Egypt reaches on the south, as was already remarked, as far as the barrier which the last cataract, not far from Syene (Assouan), opposes to navigation. Beyond Syene begins the stock of the Kesch, as the Egyptians call them, or, as the Greeks translated it, the dark-coloured, the Aethiopians, probably akin to the Axomites to be afterwards mentioned, and, although perhaps sprung from the same root as the Egyptians, at any rate confronting them in historical development as a foreign people. Further to the south follow the Nahsiu of the Egyptians, that is, the Blacks, the Nubians of the Greek, the modern Negroes. The kings of Egypt had in better times extended their rule far into the interior, or at least emigrant Egyptians had established for themselves here dominions of their own; the written monuments of the Pharaonic government go as far as above the third cataract to Dongola, where Nabata (near Nûri) seems to have been the centre of their settlements; and considerably further up the stream, some six days’ journey to the north of Khartoum, near Shendy, in Sennaar, in the neighbourhood of the long forgotten Aethiopian town Meroe, are found groups of temples and pyramids, although destitute of writing. When Egypt became Roman, all this development of power was long a matter of the past; and beyond Syene there ruled an Aethiopian stock under queens, who regularly bore the name or the title Candace,[246] and resided in that once Egyptian Nabata in Dongola; a people at a low stage of civilisation, predominantly shepherds, in a position to bring into the field an army of 30,000, but equipped with shields of ox-hides, armed mostly not with swords, but with axes or lances and iron-mounted clubs, predatory neighbours, not a match for the Romans in combat. In the year 730 or 731 {24, 23. B.C.} these invaded the Roman territory--as they asserted, because the presidents of the nearest nomes had injured them--as the Romans thought, because the Egyptian troops were then to a large extent occupied in Arabia, and they hoped to be able to plunder with immunity. In reality they overcame the three cohorts who covered the frontier, and dragged away the inhabitants from the nearest Egyptian districts--Philae, Elephantine, Syene--as slaves, and the statues of the emperor, which they found there, as tokens of victory. But the governor, who just then took up the administration of the province, Gaius Petronius, speedily requited the attack; with 10,000 infantry and 800 cavalry he not merely drove them out, but followed them along the Nile into their own land, defeated them emphatically at Pselchis (Dekkeh), and stormed their stronghold Premis (Ibrim), as well as the capital itself, which he destroyed. It is true that the queen, a brave woman, renewed the attack next year and attempted to storm Premis, where a Roman garrison had been left; but Petronius brought seasonable relief, and so the Aethiopian queen determined to send envoys and to sue for peace.