♦ KNOWLEDGE ♦ 



[June 2, 1882. 



enthusiasm with whicli that announcement was received 

 neither sprca<l so fast nor rose so high as the excitement 

 with which, in the month of July, 1881, we read of the 

 finding of Kameses the Great. For, although the mortal 

 remains and sepulchral nlics of between thirty and forty 

 royal personages belonging to various dynasties had, it 

 was reported, been recovered from the depths of a sub- 

 terraneous tomb at Dayr-el-Baliaree, and although some 

 others of those mummied kings were among the mightiest 

 warriors of ancient Egyptian liistory, it was upon the 

 mummy of Rameses the Great, the reputed oppressor of 

 the Hebrews, that our interest was mainly concentrated. 



I s;iy the " reputed " oppressor, because, in the absence 

 of direct contemporary evidence, it is scarcely possible to 

 prove quite positively that Rameses 11. was indeed the 

 Pharaoh who afflicted the descendants of Jacob. That is 

 to say, no Egyptian records bearing upon the history of 

 the Hebrew sojourn, or even mentioning the Hebrews by 

 name,* liave yet been discovered. Xor is this to bo won- 

 dered at ; for, in the first place, that part of Egypt in which 

 tlie Hebrew colony dwelt — namely, the land of Goshen — 

 remains to this day almost wholly unexplored ; and, in the 

 second place, being themselves politically insignificant, the 

 Hebrews were not likely to be named in monumental in- 

 scriptions elsewhere. We have, therefore, no contemporary 

 evidence, except the evidence of the Book of Exodus, upon 

 wliich to found an inquiry : and the I5ook of Exodus, 

 although it refers to two successive Pharaolis, unfortunately 

 omits to give the name of either. If we turn from the Book 

 of Exodus to the Book of Genesis, the same unaccountable 

 omission confronts us in the historiesof Abraham and Joseph. 

 The king who entreated Abraham well for Sarah's sake, 

 and the king who set Joseph over all the land of Egypt, 

 are alike anonymous. In all four instances, the foreign 

 ruler is called simply " Pharaoh," or " king." It is there- 

 fore only by means of a very strict analysis of the 

 text that we are enabled to arrive at any conclusion re- 

 garding the historical epoch at which Abraham journeyed 

 into Egypt, or Joseph rose to power, or the Heljrews 

 siiffered oppression and fled from captivity. There is, of 

 course, but one way in which to conduct an analysis of the 

 kind : that way being carefully to note every precise state- 

 ment and every incidental allusion contained in the 

 Hebrew narrative, and to collate such statements and 

 allusions with cognate statements and allusions derived 

 from Egyptian sources " Cognate," be it observed ; not 

 "identical." We have always to bear in mind that 

 Egyptian documents are silent as to the Hebrews from 

 first to last ; and that, for the purpos(;s of this inquiry, 

 such documents are available only as they enable the 

 analyst to calculate probabilities of time and place, 

 to identify localities, and to int<!rpret those touclies 

 of local colour in which the Bible-narrative abounds. 

 Al>ove all, it must be remembered that but for 



• M. Chalxui, nn eminently learned and cautions Kg^-ptologist, 

 pnbliBbcd an article nearly twenty years ago in his first eeries of 

 " Melan(,'C8 E(ryptologi(|uefi," wherein he sought to identify the 

 IlebrewB with a class of workmen called in Egyptian the Apcriu, 

 who were employed to extract stone from the quarries opposite 

 Slemphis during the reign of Kamoses II. Those Aperiu are twice 

 mentioned in tlie reports of certain overseers of the works named 

 Kaoiser and Keniamon, which re[>orts, written on papyrus in the 

 Hieratic chanictcr, are among the treasures of the Leydcn Museum. 

 Unfortunately for M. Chahaa's argument, however, a strict com- 

 parative examination of numerous Hebrew words impfjrtcd into tho 

 Egyptian language shows that tho Egyptians rendered the Hebrew 

 2/ by a combination equivalent to vp, and not by p, as inylpcn«; 

 while the latest researches show the Aperiu to bean Egyptian tribe 

 of whom mention is mode, according to Lenormant, as early as the 

 VJth Dynasty. See Lenormahfs " Histoiro Ancicnne de TOricnt," 

 vol. ii., p. 271. 18S2. 



the Bible we should know nothing whatever of the 

 Hebrews in Egypt, nor of their final settlement in 

 the Land of Canaan. For these important events the Bible 

 is our sole authority. Its information is invaluable, as far 

 as it goes ; but it does not go far enough. The stories of 

 Abraham and Joseph, though told at some length, leave 

 untold the very facts which would have determined their 

 place in history ; while the period of the oppression, which 

 must have extended over several reigns, is dismissed in the- 

 briefest manner, and is so vaguely worded that it reads as. 

 if all liappened under the rul(! of a single Pharaoh. ThesP 

 are the missing links which puzzle Bible students and 

 battle archa-ological inquirers. We may hope hero and 

 there to bridge over a chasm or fill up a blank ; but it is 

 impossible absolutely to reestablish the chain of events 

 from Egyptian sources, so long as the cities and cemeteries 

 of the Land of Goshen lie buried under enormous rubbish- 

 mounds, which, in a corrupt but recognisable form, pre- 

 serve to this diiy the ancient names of the sites upon which 

 they have risen. 



I may at once pi-emisc that Egyptologists are, for the 

 most part, agreed in identifying the PharMoh of the Oppres- 

 sion with Rameses II., and the Pharaoh of the Exodus, 

 with his son and successor, Menephthah I. This identifica- 

 tion — originally proposed by tho late illustrious Vicomte E. 

 de Rouge — has undoubtedly more probabilities in its- 

 favour than any other. I will even say that it has, 

 I venture to think, even more probabilities in its favotn- 

 than have as yet been recognised ; and that some of 

 these unrecognised probabilities are so conclusive that 

 they very nearly amount to proof. Before, however, we 

 proceed to an analytical examination of the evidence which 

 connects this Pharaoh with tho period of tho oppression, it 

 will be well to give a general outline of the argument, and 

 for this purpose I cannot do better than translate tho 

 following passage from M. de Rouge's preface to his 

 " Notice Sonmiaire " of the Egyptian antiquities in the 

 Louvre collection : — 



" The chronology of Egyptian history and the chronology 

 of the Bible (especially when it becomes a question of esti- 

 mating the period of the Judges) is altogether too full of 

 uncertainties to enable us, (I priori, and by a simple com- 

 parison of dates, to determine under which king the 

 Exodus took place. The dilliculty is even greater as regards 

 the time of the patriarch Joseph, liecause the length of 

 time during which the captivity lasted is in itself a fruitful 

 subject of controversy. Moses never employs any but the 

 generic term 'Pharaoh,' which means 'tlie King.' But if 

 we carefully note the salient points of the Bible narrative, 

 we find, first of all, a king who compelled his slaves to 

 build the city of Rameses, in Lower Egypt. Next, if wo 

 calculate tho time during which Moses dwelt with Jethro, 

 when ho fled from the wrath of the king ; if we remembeir 

 that ]\Ioses smote the Egyptian just as he had attained t* 

 manhood, and that, according to the Bilde, he was eighty 

 years old at tho time of the Exodus, it will at once be seen 

 that the reign thus indicated must have been excessively 

 long. The Bilile say.s, in fact, ' After a long time, the king 

 died.' But one Rameses answers to all these particulars. 

 — na-nely, Rameses II., who reigned for 67 years, and 

 who did actually build a city in Lower Egypt, to which 

 he gave his name. Moses came back from Arabia as soon 

 as he heard of the dpath of tho king whom he had angered. 

 The Bible account of the plagues of Iilgypt, and of tho 

 horrible catastrophe which attended the departure of tlu? 

 Israelites, would seem to be compatible with only a limited 

 number of yeans. Menephthah, son of Rame.ses II., is, 

 without doubt, the Pharaoh of the Red Sea; Imt the 

 Mosaic narrative does not give us to understand that the 



