The native Egyptians cannot have been far different either in position or in character from their modern descendants. They were contented, sober, capable of labour, and active, skilful artisans and mariners, and adroit merchants, adhering to old customs and to old faith. If the Romans assure us that the Egyptians were proud of the scourge-marks received for perpetrating frauds in taxation,[235] these are views derived from the standpoint of the tax officials. There was no want of good germs in the national culture; with all the superiority of the Greeks in the intellectual competition of the two so utterly different races, the Egyptians in turn had the advantage of the Hellenes in various and essential things, and they felt this too. It is, after all, only the plain reflection of their own feeling, when the Egyptian priests of the Greek conversational literature ridicule the so-called historical research of the Hellenes and its treatment of poetical fables as real tradition from primitive past times, saying that in Egypt they made no verses, but their whole ancient history was described in the temples and monuments; although now, indeed, there were but few who knew it, since many monuments were destroyed, and tradition was made to perish through the ignorance and the indifference of later generations. But this well-warranted complaint carried in itself hopelessness; the venerable tree of Egyptian civilisation had long been marked for cutting down. Hellenism penetrated with its decomposing influence even to the priesthood itself. An Egyptian temple-scribe Chaeremon, who was called to the court of Claudius as teacher of Greek philosophy for the crown-prince, attributed in his _Egyptian History_ the elements of Stoical physics to the old gods of the country, and expounded in this sense the documents written in the native character. In the practical life of the imperial period the old Egyptian habits come into consideration almost only as regards the religious sphere. Religion was for this people all in all. The foreign rule in itself was willingly borne, we might say hardly felt, so long as it did not touch the sacred customs of the land and what was therewith connected. It is true that in the internal government of the country nearly everything had such a connection--writing and language, priestly privileges and priestly arrogance, the manners of the court and the customs of the country; the care of the government for the sacred ox living at the moment, the provisions made for its burial at its decease, and for the finding out of the fitting successor, were accounted by these priests and this people as the test of the capacity of the ruler of the land for the time, and as the measure of the respect and homage due to him. The first Persian king introduced himself in Egypt by giving back the sanctuary of Neith in Sais to its destination--that is, to the priests; the first Ptolemy, when still