In our day it is almost impossible to imagine the extraordinary rôle which the priests played in Egypt. They were instructors of rising generations, also soothsayers, hence the advisers of mature people, judges of the dead, to whom their will and their knowledge guaranteed immortality. They not only performed the minute ceremonies of religion for the gods and the pharaohs, but they healed the sick as physicians, they influenced the course of public works as engineers, and also politics as astrologers, but above all they knew their own country and its neighbors. In Egyptian history the first place is occupied by the relations which existed between the priests and the pharaohs. Most frequently the pharaoh laid rich offerings before the gods and built temples. Then he lived long, and his name, with his images cut out on monuments, passed from generation to generation, full of glory. But many pharaohs reigned for a short period only, and of some not merely the deeds, but the names disappeared from record. A couple of times it happened that a dynasty fell, and straightway the cap of the pharaohs, encircled with a serpent, was taken by a priest. Egypt continued to develop while a people of one composition, energetic kings, and wise priests co-operated for the common weal. But a time came when the people, in consequence of wars, decreased in number and lost their strength through oppression and extortion; the intrusion of foreign elements at this period undermined Egyptian race unity. And when the energy of pharaohs and the wisdom of priests sank in the flood of Asiatic luxury, and these two powers began to struggle with each other for undivided authority to plunder the toiling people, then Egypt fell under foreign control, and the light of civilized life, which had burnt on the Nile for millenniums, was extinguished. The following narrative relates to the eleventh century before Christ, when the twentieth dynasty fell, and after the offspring of the sun, the eternally living Rameses XIII., San-Amen-Herhor, the high priest of Amon and ever-living offspring of the sun, forced his way to the throne and adorned his head with the ureus. CHAPTER I In the thirty-third year of the happy reign of Rameses XII., Egypt celebrated two festivals which filled all its faithful inhabitants with pride and delight. In the month of Mechir--that is, during January--the god Khonsu returned to Thebes covered with costly gifts. For three years and nine months he had travelled in the country of Buchten, where he restored health to the king's daughter, Bentres, and expelled an evil spirit not only from the royal family, but even from the fortress. So in the month Farmuti (February) Mer-Amen-Rameses XII., the lord of Upper and Lower Egypt, the ruler of Phœnicia and nine nations, after consultation with the gods to whom he was equal, named as erpatr, or heir to the throne, his son, aged twenty years, Cham-Sem-Merer-Amen-Rameses.