Aswan

Over time, she grew more and more popular in the Egyptian pantheon, becoming one of the most popular gods in the Egyptian late period.

For example, check out the huge Philae Temple on an island near the city of Aswan in Upper Egypt.

This was a gigantic temple complex built and dedicated to the goddess Isis.

first built during the late period, but then was expanded under the Ptolemies, one of the Hellenistic kingdoms that succeeded Alexander the Great.

Hills, hewn out of solid sandstone, succeed each other at distances of about two miles, low, crushed, somber and formless.

Presently a forest of palm trees, the last on that side, announces Aswan and Nubia.

Five banks of granite, ranged in lines between latitude twenty-four degrees and eighteen degrees north, cross Nubia from east to west, and from northeast to southwest, like so many ramparts thrown up between the Mediterranean and the heart of Africa.

The Nile has attacked them from behind, and made its way over them one after another in rapids, which have been glorified by the name of cataracts.

Classic writers were pleased to describe the river as hurled into the Gulfs of Sine with so great a roar that the people of the neighborhood were deafened by it.

Even a colony of Persians sent thither by Cambyses could not bear the noise of the falls and went forth to seek a quieter situation.

The first cataract is a kind of sloping and sinuous passage six and a quarter miles in length, descending from the island of Philae to the port of Aswan.

The aspect of its approach relieved and brightened by the evergreen groves of Elephantine.

Valley temples incorporate colossal blocks weighing hundreds of tons.

The unfinished obelisk of Aswan, still fused to the quarry floor, shows an attempt at a single stone that would have dwarfed almost anything ever erected.

Had it not cracked during extraction, cross the Atlantic to the Andes, and you encounter another branch of the same puzzle, at Sacsayhuaman above Cusco, and in sites like Olantaytambo, walls of interlocking polygonal blocks rise without mortar.

Some stones tip the scales at over 100 tons, cut and fit so closely you can't slide a razor blade between them.

But like the chiefs of old, he felt it a duty to his people to destroy wild beasts, and he ended by counting the slain in hundreds, however short his reign might be.

A considerable part of his time was taken up in war, in the east against the Libyans in the regions of the oasis, in the Nile valley to the south of Aswan against the Nubians, on the Isthmus of Suez and in the Syenatic Peninsula against the Bedouin, frequently also in a civil war against some ambitious noble or some turbulent member of his own family.

He traveled frequently from south to north and from north to south, leaving in every possible place marked traces of his visits, on the rocks of Elephantine and of the first cataract, on those of Sylsillus or of El Kab, and he appeared to his vassals as Tumu himself arisen among them to repress injustice and disorder.

He restored or enlarged the monuments, regulated equitably the assessment of taxes and charges, settled or dismissed the lawsuits between one town and another concerning the appropriation of the water or the possession of certain territories, distributed fiefs which had fallen vacant among his faithful servants, and granted pensions to be paid out of the royal revenues.

In the Delta, where the authority of the Pharaoh was almost everywhere directly felt, the power of the nobility was weakened and much curtailed.

In Middle Egypt it gained ground and became stronger and stronger in proportion as one advanced southward.

The nobles held the principalities of the Gizelle, of the Hare, of the Serpent Mountain, of Akhmim, of Thinis, of Kasar-es-Sayid, of El-Kab, of Aswan, and doubtless others of which we shall someday discover the monuments.

They accepted without difficulty the fiction according to which Pharaoh claimed to be absolute master of the soil and ceded to his subjects only the usufruct of their fiefs.