SENEFERU IN THE SUDAN This important monument contains a list of festivals and of the gifts which certain early Egyptian kings offered to the gods, and among these kings is mentioned Seneferu/ the first king of the IVth Dynasty, about B.C. 3766. Of him it is stated that he sent an army into the Land of the Blacks, and that he carried away captive seven thousand men, and two hundred thousand children and cattle. It is difficult to understand what Seneferu did with his captives, unless he set them to work in the turquoise mines of Sinai," and to build his tomb near Dahshur, and the Pyramid of Medum. Seneferu was the first king of Egypt who carried war into foreign countries on a large scale, and his conquest of the Sudan was, no doubt, only one of the many feats of arms with which he must be credited. We possess no details of the conquest, but it was probably made necessary bj'the Black Tribes refusing to pay tribute or send gifts. Under the immediate successors of Seneferu the authority of Egypt in the Sudan seems to have been well established, for under the reign of Assa, the last king but one of the Vth Dynasty, the governor of the region of the First Cataract, whose stronghold was at Abu, or Elephantine, and whose name was Ba-ur-tet, went so far south as the land of Punt and brought back, among other things, a pygmy, whom he sent to the royal court at Memphis to amuse the king with his dancing. To assume that this official made such a long journey merely for the purpose of bringing back a pygmy is unwarrantable, and the statement which we have on the authority of Herkhuf, a governor of the First Cataract under the 1st Dynasty, indicates that Ba-ur-tet had, during the course of a trading expedition, penetrated far to the south, and into the region where ' See Wiedemann, Aegyptische Zeitsc/irift, 1885, p. 77 ; Miiller, Aethiopien, p. 7.

- The latest publication of the representations of Seneferu slaughtering his foes in Sinai is that of R. Weill, Recueil des Inscripiions Egyptiennes du Sinai, pp. 103, 104, Paris, 1904.

* See Schiaparelli, y//'/ /A". Accademia dei Lincei, Rome, 1893, pp. 22-25 > Erman in Zeilschrift D. Morgen. Gesell. Bd. 46, p. 574 AT., and Ennan, Aegyptische Zeitschrift, Bd. xxxi., p. 66.

The word for " pygmy " is tenk 'T IM , and it finds its equivalent in the Amharic word denk Tll 515