went to form a company or a battalion, or by what ensigns the different grades were distinguished from each other, or what was their relative order of rank.  Bodies of men, to the number of forty or fifty, are sometimes represented on the monuments, but this may be merely by chance, or because the draughtsman did not take the trouble to give the proper number accurately.  The inferior officers were equipped very much like the soldiers, with the exception of the buckler, which they do not appear to have carried, and certainly did not when on the march:  the superior officers might be known by their umbrella or flabellum, a distinction which gave them the right of approaching the king’s person.

[Illustration:  319.jpg THE WAR-DANCE OF THE TIMIHU AT DEIR EL-BAHARI]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph.

The military exercises to which all these troops were accustomed probably differed but little from those which were in vogue with the armies of the Ancient Empire; they consisted in wrestling, boxing, jumping, running either singly or in line at regular distances from each other, manual exercises, fencing, and shooting at a target; the war-dance had ceased to be in use among the Egyptian regiments as a military exercise, but it was practised by the Ethiopian and Libyan auxiliaries.  At the beginning of each campaign, the men destined to serve in it were called out by the military scribes, who supplied them with arms from the royal arsenals.  Then followed the distribution of rations.  The soldiers, each carrying a small linen bag, came up in squads before the commissariat officers, and each received his own allowance.*

* We see the distribution of arms made by the scribes and other officials of the royal arsenals represented in the pictures at Medinet-Abu.  The calling out of the classes was represented in the Egyptian tombs of the XVIIIth dynasty, as well as the distribution of supplies.

Once in the enemy’s country the army advanced in close order, the infantry in columns of four, the officers in rear, and the chariots either on the right or left flank, or in the intervals between divisions.  Skirmishers thrown out to the front cleared the line of march, while detached parties, pushing right and left, collected supplies of cattle, grain, or drinking-water from the fields and unprotected villages.  The main body was followed by the baggage train; it comprised not only supplies and stores, but cooking-utensils, coverings, and the entire paraphernalia of the carpenters’ and blacksmiths’ shops necessary for repairing bows, lances, daggers, and chariot-poles, the whole being piled up in four-wheeled carts drawn by asses or oxen.  The army was accompanied by a swarm of non-combatants, scribes, soothsayers, priests, heralds, musicians, servants, and women of loose life, who were a serious cause of embarrassment to the generals, and a source of perpetual danger to military discipline.