And yet there had been a time when Herakleopolis was the capital of Egypt. The ninth and tenth dynasties sprang from it, and the authority of the tenth dynasty, at all events, was, as we now know, acknowledged as far as the Cataract. Professor Maspero and Mr. Griffith have shown that three of the tombs in the hill behind Assiout (Nos. III., IV., and V.) belong to that age. Hollowed out of the rock, high up in the cliff above the tombs of the twelfth dynasty, their mutilated inscriptions tell us of the ancient feudal lords of the nome, Tef-aba and his son Khiti, the latter of whom won battles for his master, the Pharaoh Mer-ka-Ra. Thebes was in open rebellion; so also was Herakleopolis itself, the home of the Pharaoh’s family, and Khiti provided ships and soldiers in abundance for him. The fleet filled the Nile from Gebel Abu Foda on the north to Shotb on the south, and the forces of the rebels were annihilated. For awhile the authority of the Pharaoh was restored; but the power of the Theban princes remained unshaken, and a time came when the Thebans of the eleventh dynasty succeeded to the heritage of the Herakleopolites of the tenth. Who the “blind” king of Anysis may have been we do not know. But he was certainly not the legitimate Pharaoh, although Herakleopolite vanity may have wished him to be thought so. According to Manetho, the Tanites of the twenty-third dynasty were followed by the twenty-fourth dynasty, consisting of a single Saite, Bokkhoris, whom the monuments call Bak-n-ran-f. Bokkhoris is said to have been burnt alive by his conqueror Sabako. In making the latter reign for fifty years, Herodotos has confused the founder of the dynasty with the dynasty itself. The length of his reign is variously given by the two copyists of Manetho—Africanus and Eusebius—as eight and twelve years; the last cypher can alone be the right one, as an inscription at the gold mines of Hammamât mentions his twelfth year. He was followed by two other Ethiopian kings, the second of whom was Tirhakah, and the whole length of the dynasty seems to have been fifty-two years. The Christian copyists, indeed, with their customary endeavour to reduce the chronology of the Egyptian historian, make it only forty and forty-four years; but the monuments show that Herodotos, with his round half century, is nearer the truth. From a topographical point of view the introduction of Sabako and the Ethiopian between Ahnas and the Fayyûm is out of place. But the story told to Herodotos prevented him from doing otherwise. The blind king is said to have fled to the marshes of the Delta, and there to have remained in concealment until the end of the Ethiopian rule, when he was once more acknowledged as Pharaoh. The legend of Sabako is thus only an episode in the history of the Herakleopolite prince.