134 HORSES IN GENESIS 



lower Egypt. Manetho is prejudiced ; but 

 just as in modern Western America where the 

 sheep herder is rated among cattle men as 

 something rather lower than a dog, it is amusing 

 to see how the poet in Genesis admits that 

 shepherds were an abomination in the eyes of 

 the Egyptians. If one dates Abraham's visit 

 to Egypt in the twenty-first instead of the 

 nineteenth century B.C. old Manetho and the 

 Hebrew poet are perfectly agreed as to the 

 Hyksos-Israelite invasion. 



The Genesis narrative shows the insidious 

 way in which the children of Israel drifted 

 down into Eg3^pt, then how they made them- 

 selves agreeable as office holders, and by intro- 

 ducing frogs, flies, lice, cattle sickness and other 

 improvements until at last the Egyptians 

 waxed desperate and ran them out of the 

 country. Manetho says that these Hyksos 

 people occupied lower Egypt east of the Nile 

 from Memphis to the sea, and later on estab- 

 lished a dynasty with six Kings in the succes- 

 sion. After five centuries the Egyptians com- 

 bined under the Thebaid Kings of upper 

 Egypt, and drove the Hyksos across the Desert 

 of Sin into Palestine. It is quite possible that 

 in Genesis, and Manetho 's History we have the 

 two sides of one story, and that it was the 



