[247] Lepsius, "Briefe," s. 288. [248] Brugsch, "Hist. d'Egypte," p. 128. [249] Lepsius, "Briefe," s. 266; Rosellini, "Mon. Stor." 3, 2, 284. [250] Bunsen, "Ægypten," 4, 213. [251] On the sketch of this tomb on a Turin papyrus, cf. Lepsius, "Abh. der Berl. Akad." 1867. CHAPTER VIII. LIFE AND MANNERS OF THE EGYPTIANS. We have already called attention to the peculiar features in the position and nature of their country which favoured the development of the Egyptians. The shape of the land, so conducive to unity, must have led at an early time to a community of life; the protection of this favoured valley against the plundering tribes of the desert must have called into existence a military monarchy. But it is no longer in the form of a patriarchal rule or military chieftainship that the monuments and tradition display the government of Egypt. It is the form of despotism peculiar to the East, which meets us at the threshold of history, meets us, too, in a very sharply-defined form. Herodotus says that the Egyptians could not have lived without a king, and Diodorus tells us that the Egyptians worshipped their kings, and prostrated themselves before them as though they were really gods. Of men who could confer such great blessings as their kings the Egyptians assumed that they partook of the nature of gods.[252] As a fact, we see on the monuments not only the commanders and magistrates of the districts, but even the priests, in the dust before the kings. It is true that it was the universal custom in the East to approach the ruler kneeling, as one on whose nod depended the life and death of every subject at every moment of his existence; but the Egyptians, led by their peculiar religious views, have gone further than any other nation in the exaltation of the power of the monarch; they worshipped their kings as the deities of the land. As in the beginning, according to the teaching of the priests, the gods ruled over Egypt, so in subsequent times the Pharaohs occupy the place of the gods. They do not merely spring from the gods; they are themselves gods of the land. They are not only called children of the sun; but to their subjects they are the "sun itself, which is given to the world," which beams over the land and gives blessing and increase; they are the "outpourers of life," like the gods. Like the gods, they are lords of truth and justice; they preserve order, punish the bad, and reward the good, and keep away the unclean enemies; through their care it is that their subjects share in the fruits of the earth, hence they cause Egypt to live. The king of Egypt is called, and is, "the mighty Horus," the god who gives blessing to the land. If to the Egyptians animals and men were the manifestations of the divine nature, must they not recognise such manifestations in peculiar potency in the life of the king, in the ruling, arranging, and sustaining power of the king over the whole land? This conception of the king as a god on