Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 3.djvu/304

280 kingdom, and by Yasous the Great in the other, so late as the beginning of the last century.

kings of Abyssinia are above all laws. They are supreme in all causes ecclesiastical and civil; the land and persons of their subjects are equally their property, and every inhabitant of their kingdom is born their slave; if he bears a higher rank it is by the king's gift; for his nearest relations are accounted nothing better. The same obtained in Persia. Aristotle calls the Persian generals and nobles, slaves of the great king. Xerxes, reproving Pytheus the Lydian when seeking to excuse one of his sons from going to war, says, "You that are my slave, and bound to follow me with your wife and all your family ."—And Gobryas says to Cyrus, "I deliver myself to you, at once your companion and your slave."

are several kinds of bread in Abyssinia, some of different sorts of teff, and some of tocusso, which also vary in quality. The king of Abyssinia eats of wheat bread, though not of every wheat, but of that only that grows in the province of Dembea, therefore called the king's food. It was so with the kings of Persia, who ate wheat bread, Herodotus says, but only of a particular kind, as we learn from Strabo.

shewn, in the course of the foregoing history, that it always has been, and still is the custom of the kings of