52 THR PHARxVOH OF THE EXODUS 



connection is found in the fish called Adonis, mentioned by iSlian, 

 which is equally at home in the sea and on the shore, and which the 

 naturalist thought was so called because Adonis was in love with two 

 goddesses, one of the land and the other of the sea.^^° Finally, in this 

 connection, we have the statement of Lucian, of which Mr, Kenrick 

 thus speaks : " There is a close resemblance between the rites which 

 related to the death and revival of Adonis at Byblus, and of Osiris in 

 Egypt. "^ Some of the people of Byblus claimed to have the sepulchre 

 of Osiris among them, and maintained that all the rites commonly 

 referred to Adonis properly related to Osiris. Their connection appears 

 from the story related by Lucian, that a head formed of papyrus, or a 

 vessel of papyrus containing a letter, was annually thrown into the sea 



all his dominions, are represented as hardly possessing one chaste and faithful wife. Yet there 

 was one who was destined to be found faithful to her lord, and who would effect the decisive cure 

 of his blindness. The chaste, bright Erythriean Sea had been mystically betrothed and wedded 

 to Egypt. Hasten, O Pharaoh ! gather together all thy royal state. Thy blindness shall be 

 removed ; thine eyes shall be washed and opened in the waters of the bright Erythrfean, and 

 thou Shalt sleep ever after in the embraces of thy one faithful wife, the bright, chaste sea. Go, 

 with oriental pomp and luxury ; take witli thee all thy harem, the lewd ministers of thy revel- 

 lings, and all thy faithless wives and concubines. They shall have their reward. They all shall 

 be hopelessly shut up as in a walled city, in the Brythra;an glebe, into which thou shalt have 

 gathered them ; and even as when a city is burned, they shall see the narrowing and narrowing 

 space, the nearer and nearer bursting and crashing and falling in of the encircling walls on every 

 side ; the sui'ging, eddying and roaring of the resistless and rapidly advancing element in which 

 they are inevitably doomed to be engulfed !" — Egypt. Record, 403. 



130 ^.gjiaii da NaUira, Animalium, L. ix, c. 36. The explanation which iElian fails to give 

 may be found in the words of inspiration : — "The waters returned and covered the chariots and 

 the horsemen, and all the host of Pharaoh that came into the sea after tliem : there remained 

 not so much as one of them. * •*■ * And Israel saw the Egyptians dead upon the sea-shore." — 

 Exod. xiv, 28, 30. It is to be remarked that Pharaoh is not specially mentioned among the 

 drowned. Bishop Patrick thus writes, in his commentary upon the first of the verses quoted 

 above : "Some have fancied that all the host of Pharaoh did not perisli, but only so many of 

 them as pursued the Israelites into the sea, which they fancy this jilace intimates some did not. 

 But tlie plain moaning is that they all came into the sea after the Israelites, and were all drowned 

 in it. It is a wilder fancy that Pharaoh alone was saved by the angels Michael and Gabriel, 

 because he cried out, as he had done heretofore (Exod. ix, 17), ' The Lord is righteous, and I 

 and my people are wicked. ' Thus the author of D ihre Hajamim (or the Life and Death of Moses), 

 who says they transported him to Nineveh, where he reigned as long as the Israelites wandered 

 in the wilderness. The same is related by other such fabulous writers, who are soberly confuted 

 by Aben Ezra from the following words : ' There remained not so much as one of them ;' and 

 from Exodus, xv, 4, 19, where Moses, in his song, plainly makes Pharaoh to have perished among 

 the rest." The restoration of Adonis to life, commemorated in the Finding of Adonis, may 

 connect with such statements as Aben Ezra sought to disprove. 



isi I cannot agree with this author and others in their belief that Osiris and Adonis are the 

 same. Osiris I regard as very much older, and identical with the Phrygian Atys, tlie Arabian 

 Ad, and the Egyptian Actoes of the lists or Ati of tl<g monuments, who was killed, like Actaeon, 

 by his own guards. It is, however, not at all unlikely that the old Typhonian myth was super- 

 seded by the later catastrophe, and that the Solar Rameses Thothmosis was put in the place of 

 his ancestor, the Solar Ati, who preceded the Shepherds, being himself often reckoned as one 

 of them. 



