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After him came a blind king named Anysis, during whose reign Egypt was invaded by the Ethiopians, who lorded it over the country for fifty years. He was succeeded by Sethos, a priest of Vulcan, who oppressed the warrior caste, so that they refused to serve him when Sennacherib, king of the Assyrians, invaded the country. But a vision in the sanctuary bid him be of good cheer; and when he went out to the frontier with an army of citizens, trusting in divine aid, a number of field-mice came in the night and gnawed the bowstrings, quivers, and shield-straps of the enemy, so that the Egyptians easily defeated them. Such is the dim tradition which, reached the historian of the mysterious destruction of the Assyrian host recorded in the Scriptures. The mouse, according to some interpreters of hieroglyphic language, was the symbol of destruction. Thus far Herodotus had derived his information as to early Egyptian history entirely from the priests. He computed that the reigns of these kings, as given him, would require eleven thousand three hundred and forty years.

A revolution seemed to have occurred after the death of Sethos, by which twelve provincial kings, like those of the Saxon Heptarchy, reigned at once. Their great work was a labyrinth near Lake Mœris, which struck Herodotus as one of the wonders of the world—more wonderful even than the Pyramids themselves. One of the twelve, Psammetichus, at length managed to