CONGRES INTERNATIONAL D’ HISTOIRE DES RELIGIONS. 47 
As for the sbjection that the Exodus is usually assigned to the 
reign of Meneptah, 150 years later than that of Amenophis IV, to 
whom these letters were written, an inscription of Meneptah proves 
that the Israelites were already in his time settled in Canaan ; 
for, speaking of an expedition that he made along the Canaanite 
coast, he says, ‘‘ Ashkelon has been led away captive, Gezer has 
been taken, Inoam has been annihilated, and Isri’il has been laid 
waste and its seed destroyed’ (Hommel, Hebrew Tradition, p. 266). 
It is remarkable that from the time of the division of the 
kingdom of Israel the tribe of Dan is not once named in its 
history ; but, on the other hand, Ezekiel speaks of a certain Dan 
as trading in the fairs of Tyre in company with Javan, as though 
these were kindred peoples (xxvii, 19).* Again, in the times of 
Jonathan and Simon Maccabeus messages passed between the 
_ Jews and the Lacedemonians, or Spartans, stating that they were 
brethren, being equally descended from Abraham. The letters that 
bore them were full of the friendliest expressions; and the first 
sent by the Jews says that since they discovered it they had not 
ceased to remember them at their festivals, in their sacrifices and 
in their prayers, as they would hardly have done if the Spartans 
had been related to them only as closely as the Midianites or the 
Edomites; therefore we may conclude that the Spartans were 
children of Jacob also—part or all of a banished tribe of Israel 
which had settled in the land of Javan (1 Mace. xii and xiv; ef. 
Josephus Ant. xii, 10, and xiii, 8). 
Now Greek tradition tells us that certain descendants of 
Hercules, with the help of the Dorians, about two generations 
atter the Trojan War, conquered the Peloponnesus, establishing 
the dynasties and predominances there found in the earliest times 
of regular history, which begins with the first Olympiad in 
B.c. 776. Again, besides the Grecian Hercules there was an 
Egyptian, an Indian, and a Pheenician Hercules; and it must be 
from the last-named that the two mighty rocks which guard the 
Straits of Gibraltar took their appellation, since to the Greeks in 
Homer’s time, about 800 z.c., the region beyond Italy was all 
* The Hebrew «Dan v’ Javan = and Dan and Javan, is rendered by 
the R.V., Vedan and Javan; but the name of no tribe in the least 
resembling Vedan is on record east of Liguria. 
