126 COSMOS. 



lands of the Scythians and Thracians, to Colchis and the 

 River Phasis, where those of his soldiers who were weary of 

 their wanderings remained as settlers. Rameses was also the 

 first, according to the priests, " who, by means of his long ships, 

 subjected to his dominion the people who inhabited the coasts 

 of the Erythrean Sea. After this achievement, he continued 

 his course until he came to a sea which was not navigable, 

 owing to its shallowness."* Diodorus expressly says that Se- 

 sostris (Rameses the Great) penetrated into India beyond the 

 Ganges, and that he brought captives back with him from 

 Babylon. " The only certain fact with reference to Eg}'ptian 

 navigation is, that, from the earliest ages, not only the Nile, 

 but the Arabian Gulf, was navigated. The celebrated cop- 

 per mines near Wadi-Magaha, on the peninsula of Sinai, were 

 worked as early as the Iburth dynasty, under Cheops-Chufu. 

 The sculptural inscriptions of Hamamat on the Cosseir road, 

 which connected the Valley of the Nile with the western 

 coasts of the Red Sea, go back as far as the sixth dynasty. 

 Attempts were made under Rameses the Greatt to form the 



* Herod., ii., 102 and 103 ; Diod. Sic, i., 55 and 56. Of the memo- 

 rial pillars (^arrj'kaL) which Rameses Miamoun set up as tokens of victoiy 

 in the comitries through which he passed, Herodotus expressly names 

 three (ii., 106): '-one in Palestinian Syria, and two in Ionia, on the 

 road from the Ephesian territory to Phocaea, and from Sardis to Smyr- 

 na." A rock inscription, in which the name of Rameses is frequently 

 met with, has been found near the Lycus in Syria, not far from Beirut 

 (Berytus), as well as another ruder one in the Valley of Karabel, near 

 Nymphio, and, according to Lepsius, on the road from the Ephesian 

 territory to Phocfea. Lepsius, in the Ann. delV Institule Archeol., vol. 

 X., 1838, p. 12; and in his letter from Smyrna, Dec, 1845, published 

 in the Archdologische Zeitung, Mai, 1846, No. 41, s. 271-280. Kiepert, 

 in the same periodical, 1843, No. 3, s. 35. Whether, as Heeren be- 

 lieves (see in his Geschichte der Staaten des Alterthums, 1828, s. 76), 

 the great conqueror penetrated as far as Persia and Western India, " as 

 Western Asia did not then contain any great empire" (the building of 

 Assyrian Nineveh is placed only 1230 B.C.), is a question that will un- 

 doubtedly soon be settled from the rapidly advancing discoveries now 

 made in archfeology and phonetic languages. Strabo (lib. xvi., p. 760) 

 speaks of a memorial pillar of Sesostris near the Strait of Deire, now 

 known as Bab-el-Mandeb. It is, moreover, also very probable, that 

 even in " the Old Kingdom," above 900 years before Rameses Miamoun, 

 Egyptian kings may have undertaken similar military expeditions into 

 Asia. It was under Setos II., the Pharaoh belonging to the nineteenth 

 dynasty, and the second successor of the great Rameses Miamoun, that 

 Moses went out of Egypt, and this, according to the researches of Lep- 

 sius, was about 1300 years before our era. 



f According to Aristotle, Strabo, and Pliny, but not according to 

 Herodotus. See Letronne, in the Rdvue des deux Mondes, 1841, t. 

 xxvii., p. 219 ; and Droysen, Bildung des Hellenist. Staatensystems, s. 735. 



