THE EGYPTIAN SUDAN The inscription of Usertsen III. quoted above is interesting from several points of view. Portions of the text are difficult to translate, and no rendering of the inscription yet published is satisfactory. The general drift of it is, however, quite clear. It opens with a statement that he has enlarged the boundary of his kingdom to an unprecedented extent, and goes on to say that he is a king whose thoughts are turned into action promptly and vigorously. His abuse of the Blacks whom he has conquered is violent, and is truly oriental in character, for he calls them cowards, who run away when they find themselves attacked, poltroons, and impotent folk, and says that they fall prostrate at the mere sound of a warlike word. Timid, feeble, and foolish he reckons them to be. The next few lines throw a lurid light on Egyptian methods in the Sudan, and they help us to realize that the slaughter of men and cattle, the ravishing of women, the destruction of crops, and the burning of villages, were the results which always followed an invasion of Nubia by Pharaoh's hosts. We have already seen (see p. 517) how Una treated the natives, and how he cut down their vines and fig-trees, and laid waste the fields, and slew the people by tens of thousands, and we know that whether it was the king in person who conducted an expedition, or merely a high official, the result, so far as the native was concerned, was the same.

Now although Usertsen's arms were victorious in the Sudan, he appears to have realized that the only way to ensure their success uniformly was to build a line of forts in places of strategic importance. Thus he built a fortress called Heru-Ra-kha-kau, near the Island of Elephantine, and also a temple, which he dedicated to the Cataract deities Sati and Anuquet, on the Island itself; we derive this information from the stele of his official, Ameni, which was discovered by Mr. Gadsby in 1874, and from rock inscriptions on the Island of Saial. At Amada, a few miles to the south of Korosko, he built another fort, and the site was so well chosen that Thothmes III. restored it, and established the worship of his great predecessor, to whom, even in those early times, divine honours were paid. The fort and temple built by Usertsen I. were, no doubt, still standing at Behen, or Buhen, ' See Birch, Aeg. Zeit., 1S75, p. 50 ff.

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