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“I found him sitting in his upper room with his back to a window, so that the waves of the great Syrian sea broke behind his head,” says Wenamon poetically. The two men got down to business, and with every word Wenamon was deeper in trouble. The prince spared the humiliated Egyptian no embarrassment. He admitted that Amon was supreme, that Egypt had once been the hub of the world, and that his own land owed much to the skill and learning it had acquired from Egypt. But this was in the past. Where was Wenamon’s ship? the prince asked sarcastically—for surely a man on so important a mission would have been given an official vessel for his journey? Where were his credentials? Most important of all—where was his money? Byblos was not subject to the ruler of Egypt. Even in the past, when a king of that land ordered a shipment of the fine cedar wood, he had paid for it, and paid well. The prince brought out his account books to prove it.

Wenamon “was silent in that great moment.” There really wasn’t much he could say. But he hit on the one argument he did have, and hit it hard—the power and might of Amon and the spiritual benefits he could bestow, benefits beside which mere gold and silver were trivial. His speech was masterful, fully worthy of the man who could talk his way out of a robbery, and it had its effect. The prince of Byblos let him send back to Tanis for goods with which to trade. Smendes and his queen Tentamon came through, and the prince began to load the cedar.

Wenamon’s troubles were not over. Just as he was finally about to set sail for Egypt with the hard-won cedar, he saw ships speeding into port. The ships belonged to the prince of Dor, who was in hot pursuit of the money Wenamon had liberated. Wenamon knew, as soon as he identified the ships, that he was in for it. Stiff upper lips and Anglo-Saxon phlegm were unknown to the ancients; when they suffered, they wanted everybody to know about it. Wenamon suffered all over the beach of Byblos, in a tone of voice that was clearly audible up at the palace.

One can only marvel at Wenamon’s oratorical talents. His character or personal habits apparently induced instant hatred in the people who met him, but when he started talking he had the situation under control. The prince of Byblos was as responsive as a hypnotized rabbit to the Egyptian’s rhetoric. Although Wenamon’s loud laments—before the boats had even landed!—were an open confession of guilt, the prince stood by him. He sent the woebegone Egyptian a message telling him not to worry, and reinforced the advice with gifts of food and drink and the temporary loan of an Egyptian singing girl. The following day he got Wenamon on a ship and out of Byblos—with, no doubt, a hearty sigh of relief. The Egyptian ended up in Cyprus, and the inhabitants met him with curses and threats; this seems to have been the instant reaction of most of the people Wenamon encountered. He forced his way through the enraged throng and appealed to the queen of Cyprus for protection. The papyrus unhappily breaks off at this point, but no doubt the eloquence of Wenamon once again saved his life. He got back to Egypt to tell his tale.

The most important historical fact about this picaresque story is what it tells us of Egyptian prestige in the areas that had once been controlled by swaggering Egyptian troops. The breakdown at home was reflected by the contempt in which the once powerful nation was held abroad.

We may as well stop for a minute and get the terminology straight. Egyptologists like to break history up into periods. The Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties are sometimes referred to as the Ramesside Period. The Twenty-first through Twenty-sixth (Saite) Dynasties now constitute the Third Intermediate Period. (I can’t quarrel with the logic of that term, since for almost the entire time Egypt consisted of separate states and kingdoms, just as it had during the first two intermediate periods. I just think there are getting to be too many “periods.”) That leaves us with the Late Period, from the Twenty-seventh Dynasty, depending