It is characteristic of the all-absorbing power of the monarchy in Egypt that tradition can scarcely mention a single eminent person beside the names of the kings. We hear nothing of generals or statesmen, and scarcely of priests. All stood in equal subjection to the king. Though families may have at one time arisen from the nation, which were in a position, from wealth and inclination, to undertake the defence of the valley of the Nile against the tribes of the desert, and though the monarchy may have arisen out of the ranks of this military nobility, which in bygone times united the valley of the Nile into a kingdom, still, so far as the monuments allow us to see, there is no trace left of the eminent position of any nobility, whether military or hereditary. The military order, as presented to us on the monuments, and by the tradition of the Greeks, no longer consisted of wealthy landowners who went to war at the bidding of the king with their chariots and horses and retainers; they are merely soldiers--families, who for a certain portion of land given to them by the state are pledged to service in war, and who receive their weapons from the armouries of the state. Such are the warriors on the monuments even in the times of the Amenemha and Sesurtesen, and also under Ramses III. Herodotus tells us that each family of warriors possessed twelve measures of good land, free of taxes, the measure being 100 Egyptian cubits in length and breadth. This would make the allotment more than twelve acres. These families, according to Herodotus, could, even about the middle of the fifth century B.C., put in the field 400,000 men, although two hundred years before, under Psammetichus I., a large number of them, it is said more than 200,000, migrated into Ethiopia. The military order was divided into two classes: the Hermotybians, numbering at most 160,000 men, and the Kalasirians, about 250,000 strong. In the time of Herodotus, the first were settled in Upper Egypt in the province of Chemmis, and mainly in the western Delta; the Kalasirians were in the province of Thebes, and in the central and eastern Delta.[258] Each division furnished yearly 1,000 men for the bodyguard of the king, who were handsomely provided for, and the garrisons in the border towns and strongholds, which were also relieved year by year. From the masses of the two divisions so many may have been told off for field duty as were considered necessary. From the numbers which Herodotus gives it is not impossible that the armies of Sethos and Ramses II., when all the soldiers were called out, were, if not 700,000, yet from 400,000 to 500,000 strong. Under Ptolemy Philadelphus (285-247 B.C.) the army of Egypt was estimated at 240,000 men.