this spot belong to a temple dedicated by this king to Ammon (Lepsius, "Reisebriefe," s. 238); next come the ruins of the buildings of Thirhaka, which differ as little from Egyptian buildings as those which he and his two Ethiopian predecessors erected in Egypt. Moreover, the later ruins found at Napata, especially some twenty small pyramids, are feeble imitations of Egyptian art. The same character of imitation is stamped upon the monuments of Begerauieh, though here it is mingled with foreign elements. This place, further removed from Egypt, and therefore more secure, was beyond doubt the residence of the kings of Meroe, at least from the time of Cambyses, and it was named after the country. Herodotus points out that Zeus and Dionysus, _i.e._ Osiris, were worshipped here, and that the oracle of Zeus, _i.e._ of Ammon, extended its authority over the Ethiopians: the further accounts which Diodorus preserves of this priesthood give a poor idea of their cultivation (3, 3 ff. Strabo, pp. 827, 828). At the time of the second Ptolemy, this priesthood was destroyed by the King, Ergamenes, whose name (Arkamen) Lepsius has discovered on ruins at Mt. Barkal, as well as Begerauieh, and an independent monarchy was established. Hence we must entirely give up the idea of deriving the supposed supremacy of the priesthood in Egypt, a supremacy which never existed here, from the priesthood formed at Begerauieh after the time of Thirhaka and Psammetichus (in the days of Psammetichus, Herodotus tells us that a king of the Ethiopians received strangers without an oracle, and gave them land, 2, 30); that is, in the sixth century B.C., which continued to exist till 250 B.C. Still less reason is there to suppose that the so-called Indian supremacy of the priesthood came through Meroe into Egypt. Rather we may feel ourselves justified in assuming that the elements of civilisation which took root on the middle Nile passed from Egypt to that district. In the inscriptions of Begerauieh the name Meroe occurs as Meru, and Merua, _i.e._ "White rock"; Lepsius, _l. c._ 205-232. As the banks of the Nile, here and also at Mt. Barkal, consist of whitish-yellow chalk rocks, the name of the land and its southern metropolis, of which the existence since the sixth century B.C. is demonstrated, may have been named from this peculiarity of the land. CHAPTER II. THE ANTIQUITY OF THE CIVILISATION IN THE VALLEY OF THE NILE.