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ἴσῳ: i.e. in 60 days; this estimate may well be exaggerated. As usual H. becomes less accurate as he gets further away from his own observations.

The Deserters. Some moderns (e.g. Wiedemann) have doubted the whole story, but it is now generally accepted. Maspero (iii. 498) points out that in the seventh century the military Mashauasha disappear from the monuments; he considers the divisions of ii. 164 seq. to be the new army arrangements of Psammetichus. For an interesting parallel under Apries to the desertion cf. statue of Nesuhor, in Louvre, with its inscription (Klio, iv. 152 seq.; Breasted, R. iv. 989 seq.).

Eratosthenes (in Strabo 786) calls these deserters Σεμβρῖται, i.e. ἐπήλυδες. They are variously placed in Abyssinia, on the Blue Nile, or in Sennaar (Bunbury), about 150 miles south of Khartoum, or where the Sobat joins the White Nile, about 400 miles south of Khartoum. It is in the last region that the Nile ceases to flow west and north-west and turns north (cf. 31 n.).

Ἀσμάχ. The translation ‘left’ is a popular explanation, perhaps given by an interpreter; the real meaning of the word was ‘forgetting’, i.e. it = ‘runaways’. But the word for ‘left’ in Egyptian is very similar in sound (Spiegelberg, Z. Ä. S. xliii. 95).

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