(3) Rameses II. Rameses II snceeedcd Seti I. Wars were carried on with greater vigor than ever before. All countries, even those whom Egyptians had never known, began to learn of Rameses' sol diers. A prize poem called Pentair, or by a poet of that name, describing with great vividness the brave deeds of Rameses II, was inscribed on the walls of the temples at Abydos. (See EGYP TIANS, LITERATURE OF ANCIENT.) All the best artists of that period painted great pictures of the battle of the Khita or Hittites. One of the pictures shows the king of Khilibu or Khiribu, an ally of the Khita king, being rescued from drown ing by his own men, as the chariots were over turned into the river. Raineses II is said to have gone too far into the thickest of the battle. In this dread time he prayed to his god 'Amen,' who appearing encouraged him, and led him on to vic tory. (Sayce, Old Testament History in the Light of Recent Discoveries in Egypt.) There is little doubt that the Pharaoh who persecuted the Israel ites so bitterly was Rameses 11. Both tradition and monuments prove that he was a builder and in each of his works he erected a monument which declared that the work had been done by captives. (See Panora.) In later years when Rameses was thirty-four, he married the daughter of the king of Khita, thus ce menting a treaty between Egypt and Khita. Rame ses II reigned sixty-seven years.
(4) Meneptah or Menephtah. The persecu tion of the Israelites which Rameses began was bitterly prosecuted by Meneptah.
(5) Egypt's Decline. By the time of the twenty-fifth dynasty Egypt had been divided into a number of small principalities. The light of Egypt's glory was fact fading. Amasis briefly kindled the dying spark. but upon his death Cam byses, the Persian, became king. From this time, with a brief exception. Egypt ceased to be Egyp tian.
8. Egypt and the Bible. (1) Zoan. The spade of the archeologist has revealed fire as a most destructive agent at the imperial Zoan, the Tanis of the Greeks. The unearthing of the pri vate houses, in genuine Pompeiian style, reveals the sad havoc played by fire almost everywhere. By the mouth of Ezekiel, God had declared, "I will set fire in Zoan" (Ezek. xxx :W. We had known it was a desolate ruin; now we know scientifically that fire was set in Zoan—most de structively.
(2) Joseph. On an altar, excavated at Am in the suburbs of Zoan, is engraved as a title that of the "Chief of the chancellors and royal seal bear ings." Under Pharaoh at Memphis, Thebes or Zoan, there could be but one such personage. Now this occurred, according to the monuments, under the Hyksos kings. Joseph was under a Hyksos king —probably Apepi, the last monarch of the XVIIth Dynasty. And, biblically speaking, Joseph had
such power. So we read: "Let Pharaoh look out a man discreet and wise, and set him over the land of Egypt" (Gen. xli :33). Such an inscription as the above, therefore, reflects much light upon these vivid passages in the biography of Joseph.
(3) Inscriptions at Tanis. A marked pecu liarity of the Hyksos inscriptions at Tanis is that they are always in a line down the right shoulder, never on the left ; whereas the native Egyptians inscribed either side indifferently. This Semitic honoring of the right shoulder recalls at once such passages as Exod. xxix :22 ; Lev. vii :32, 33; Num. xviii The statement, "There went up with Joseph both chariots and horsemen" (Gen. 1:9), disputed as impossible by Kalisch and others, who have said that there were no mounted horsemen in the Egyptian army, is established by two granite tablets which refer to "the very valorous upon horses," and "strong upon their horses"—expres sions applied to Rameses and his soldiers. The sublime hymn, "The horse and his rider bath he thrown into the sea" (Exod. xv :21), becomes fact, as well as poetry, in the light of such texts from the long-buried monuments of a site like Zoan.
In the Boston Museum of Fine Arts is an un gainly statue of an elderly brother of the Pharaoh of the Exodus. This crouching figure is entitled "General of Cavalry," Ni•hile Meneptah was called "General of Infantry," terms indicative of both mounted and foot soldiers in the armies of Egypt.
(4) Goshen. Where in Egypt was the land of Goshen? Saft-el-Henneh, some four miles east of the railway station, Zagazig. is shown to be the site of the capital, in that land, and the all important discovery is told in the volume of the Egyptian Exploration Fund entitled "Goshen, and the Shrine of Saft-el-Henneh." Dr. Naville had read on two fraements in the Museum at Cairo inscriptions relating to this name ; and when in his personal research he espied a block of black granite peeping from the mud at Saft-el-Henneh, his trained eye instantly recognized it as a third fragment of the monument from which the two fragments had been taken. Excavations followed with the proofs that this site, within the walls of brick, anciently was the city of Goshen, and the country about it the land of that name. (See GOSHEN.) (5) Bubastis. A re-study is necessary of the ten chapters of Jeremiah, from the 37th to the 47th chapter inclusive, in which the events in Egypt following the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar are described, in order fully to appreciate the importance of such excavations as those of Tell-el-Defeneh, the site of the Daphnx of the Greeks and the Tahpanhes of Jeremiah.