310 APPENDIX C.,—ON RECENT EGYPTIAN DISCOVERIES. 
“Our most important discovery up to the present time was made 
yesterday morning. I had noticed on Friday the corner of a block 
of polished black granite which I thought might belong to some 
good monument, and I had it unearthed yesterday. It proved to be 
the lower half of a life-sized figure of very beautiful workmanship, 
with two columns of finely-cut hieroglyphs engraved down each side 
of the front of the throne to right and left of the legs of the statue, 
These inscriptions give the name and titles of an absolutely un- 
known King, who, judging from the work, must belong to the 
Hyksos period, or, at all events, to one of the obscure dynasties 
preceding the Hyksos invasion. I forward a copy of the inscrip- 
tions.. One cartouche contains a sign which is quite new to me, 
and which I cannot therefore decipher. The other reads ‘Ian-Ra’ 
or ‘ Ra-Ian,’—a name unlike any I have ever seen. He is described, 
-most strangely, as the worshipper of his Ka (7e. his ghost, or 
double)... .” M. Naville then mentions that the Pharaoh of 
Joseph is called “ Reiyan the son of El Walid” in Arab literature, 
but attaches no weight to this fact, for the utter valuelessness of 
Egyptian history, when written with the reed pen of the Arab Chroni_: 
cler, is only too well known. A writer in the Times adds: “ In the 
meanwhile it must be conceded that the letter-for-letter iden- 
tity of the two names is, to say the least of it, very extraordinary. 
We must not, however, forget that ‘Ra-ian’ may with equal 
correctness be read.‘JIan-Ra,’ and ‘Ian-Ra’ is curiously like 
the name of the Hyksos ‘Iannas’ or ‘Janias,’ who, in a long 
quotation which professes to be given verbatim from Manetho by 
Josephus (answer to Apion, Book I., section 14), is said to have 
reigned for fifty years and one month, and to have been the succes- 
sor of Apophis, and the predecessor of Assis. It would be unrea- 
sonable to doubt that Iannas is as truly an historical personage 
as Apepi ; and itis at least possible that Iannas and Ian-Ra may 
be one and the same. That Joseph served a Hyksos King has long 
been accepted by the majority of Egyptologists as a very probable 
hypothesis, both chronologically and from the internal evidence of 
the Biblical narrative.” 
[As M. Naville is one of the members of this Institute, a 
paper giving the final results of the explorations may be 
expected. | 
