There remains to be noticed one piece of docu mentary evidence which has quite recently been brought to light. Dr. Brugsch, Zeitschrift, Sept. '63, reports that ' one set of the Leyden hieratic papyri, now publishing by Dr. Leemans, consists of letters and official reports. In several of these, examined by M. Chabas, repeated mention is made of certain foreigners, called eipuruju, i. e., Hebrews, compelled by Ramses II. to drag stones for the building of the city Ramses.' In his Me langes Egyptol., '62, 4th dissertation, M. Chabas calls them Aperiu. It is certainly striking, as Mr. Birch remarks (in Revue Archeol., April '62, p. 291), that ' in the three documents which speak of these foreigners, they appear engaged on works of the same kind as those to which the Hebrews were subjected by the Egyptians : it is also impor tant that the papyri were found at Memphis. But the more inviting the proposed identification, the more cautious one needs to be.' As the sounds R and L are not discriminated in Egyptian writing, it may be that the name is Apeliu ; and as B P have distinct characters, one does not see why the b of c-oy should be rendered by p. (The case of Epep = Y;t% is different ; see below.) It seems also that the same name occurs as late as the time of Rameses IV., where it can hardly mean the Hebrews. Besides, the monumen' of Thothmes III. above mentioned leads to quite a different conclusion. Where the evidence is so conflicting, the inquirer who seeks only truth, not the confir mation of a foregone conclusion, has no choice but to reserve his judgment.
The time of this Menephtha, so unhesitatingly proclaimed to be the Pharaoh of the Exode, is placed beyond all controversy—so Bunsen and Lepsius maintain—by an invaluable piece of evi dence furnished by Theon, the Alexandrine mathe matician of the 4th century. In a passage of his unpublished commentary on the Almagest, first given to the world by Larcher (Ilerodot., i',. 553), and since by Biot (Sur la periode Sothiaque, p. 18, 129, ff.), it is stated that the Sothiac Cycle of Astronomy which, as it ended in A. D. 139, com menced in 1322 B. c. (2oth July), was known in his time as 'the era of Menophres,' aro Aievb (mews. There is no king of this name : read Illep600ecos—so we have Menephtha of the 19th dynasty, the king of the leper-story, the Exodus Pharaoh. Lepsius, making the reign begin in 1328 B. c., places the Exode at 1314 B. C. = is Menephtha, in accordance with the alleged thirteen years' retirement into Ethiopia and the return in the fourteenth or fifteenth year.—Certainly the pre cise name Menophres does not appear in the lists ; but in later times that name may have been used for the purpose of distinguishing some particular king from others of the same name ; and there is reason to think this was actually the case. (t.) The king Tethmosis or Thothmes III. repeatedly appears on monuments with the addition to his royal legend, Mai-Re, 'Beloved of Re,' with the article Alai-ph - RI, and with the preposition Alain' -ph-Re, which last is precisely Theon's Me vdOpris. (2.) The acknowledged confusion of names in that part of the 18th dynasty, where this king occurs—Afisaphris, Alisphres, Memphres (Armen.), then ilfispnragmuthosis (the AAILW. of Josephus is evidently an error of copying for .1.11IDIDP. : in the list ibid., the 5th and 6th names are M495pris, MeOpal.z.ou'Oceo-ts)—is perhaps best explained by sup posing that the king was entered in the lists by his distinctive as well as his family name. (3.) In Pliny's notice of the obelisks (/./. Ar., xxxvi. 64), that known to be of Thothmes III. is said to belong to Mesphres, which, says Bunsen (iv. 130), 'would he the popular distinctive name given to this Thothmes.' Just so ! And in the statement of Theon, the king is presented by ' his popular dis tinctive name,' Menophres. (4.) 'There was (says Dr. Hiucks, Trans. R. Irish Acad., vol. xxi., pt. r) a tradition, if it do not deserve another name, current among the Egyptians in the time of Anto ninus, to the effect that the Sothiac Cycle, then ending (139 A. D.), commenced in the reign of Thothmes III. The existence of such a tradition is evidenced by a number of scarab:ei, evidently of Roman workmanship, referring to the Sothiac Cycle, and in which the royal legend of this monarch appears.' These are sufficient grounds
for believing that the Menophres of Theon is no other than Thothmes III., and that his reign was supposed (rightly or wrongly) to include the year 1322 B. C. It may be also that when Herodotus was told that MoenIr lived about 90o years before the time of his visit to Egypt—a date not very wide of 1322 B. c.—Thothmes was named to him by his popular distinctive appellation, Mai-Re, only confused with Mares=Amenemha III., the Pharaoh of the Labyrinth and its Lake. (Other explanations of the name Menophres may be seen in Bockh, Manetho, p. 691, ff. ; Biot, Re'cherches, interprets it as the name of Memphis, lWen-nofru, importing that the normal date, 2oth July, for the heliacal rising of Sirius and epoch of the cycle, is true only for the latitude of Memphis.) What has been said is sufficient to show that there is no necessity for altering a letter of the name ; conse quently that the time of Menephtha is not defined by the authority of In support of his date, 1314 B.c., for the Exode, Lepsius (Chronol. 359, ff.) has an argument fetched from the modern Jewish chronology (Hillel's Mun dane Era), in which, he says, that is the precise year assigned to that event. Hillel, he is confident, was led to it by Manetho's Egyptian tradition, which gave him the name of the Pharaoh, which being obtained would easily give him the time. Bunsen, though finally settling on the year 1320 B. C., had previously declared with Lepsius for 1314 B. C., decided by the circumstance that a tradition not compatible with the usual chrono logical systems of the 7ews, but which cannot be accidental, places the Exode at that year. This fact seems, from Lepsius's account of the Seder Olam Rahba, to admit of no doubt' (iv. 336). It admits of more than doubt—of absolute refutation. Hillel's whole procedure, from first to last, was simply Biblical. Daniel's prophecy of the 70 weeks gave him B. C. 422 for n Zedekiah [CHRONOLOGY, sec. 17]; thence up to 6 Hezekiah, he found the sum=133 years; for the kings of Israel the actual numbers were 243, of which he made 24o years; then 37 years of Solomon, 4S0 years of 1 Kings vi. I, added to these, made the total 890 years, whence the date for the Exode was B. C. 422 plus 890=1312 ; for that this, not 1314, was Hillel's year of the Exode is demonstrable (Review of Lepsius on Bible Chronology by the present writer, in Arnold's Theolog. Critic, vol. i., P. 1851).f It is alleged that an indication confirmatory of the low date assigned by these writers is furnished by the month-date of the Exodus passover, 14 Abib, a name which occurs only in connection with that history, Exod. xii. 2 ; xiii. 4 ; xxiii. 15 ; xxxiv. 18; Deut. xvi. I. For there is no reason to doubt that this is the hebraized form of the Egyptian Epep, Coptic Epiphi, of which the Arabic render ing is also Abib.* ' At the time assigned, the vague month Epep would pretty nearly coincide with the Hebrew Abib '—Lepsius, Chron., p. mi. Hardly so: for in the year named, 1 Epiphi would fall on r4th May ; and it 'is scarcely conceivable that the passover month (whose full moon is that next to the vernal equinox, which in that century fell cir. 5th April) should begin so late as the middle of May. Not till a hundred years later would the vague month Epiphi and the Hebrew passover month coincide. The argument proves too much, unless we are prepared to lower the Exode to cir. 1200 B. C. (To some it may imply that the narra tive of the Exode was written about that time —Mr. Sharpe, History of Egypt, i. 63—but one can hardly suppose the Hebrews to have retained the vague Egyptian months as well as their names so long after their settlement in Palestine.) If in any year from 1300 B.C. upwards, the full moon next the vernal equinox fell in the month Epiphi, it would follow that the Coptic month-names (which, it is well understood, never occur on the monuments) belonged then to a different form of the year. The present writer surmises that such was the state of the case; but the question is not for this place.