Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE CAMPAIGNS OF RAMESES THE GREAT- Situation, Wealth and Population of Egypt, on the Accession of Barneses.—The plausible Motives for his Expeditions.- -Two Razzias at an Interval of Thirty-three Centuries. —Departure of Barneses for Asia.—His Army.—Testimony of Tacitus, Herodotus, Strabo and the Monuments.—A Bulletin of Victory, and a Poet Laureate of the Fourteenth Century before our Era. -Tha Battle of Atesh.—The return of Barneses. When Barneses ascended the throne, more than two centurias had elapsed since the expulsion of the Hycsos. The almost uninterrupted succession of a decade of memorable reigna had raised the internal prosperity of the empire, as well as its influence outside, to the highest pitch. The advantages resulting naturally from a long period of security; an administration equal to the needs of the epoch; the multiplication and good management of the canals, those peaceful conquerors of arable land won by them from the desert, were daily augmenting the chances of existence already so easy on a fertile soil and beneath a smiling sky. And, while all these causes combined were making the agricultural and industrial classes of Egypt the most laborious and the most compact population then existing, on the other hand, the military castes, trained to warfare from generation to generation by a series of successful distant expeditions, presented in its real effective force, and in that alleged in the exaggerated figures handed down to us by the writers of Greece and Borne, the most martial, the best armed and the most formidable mass of combatants known to those ancient times. Such elements of greatness, taken together with the youth of Mei-Amoun and his natural ardor, excited, as it was, in the highest degree by his first triumphs in war, and by the exam... --This text refers to the Paperback edition.