356 THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY vin 



surely impossible that he should have been less 

 familiar with the complete legal system, and with 

 the method of administration of justice, which, 

 even in his time, had enabled the Egyptian people 

 to hold together, as a complex social organisation, 

 for a period far longer than the duration of old 

 Roman society, from the building of the city to the 

 death of the last CaBsar. Nor need we look to 

 Moses alone for the influence of Egypt upon Israel. 

 It is true that the Hebrew nomads who came into 

 contact with the Egyptians of Osertasen, or of 

 Ramses, stood in much the same relation to them, 

 in point of culture, as a Germanic tribe did to the 

 Romans of Tiberius, or of Marcus Antoninus ; or as 

 Captain Cook's Omai did to the English of George 

 the Third. But, at the same time, any difficulty 

 of communication which might have arisen out of 

 this circumstance was removed by the long pre- 

 existing intercourse of other Semites, of every 

 grade of civilisation, with the Egyptians. In 

 Mesopotamia and elsewhere, as in Phenicia, Semi- 

 tic people had attained to a social organisation 

 as advanced as that of the Egyptians ; Semites had 

 conquered and occupied Lower Egypt for cen- 

 turies. So extensively had Semitic influences pene- 

 trated Egypt that the Egyptian language, during 

 the period of the nineteenth dynasty, is said 

 byBrugsch to be as full of Semitisms as German is 

 of Gallicisms ; while Semitic deities had supplant- 

 ed the Egyptian gods at Heliopolis and else- 



