familiarities as the Greek:  two friends on catching sight of one another paused before they met, bowed, then clasped one another round the knees or pretended to do so.  Young people gave way to an old man, or, if seated, rose to let him pass.  The traveller recalled the fact that the Spartans behaved in the same way, and approved this mark of deference; but nothing in his home-life had prepared him for the sight of respectable women coming and going as they pleased, without escort and unveiled, carrying burdens on their shoulders (whereas the men carried them on their heads), going to market, keeping stalls or shops, while their husbands or fathers stayed comfortably at home, wove cloth, kneaded the potter’s clay or turned the wheel, and worked at their trades; no wonder that they were ready to believe that the man was the slave, and the wife the mistress of the family.  Some historians traced the origin of these customs back to Osiris, others only as far as Sesostris:  Sesostris was the last resource of Greek historians when they got into difficulties.  The city was crowded with monuments; there was the temple of the Phoenician Astarte, in which priests of Syrian descent had celebrated the mysteries of the great goddess ever since the days of the XVIIIth dynasty; then there was the temple of Ra, the temple of Amon, the temple of Tamu, the temple of Bastit, and the temple of Isis.*

* This list is taken mainly from one of the mutilated letters found on the back of the Sallier Papyrus.  The Phoenician Astarte, called a foreign Aphrodite by Herodotus, was regarded by the Egyptians as a counterpart of Bastit, lady of Onkhtoui.

The temple of Phtah, as yet intact, provided the visitor with a spectacle scarcely less admirable than that offered by the temple of the Theban Amon at Karnak.  The kings had modified the original plan as each thought best, one adding obelisks or colossal statues, another a pylon, a third a pillared hall.  Completed in this way by the labours of a score of dynasties, it formed, as it were, a microcosm of Egyptian history, in which each image, inscription and statue, aroused the attention of the curious.  They naturally desired to learn who were the strangely dressed races shown struggling in a battle scene, the name of the king who had conquered them, and the reasons which had led him to construct this or that part of a monument, and there were plenty of busybodies ready to satisfy, as far as they could, the curiosity of visitors.  Interpreters were at hand who bartered such information as they possessed, and the modern traveller who has had occasion to employ the services of a dragoman will have no difficulty in estimating the value of intelligence thus hawked about in ancient times.  Priests of the lower class, doorkeepers and sacristans were trained to act as ciceroni, and knew the main outlines of the history of the temple in which they lived.  Menes planned it, Moeris added the