Ill] AND HISTORIC TIMES 219 



To the acquisition of horses was plainly due the great 

 conquests of the monarchs of the eighteenth and nineteenth 

 dynasties, such as Rameses II (called Sesostris by the Greeks), 

 who pushed his conquests into far regions of Asia and Africa. 

 It may even turn out that so far from the Egyptians having 

 obtained the horse from the Hyksos, their successful revolt and 

 final expulsion of that people was due to the fact that the 

 latter had no horses, whilst the Egyptians had been able to 

 obtain these animals from a neighbouring region. But though 

 the king had a numerous body of war-chariots, it must not be 

 supposed that the horse was generally used by the Egyptians 

 for any other purpose than war. The king and his nobles rode 

 in chariots, but the ordinary people used the ass, known in 

 Egypt for many centuries before the horse. We are told that 

 "Pharaoh made Joseph ride in the second chariot that he had 1 ," 

 and those Egyptians who bought with horses corn from Joseph 2 

 were probably the wealthy class who would be obliged to 

 furnish chariots and horses to the king in time of war. When 

 Pharaoh pursued the Israelites he took with him six hundred 

 chosen chariots 3 , which probably represent the standing force 

 of war chariots kept in readiness. 



Achilles is represented in the Iliad* as declaring that no 

 gifts from Agamemnon can assuage his wrath, not even if he 

 gave him all the revenue of Orchomenus or Egyptian Thebes 

 " Thebes of the hundred gates, whence sally forth two hundred 

 warriors through each with horses and chariots," but in such 

 a passage we may well make allowance for considerable poetic 

 exaggeration. 



It is now plain that Egypt did not get from the Arabs or 

 from any other Semitic people the horses which she was ex- 

 porting into Asia Minor in the tenth century B.C., and we know 

 not how much earlier. As she was sending them into regions 



1 Gen. xli. 43. a Gen. xlvii. 17. 



3 Ex. xiv. 7. "Six hundred chosen chariots, and all the chariots of Egypt." 

 But the latter clause may well mean, even "all the chariots of Egypt," from which 

 it would follow that six hundred chariots was the full number that the king 

 could put in the field, a very likely figure. 



4 ix. 381. 



