This kingdom preserved its independence to the time of Psammeticus; at which period, being united to the Lower Egypt, it lost its name of Ethiopia, which thenceforth was bestowed upon the nations of Nubia and upon the different tribes of blacks, including Thebes, their metropolis.
** The idea of a city with a hundred gates, in the common acceptation of the word, is so absurd, that I am astonished the equivoque has not before been felt.
It has ever been the custom of the East to call palaces and houses of the great by the name of gates, because the principal luxury of these buildings consists in the singular gate leading from the street into the court, at the farthest extremity of which the palace is situated.

It is under the vestibule of this gate that conversation is held with passengers, and a sort of audience and hospitality given.
All this was doubtless known to Homer; but poets make no commentaries, and readers love the marvellous.
This city of Thebes, now Lougsor, reduced to the condition of a miserable village, has left astonishing monuments of its magnificence.

Particulars of this may be seen in the plates of Norden, in Pocock, and in the recent travels of Bruce.

These monuments give credibility to all that Homer has related of its splendor, and lead us to infer its political power and external commerce.
Its geographical position was favorable to this twofold object.

For, on one side, the valley of the Nile, singularly fertile, must have early occasioned a numerous population; and, on the other, the Red Sea, giving communication with Arabia and India, and the Nile with Abyssinia and the Mediterranean, Thebes was thus naturally allied to the richest countries on the globe; an alliance that procured it an activity so much the greater, as Lower Egypt, at first a swamp, was nearly, if not totally, uninhabited.