The allusion to the Tenu belonging to Pharaoh,
like his dogs, is peculiarly fitting to this period, as the dog seems
to have been more familiarly domesticated in the XIth and XIIth
Dynasties than at any other age, and dogs are often then represented
on the funereal steles, even with their names.
The expression for strangeness--"as a man of the Delta sees himself at
the cataract, as a man of the plain who sees himself in the deserts"--is
true to this day. Nothing upsets an Egyptian's self-reliance like going
back a few miles into the desert; and almost any man of the cultivated
plain will flee with terror if he finds himself left alone far in the
desert, or even taken to the top of the desert hills. .
We learn incidentally that the Egyptian frontier, even in the later
years of Usertesen I., had not been pushed beyond the Wady Tumilat; for
Sanehat travels south to the Roads of Horus, where he finds the frontier
garrison, and leaves his Syrian friends; and there laden boats meet him,
showing that it must have been somewhere along a waterway from the Nile.
The abasement of Sanehat might well be due to natural causes, beside the
reverence for the divine person of the king. The Egyptian court must
have seemed oppressively splendid, with the brilliant and costly
workmanship of Usertesen, to one who had lived a half-wild life for so
many years; and, more than that, the recalling of all his early days and
habits and friendships would overwhelm his mind and make it difficult to
collect his thoughts.
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