which the Roman strangers did homage to the emperor, are said to have excited great admiration. Egyptian merchants brought to the king of the Axomites (Habesh) as standing presents gold and silver vessels prepared after the fashion of that country, to the civilised rulers of the South-Arabian and Indian coast among other gifts also statues, probably of bronze, and musical instruments. On the other hand the materials for the manufacture of luxuries which came from the East, especially ivory and tortoise-shell, were worked up hardly perhaps in Egypt, chiefly, in all probability, at Rome. Lastly, at an epoch, which never had its match in the West for magnificent public buildings, the costly building materials supplied by the Egyptian quarries came to be employed in enormous masses outside of Egypt; the beautiful red granite of Syene, the green breccia from the region of Kosêr, the basalt, the alabaster, after the time of Claudius the gray granite, and especially the porphyry of the mountains above Myos Hormos. The working of them was certainly effected for the most part on imperial account by penal colonists; but the transport at least must have gone to benefit the whole country and particularly the city of Alexandria. The extent to which Egyptian traffic and Egyptian manufactures were developed is shown by an accidentally-preserved notice as to the cargo of a transport ship (ἄκατος), distinguished by its size, which under Augustus brought to Rome the obelisk now standing at the Porta del Popolo with its base; it carried, besides 200 sailors, 1200 passengers, 400,000 Roman bushels (34,000 hectolitres) of wheat, and a cargo of linen cloth, glass, paper, and pepper. “Alexandria,” says a Roman author of the third century,[230] “is a town of plenty, of wealth, and of luxury, in which nobody goes idle; this one is a glass-worker, that one a paper-maker, the third a linen-weaver; the only god is money.” This held true proportionally of the whole land. [Sidenote: Egyptian navigation of the Mediterranean.]