People speak carelessly of Egyptian darkness and the Riddle of the Sphinx. The facts are that the Riddle of the Sphinx is Greek, not Egyptian, and that we know a great deal about ancient Egypt. We understand its language and possess thousands of inscriptions and documents, up to and including love songs and love letters. (Some are charming. In one letter a young man stoutly avers that he would wade a crocodile-infested stream to be with his beloved. In a love song, a young woman yearns "for him to send word to my mother." He may have preferred the stream.)

Nubia, however, is a genuine enigma. At the time this scroll was written, its people did not speak Nubian, but the largely unknown language that we call Merotic. Because they wrote it in Egyptian hieroglyphics as well as in what we call Merotic script, we know how it sounded, the names of some kings, and a few other words. But no more than that. There has been no Nubian Rosetta Stone.

Both the Nehasyu and the Medjay, the principal Nubian tribes, were expert archers and horsemen. Nubian kings paid enormous prices for fine horses from Arabia Felix. (Fortunate Arabia-Arabia, too, was better watered in those days.) Favorite horses might be buried with great ceremony in elaborate tombs.

The Medjay, the narrator's Lion People, were nomads who drove their cattle and horses wherever the grass was long. Employed originally to fend off raiding parties from Libya, their duties were soon enlarged. By late Pharaonic times they were Egypt's police. Many Nubian mercenaries married Egyptians and settled in Egypt.

Allow me to note in closing that the ancient Egyptians, who invented and discovered so many things, never had a coinage of their own. The gold pieces with which the Phoenician captain fees the priest of Hathor, and no doubt most of the other coins mentioned in this scroll, are those of the occupying Persian Empire.

PART I