* From the account of the campaigns of Amenothes II., I thought we might conclude that this Pharaoh wintered in Syria at least once; but the text does not admit of this interpretation, and we must, therefore, for the present give up the idea that the Pharaohs ever spent more than a few months of the year on hostile territory.
The troops employed in these campaigns were superior to any others hitherto put into the field. The Egyptian army, inured to war by its long struggle with the Shepherd-kings, and kept in training since the reign of Ahmosis by having to repulse the perpetual incursions of the Ethiopian or Libyan barbarians, had no difficulty, in overcoming the Syrians; not that the latter were wanting in courage or discipline, but owing to their limited supply of recruits, and the political disintegration of the country, they could not readily place under arms such enormous numbers as those of the Egyptians. Egyptian military organisation had remained practically unchanged since early times: the army had always consisted, firstly, of the militia who held fiefs, and were under the obligation of personal service either to the prince of the nome or to the sovereign; secondly, of a permanent force, which was divided into two corps, distributed respectively between the Sa’id and the Delta. Those companies which were quartered on the frontier, or about the king either at Thebes or at one of the royal residences, were bound to hold themselves in readiness to muster for a campaign at any given moment. The number of natives liable to be levied when occasion required, by “generations,” or as we should say by classes, may have amounted to over a hundred thousand men,* but they were never all called out, and it does not appear that the army on active service ever contained more than thirty thousand men at a time, and probably on ordinary occasions not much more than ten or fifteen thousand.**
* The only numbers which we know are those given by Herodotus for the Saite period, which are evidently exaggerated. Coming down to modern times, we see that Mehemet-Ali, from 1830 to 1840, had nearly 120,000 men in Syria, Egypt, and the Sudan; and in 1841, at the time when the treaties imposed upon him the ill-kept obligation of reducing his army to 18,000 men, it still contained 81,000. We shall probably not be far wrong in estimating the total force which the Pharaohs of the XVIIIth dynasty, lords of the whole valley of the Nile, and of part of Asia, had at their disposal at 120,000 or 130,000 men; these, however, were never all called out at once.
** We have no direct information respecting the armies acting in Syria; we only know that, at the battle of Qodshu, Ramses II. had against him 2500 chariots containing three men each, making 7500 charioteers, besides a troop estimated at the Ramesseum at 8000 men, at Luxor at 9000, so that the Syrian army probably contained about 20,000 men. It would seem that the Egyptian


