488 COSMOS. 



expressly says, that Sesostris (Ramses 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 Egyptian navigation is that from the earliest ages, 

 not only the Nile but the Arabian Gulf was navigated. The 

 celebrated copper mines near Wadi-Magaha, on the peninsula 

 of Sinai, were worked as early as the fourth 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 Ramses the Great,* to 

 form the canal from Suez, probably for the purpose of facili- 

 tating intercourse with the land of the Arabian copper mines." 

 More considerable maritime expeditions, as for instance, the 

 frequently contested, but not, I think improbable,^ circum- 



the countries 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 Smyrna." A rock 

 inscription, in which the name of Ramases 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 Pho- 

 csea. Lepsius, in the Ann. dell Institute archeol., vol. x. 1838, p. 12; 

 and in his letter from Smyrna, Dec. 1845, published in the Archdolo- 

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

 periodical, 1843, No. 3, s. 35. Whether, as Heeren believes, (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 undoubtedly 

 soon be settled from the rapidly advancing discoveries now made in 

 archaeology 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 Ramases 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 Ramases Miamoun, that Moses 

 went out of Egypt, and this, according to the researches of Lepsius, was 

 about 1300 years before our era. 



* According to Aristotle, Strabo, and Pliny; but not according to 

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

 xxvii. p. 219; and Droysen, Bildung des hellenist. Staatensy stems, s. 735. 



t To the important opinions of Rennell, Heeren, and Sprengel, who 



