Menes united these into one kingdom, but they were separated for a time again, under later kings, and this shows that not only were the Egyptians sometimes at war with the tribes from the deserts, who invaded them, but also that the people along the river-banks were sometimes fighting among themselves. By a dynasty is meant both the king who is the founder, the first, of that dynasty, and also those of his children and grandchildren, or relatives, who followed him on the throne. It is as we may speak of the Stuart dynasty or the Hanover dynasty, of our own kings. When there were no more relations of a dynasty to come to the throne, or when one king was conquered by a foreign invader, or by a revolution of his own subjects, the next king was called the founder of a new dynasty, which went on till his family also died out or was turned out. In the long history of Egypt, from the time of Menes, the founder of the first dynasty, to the conquest of Egypt by Alexander of Macedon in 332 B.C.--that is, 332 years before the birth of Christ--there were thirty-one of these dynasties, or kingly families, which ruled Egypt one after the other. We speak of the rulers of all these dynasties as kings, but it is evident that they did not all have the same authority over their subjects. In our own history we know that sometimes the barons were very powerful, and the king of England had great difficulty in keeping them under his rule. Something of the same kind happened at various times in Egypt. There were local chiefs, with a large following of men, who {23} were nearly independent of the actual king. But in the end the kings regained the authority over them. [Sidenote: The new empire] The capital city, in the earliest times, was Memphis, in Lower Egypt, and so it remained until the ninth and tenth dynasties, when the power of the Memphis kings was overthrown by conquerors from the north, and the country was distracted by revolutions, so far as we can learn, for a long period. Then a people called the Hyksos, coming from the north-east, from Syria, invaded Egypt and established their power there for many generations. And then came a new dynasty, which is thought to have arisen from a combining together of the chief men in Upper Egypt, of which Thebes was the capital. This rising drove out the foreign Hyksos and gave a military strength to Egypt which it never had before. The greatest king of this the greatest period of Egypt in the old days was Tethmosis III. He was a stepson of Hatshepsut, the wife of his father Tethmosis II., and Hatshepsut herself ruled as queen until Tethmosis came of age. That was in, or about, 1500 B.C.