From all this it will be seen how impossible it was for a lay king, like the sovereign ruling at Tanis, to submit to such restraints beyond a certain point; his patience would soon have become exhausted, want of practice would have led him to make slips or omissions, rendering the rites null and void; and the temporal affairs of his kingdom—­internal administration, justice, finance, commerce, and war—­made such demands upon his time, that he was obliged as soon as possible to find a substitute to fulfil his religious duties.  The force of circumstances therefore maintained the line of Theban high priests side by side with their sovereigns, the Tanite kings.  They were, it is true, dangerous rivals, both on account of the wealth of their fief and of the immense prestige which they enjoyed in Egypt, Ethiopia, and in all the nomes devoted to the worship of Amon.  They were allied to the elder branch of the ramessides, and had thus inherited such near rights to the crown that Smendes had not hesitated to concede to Hrihor the cartouches, the preamble, and insignia of the Pharaoh, including the pschent and the iron helmet inlaid with gold.  This concession, however, had been made as a personal favour, and extended only to the lifetime of Hrihor, without holding good, as a matter of course, for his successors; his son Pionkhi had to confine himself to the priestly titles,* and his grandson Painotmu enjoyed the kingly privileges only during part of his life, doubtless in consequence of his marriage with a certain Makeri, probably daughter of Psiukhannit L, the Tanite king.  Makeri apparently died soon after, and the discovery of her coffin in the hiding-place at Deir el-Bahari reveals the fact of her death in giving birth to a little daughter who did not survive her, and who rests in the same coffin beside the mummy of her mother.  None of the successors of Painotmu—­Masahirti, Manakhpirri, Painotmu II., Psiukhannit, Nsbindidi—­enjoyed a similar distinction, and if one of them happened to surround his name with a cartouche, it was done surreptitiously, without the authority of the sovereign.**

* The only monument of this prince as yet known gives him merely the usual titles of the high priest, and the inscriptions of his son Painotmu I. style him “First Prophet of Amon.”  His name should probably be read Paionukhi or Pionukhi, rather than Pionkhi or Piankhi.  It is not unlikely that some of the papyri published by Spiegelberg date from his pontificate.

** Manakhpirri often places his name in a square cartouche which tends at times to become an oval, but this is the case only on some pieces of stuff rolled round a mummy and on some bricks concealed in the walls of el-Hibeh, Thebes, and Gebelein.  If the “Psiukhannit, High Priest of Amon,” who once (to our knowledge) enclosed his name in a cartouche, is really a high priest, and not a king, his case would be analogous to that of Manakhpirri.

Painotmu II. contented himself with drawing attention to his connection with the reigning house, and styled himself “Royal Son of Psiukhannit-Miamon,” on account of his ancestress Makeri having been the daughter of the Pharaoh Psiukhannit.*