teasing the writer's correspondent. Nekht-sotep had evidently assumed
airs of superiority on the strength of his foreign travels, and his
stay-at-home friend undertook to demonstrate that he had himself enjoyed
the more comfortable life of the two. Nekht-sotep is playfully dubbed
with the foreign title of Mohar--or more correctly Muhir--a word
borrowed from Assyrian, where it primarily signified a military
commander and then the governor of a province.

Long before the days of the nineteenth dynasty, however, there had been
Egyptian travellers in Palestine, or at least in the adjoining
countries. One of the Egyptian books which have come down to us contains
the story of a certain Sinuhit who had to fly from Egypt in consequence
of some political troubles in which he was involved after the death of
Amon-m-hat I. of the twelfth dynasty. Crossing the Nile near Kher-ahu,
the Old Cairo of to-day, he gained the eastern bank of the river and
made his way to the line of forts which protected Egypt from its Asiatic
enemies. Here he crouched among the desert bushes till night-fall, lest
"the watchmen of the tower" should see him, and then pursued his journey
under the cover of darkness. At daybreak he reached the land of Peten
and the wadi of Qem-uer on the line of the modern Suez Canal. There
thirst seized upon him; his throat rattled, and he said to
himself--"This is the taste of death." A Bedawi, however, perceived him
and had compassion on the fugitive: he gave him water and boiled milk,
and Sinuhit for a while joined the nomad tribe. Then he passed on to the
country of Qedem, the Kadmonites of the Old Testament (Gen. xv. 19;
Judges vi. 3), whence came the wise men of the East (1 Kings iv. 30).
After spending a year and a half there, 'Ammu-anshi, the prince of the
Upper land of Tenu, asked the Egyptian stranger to come to him, telling
him that he would hear the language of Egypt. He added that he had
already heard about Sinuhit from "the Egyptians who were in the