mere handful of men, and their individual action in the combat would
scarcely ever have been sufficient to decide the result; the actual
importance of their support, in spite of their numerical inferiority,
lay in the moral weight they brought to the side on which they fought,
since they represented the whole army of the Pharaoh which lay behind
them, and their presence in a camp always ensured final success. The
vanquished party had the right of appeal to the sovereign, through whom
he might obtain a mitigation of the lot which his successful adversary
had prepared for him; it was to the interest of Egypt to keep the
balance of power as evenly as possible between the various states which
looked to her, and when she prevented one or other of the princes from
completely crushing his rivals, she was minimising the danger which
might soon arise from the vassal whom she had allowed to extend his
territory at the expense of others.

These relations gave rise to a perpetual exchange of letters and
petitions between the court of Thebes and the northern and southern
provinces, in which all the petty kings of Africa and Asia, of whatever
colour or race, set forth, either openly or covertly, their ambitions
and their fears, imploring a favour or begging for a subsidy, revealing
the real or suspected intrigues of their fellow-chiefs, and while loudly
proclaiming their own loyalty, denouncing the perfidy and the secret
projects of their neighbours. As the Ethiopian peoples did not,
apparently, possess an alphabet of their own, half of the correspondence
which concerned them was carried on in Egyptian, and written on papyrus.
In Syria, however, where Babylonian civilization maintained itself
in spite of its conquest by Thûtmosis, cuneiform writing was still
employed, and tablets of dried clay.* It had, therefore, been found
necessary to establish in the Pharaoh's palace a department for this
service, in which the scribes should be competent to decipher the