The kings of Ethiopia, priests from the first, never lost their sacerdotal character.  They continued to be men of God, and as such it was necessary that they should be chosen by the god himself.  On the death of a sovereign, Amon at once became regent in the person of his prophet, and continued to act until the funeral rites were celebrated.  As soon as these ceremonies were completed, the army and the people collected at the foot of the Sacred Mount; the delegates of the various orders of the state were led into the sanctuary, and then, in their presence, all the males of the royal family—­“the king’s brothers,” as they were called—­were paraded before the statue of the god; he on whom the god laid his hand as he passed was considered to be the chosen one of Amon, and consecrated king without delay.*

* This is the ritual described in the Stele of the Enthronement.  Perhaps it was already in use at Thebes under the XXIst and XXIInd dynasties, at the election of the high priest, whether he happened to be a king or not; at any rate, a story of the Ptolemaic period told by Synesius in The Egyptian seems to point to this conclusion.

As may be readily imagined, the new monarch thus appointed by divine dictation was completely under the control of the priests, and before long, if he failed to prove sufficiently tractable, they claimed the right to dispense with him altogether; they sent him an order to commit suicide, and he obeyed.  The boundaries of this theocratic state varied at different epochs; originally it was confined to the region between the First Cataract and the mouth of the Blue Nile.  The bulk of the population consisted of settlers of Egyptian extraction and Egyptianised natives; but isolated, as they were, from Egypt proper by the rupture of the political ties which had bound them to the metropolis, they ceased to receive fresh reinforcements from the northern part of the valley as they had formerly done, and daily became more closely identified with the races of various origin which roamed through the deserts of Libya or Arabia.  This constant infiltration of free or slavish Bedawin blood and the large number of black women found in the harems of the rich, and even in the huts of the common people, quickly impaired the purity of the race, even among the tipper classes of the nation, and the type came to resemble that of the negro tribes of Equatorial Africa.*

* Taharqa furnishes us with a striking example of this degeneration of the Egyptian type.  His face shows the characteristic features of the black race, both on the Egyptian statue as well as on the Assyrian stele of Sinjirli.

[Illustration:  260a.jpg A NEARLY PURE ETHIOPIAN TYPE]

[Illustration:  260b.jpg mixed negro and Ethiopian TYPE]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Lepsius.