The whole country is naturally divided into three parts――Upper Egypt, bordering on what was anciently Ethiopia; Middle Egypt; and Lower Egypt, including the Delta of the Nile. In each there were numerous cities in which the population was amassed: originally Thebes, a city of Upper Egypt, of the size of which surprising accounts are transmitted to us, and whose ruins still astonish the traveler, was the capital of the country; but latterly, as commerce increased, Memphis in Middle Egypt became the seat of power. After Thebes and Memphis, Ombi, Edfou, Esneh, Elephantina, and Philoe seem to have been the most important of the Egyptian cities. Our accounts of the Egyptian civilization are derived chiefly from the Greek historian Herodotus (B. C. 408), who visited Egypt and digested the information which he received from the priests as to its ancient history; and Manetho, a native Egyptian of later times, who wrote in Greek. From their accounts it is inferred that the country was anciently divided into thirty-six sections or provinces called _nomes_――ten in Upper, sixteen in Middle, and ten in Lower Egypt. ‘Many of the separate nomes were of considerable substantive importance, and had a marked local character each to itself, religious as well as political; though the whole of Egypt, from Elephantine to Pelusium and Kanopus, is said to have always constituted one kingdom.’ Of this kingdom, the population, according to a rough estimate, may have been about seven millions. The government was a monarchy based on an all-powerful priesthood, similar to the Brahminical system of India; and, as in India, the most striking feature in the Egyptian society was the division of the people into hereditary castes. ‘The population of Egypt,’ says Mr Grote in his History of Greece, ‘was classified into certain castes or hereditary professions, of which the number is represented differently by different authors. The priests stand clearly marked out as the order richest, most powerful, and most venerated, distributed all over the country, and possessing exclusively the means of reading and writing, besides a vast amount of narrative matter treasured up in the memory, the whole stock of medical and physical knowledge then attainable, and those rudiments of geometry (or rather land-measuring) which were so often called into use in a country annually inundated. To each god and to each temple throughout Egypt, lands and other properties belonged, whereby the numerous band of priests attached to him were maintained. Their ascendancy, both direct and indirect, over the minds of the people was immense; they prescribed that minute ritual under which the life of every Egyptian, not excepting the king himself, was passed, and which was for themselves more full of harassing particularities than for any one else. Every day in the year belonged to some particular god, and the priests alone knew to which. There were different gods in every