than had been gathered in for thirty years. The traffic carried on between Asia and the Delta by means of both Egyptian and foreign ships was controlled by customhouses erected at the mouths of the Nile, the coast being protected by cruising vessels against the attacks of pirates. The fortresses of the isthmus and of the Libyan border, having been restored or rebuilt, constituted a check on the turbulence of the nomad tribes, while garrisons posted at intervals at the entrance to the Wadys leading to the desert restrained the plunderers scattered between the Nile and the Red Sea, and between the chain of Oases and the unexplored regions of the Sahara.* Egypt was at once the most powerful as well as the most prosperous kingdom in the world, being able to command more labour and more precious metals for the embellishment of her towns and the construction of her monuments than any other. All this information is gathered from the inscription on the statue of Amenothes, the son of Hapi. Public works had been carried on briskly under Thutmosis III. and his successors. The taste for building, thwarted at first by the necessity of financial reforms, and then by that of defraying the heavy expenses incurred through the expulsion of the Hyksos and the earlier foreign wars, had free scope as soon as spoil from the Syrian victories began to pour in year by year. While the treasure seized from the enemy provided the money, the majority of the prisoners were used as workmen, so that temples, palaces, and citadels began to rise as if by magic from one end of the valley to the other.* * For this use of prisoners of war, cf. the picture from the tomb of Rakhmiri on p. 58 of the present work, in which most of the earlier Egyptologists believed they recognised the Hebrews, condemned by Pharaoh to build the cities of Ramses and Pithom in the Delta. Nubia, divided into provinces, formed merely an extension of the ancient feudal Egypt--at any rate as far as the neighbourhood of the Tacazzeh--though the Egyptian religion had here assumed a peculiar character. [Illustration: 058.jpg A GANG Of SYRIAN PRISONERS MAKING BRICK FOR THE TEMPLE OF AMON] Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the chromolithograph in Lepsius.