THE GREAT EGYPTIAN REVOLUTION. 11 
population, more than we should conclude from the above-described conditions; they formed 
_ thus a certain nobility, owing to their privileges and their esprit de corps. 
This may be due partly to the fact that the Egyptian kings (from dynasty 20 on?) had | 
settled foreign soldiers, principally Libyans, on the vacant military fiefs. Although inter- 
marrying freely with the Egyptians and thus soon losing their racial characteristics and their 
foreign language, those soldiers still felt themselves to be distinct from the ordinary Egyptians. 
Their officers formed a still higher nobility and tried to rule over whole districts, which partly 
may have been given to them as royal fiefs in serfs, partly may have been usurped. The 
Pharaohs of later time had to fight much with these disobedient vassals, whom we find repeatedly 
ruling as independently as the medieval European dukes and counts. ‘The termination of this 
often anarchic condition by Psammetichus’s suppression of the “dodekarchy,’’’ 7. e., the many 
small independent principalities, was still well remembered in the time of Herodotus (II, 147). 
He seems to give a correct tradition in describing how the royal government found in foreign 
mercenaries the best support against those unruly vassals; those nobles in.their turn must have 
sought the favor of the hereditary soldiers by increasing their privileges. ‘This development 
seems to explain why the soldiers in the later period of Egyptian history showed more pride 
than during the golden time of Egyptian conquests and held a more esteemed position in the 
state. Their history presents thus a certain analogy to that of the Mamluk nobility of medieval 
Egypt. 
The fancifully exaggerated report that 240,000 (!) soldiers emigrated to Ethiopia (Herod- 
otus, II, 30) when their privileges were shortened, and the not very clearly stated part which 
they had in dethroning King Apries, etc., again demonstrates that they continued to form 
a difficult element, even under the strongly centralized twenty-sixth dynasty. The Persians 
apparently left their prerogatives as much as possible untouched. I ascribe the endless revolu- 
tions which the Persians had to face in Egypt principally to this class of the population, as said 
above (p. 7); unfortunately we have no detailed information on any of those revolutions. 
If I am right, then the conservatism with which the Persian government treated their Egyptian 
province seems to have been the principal reason for their difficulties with the Egyptians. 
Notwithstanding all these experiences, the Persians transmitted those conditions to their 
Greek successors, the Ptolemies. Under these we still have at least considerable remnants of 
the old system of the waxipor, 7. e., “those fit for fighting,” the remu-gongen (7. e., early rmiw 
gnqnw), which is the rare Egyptian name for “ soldiers,’ according to the Rosetta stone, demotic 
line 11. We shall find below the strange fact that the Ptolemaic hieroglyphic inscriptions lack 
a fixed name for them; the various words for ‘“‘ warriors” which they employ are so vague that 
they can be applied also to the privileged settled soldiers of Macedonian and Greek descent, 
to mercenaries, and are even more ambiguous (cp. p. 60, note 6; p. 72, note 7). 
In general, we again know little as to the native soldiers in the time of the Ptolemies. On 
the treatment of this class see especially P. M. Meyer, Das Heerwesen der Griechen und Romer 
in Aegypten, 1900; Jean Lesquier, Les institutions malitatres de l’ Egypte sous les Lagides, 1911. 
For this we have, unfortunately, material only from the time after our two decrees, when 
probably considerable changes had taken place. We notice, then, above all, that the name 

1 Twelve is merely a symbolical number. At most times the number of principalities must have been larger. 
