Herodotus relates that in the fabulous ages a king of Egypt called Sesostris left his country in order to go and make the conquest of the world; it is evident that such a design could only be worthy of a Don Quixote; and not to mention that the name Sesostris is not Egyptian, we may rank this event, like many others of the same date, among the romances and fairy tales. Nothing is more common among a conquered people than to tell strange stories of their former grandeur, just as, in some countries, certain wretched families, in want of the common necessaries of life, pride themselves upon being descended from ancient sovereigns. The Egyptian priests told Herodotus that this king, whom he called Sesostris, went on an expedition to conquer Colchis, which is much the same as if we were to say that a king of France set out from Touraine to conquer Norway. It avails not that these stories are found repeated in a thousand different writers; it makes them not a whit more probable; it is much more natural to suppose that the fierce and athletic inhabitants of Mount Caucasus, of Colchis, and the other parts of Scythia, who so often made incursions upon and ravaged Asia, might have penetrated as far as Egypt; and although the priests of Colchis might afterwards have carried back with them the form of circumcision, yet that is no kind of proof that they were ever conquered by the Egyptians. Diodorus Siculus tells us that all the kings who were conquered by Sesostris came every year from their own kingdoms to bring him their respective tributes, when Sesostris made them draw the chariot in which he went in triumph to the temples of his gods. These old women’s stories we see every day gravely copied by other writers; it must be confessed that these kings were very complaisant, to come every year so far to be made hackney horses of. As to their pyramids, and other monuments of antiquity, they prove nothing but the pride and bad taste of the Egyptian princes, and the wretched slavery of a weak people, who employed their strength, which was their only support, in pleasing the barbarous ostentation of their masters. The polity of these people, even in those times which are so much cried up, appears to have been both absurd and tyrannical; they pretended that the whole universe belonged to their monarchy. It well became such an abject race to set up for conquerors of the world!