more fitted to excite surprise - if not to cause a smile-than to touch the heart or to convince the intellect; and we think a wide change of base will be needed to make this one-sided philosophy into a religion.

Judged on its scientific merits, the book has very little value. Its tone is noisy, flippant, and conceited. It is chiefly of interest to us, as illustrating one phase of contemporary Italian thought, and from its bearings on the religious and political changes which are maturing so fast in Italy. And, despite all the faults of this book, - and they are many, - we hail it as a sign of the great reform which is coming. It will help to swell the flood of indignation which will, ere long, sweep the Eternal City clean of its tyrannical and imbecile government, and which will do away with the sad and sorry comedy which has so long been played there.

F. T. W.

HEINRICH BRUGSCH is well known as one of the ablest living Egyptian scholars. The little book uudernoted * consists of the lectures which he delivered in Berlin at various times during the nine or ten years preceding his departure, as Prussian consul, to Egypt. The titles of the chapters are: A Day and Night in Cairo; The Nile Boat; A Journey over the Desert; An ancient Egyptian story, - the oldest in the world; Moses and the Monuments; The Revelations of the Stones; Germans and Persians, - all fresh and lively and clear, a happy instance of a German scholar being entertaining without ceasing to be learned.

The lecture upon " Moses and the Monuments" touches upon the relation of ancient Hebrew history to that of contemporary nations, which is one of the most interesting topics of modern investigation. The subject is still involved in much obscurity; but there are, nevertheless, certain points which may now be considered clear; and some of the results of recent discoveries in respect to the central figure, the commanding name with which the strictly historical records of the Hebrews open, are quite curious.

There is a difference among scholars of fifty or sixty years as to the date of the Exodus: but that the period intervening between the entrance and the exit of the children of Israel in Egypt comprises one of the most glittering epochs in the history of the kingdom of

* Aus dem Orient. Von HEINRICH BRUGSCH. Zwei Theile in einem Bande. Berlin, 1864. Verlag von Werner Grosse.

VOL. LXXXII. NEW SERIES, VOL. III. NO. III.

32

the Pharaohs, is established beyond question by monumental evidence; and that this period corresponds with the first half of the fourteenth century before Christ, is also well settled. Two thousand years had elapsed since the empire of the Egyptians, beginning in Memphis, and gradually extending its pyramids and its temples southwards to Thebes, had attained a great degree of splendor and power, when suddenly, as the traditions relate, a Semitic horde, hard pressed by the Assyrians, broke into Egypt across the Isthmus of Suez, and, having become well organized under able leaders, occupied the Delta, defeated the Egyptian armies, and, choosing their own kings, established their residence and camp in the city of Tanis, or, as it was called in Egyptian, Hanar (Avaris). By degrees they extended their domination to Memphis, and made the Egyptian kings in Southern Egypt tributary. The foreign domination lasted five hundred years; and the Egyptians found what satisfaction they could in designatiug them, in the inscriptions with which they still went on covering the walls of their temples and tombs, by the word Amu, which means " ox-herds," or with the epithet Aadu, which means "the despised."

But, as in many similar cases of contact between an inferior and a superior civilization, the latter triumphed at last: the nomadic hordes of the Semites yielded to the culture and the arts of the Egyptians. One of the Semitic kings erected a temple in Tanis to Sutech, the Egyptian conception of the Semitic Baal; and they came at last to use in their tombs the Egyptian mode of writing. But the warlike spirit of the Pharaohs still survived, and enabled the latter in the end to overcome their conquerors. Tanis was besieged and taken, and Egypt was again free. And from that time begins the brilliant period in its history, which covers the nineteenth and eighteenth and seventeenth centuries before our era. The Egyptian armies pressed into Palestine, and over the highway, by Gaza and Megiddo, to the banks of the Euphrates and the Tigris; an annual tribute was laid upon Babylon and Nineveh; and the Egyptian conquerors erected their pillars of victory upon the borders of Armenia, where, as the hieroglyphic inscriptions read, "the heavens rest upon four columns."

Thus, as Bunsen says, Africa took its revenge on Asia. Thousands of captives were brought back to labor on the Egyptian temples in Memphis and Thebes, on the walls of which they still stand delineated as bringing water and moistening clay, and making bricks and spreading them to dry in the sun, while Egyptian taskmasters stand over them, stick in hand.

A new dynasty, the nineteenth, followed presently the one that had thus shaken off the Hyksos, as the foreign Semitic kings are commonly termed; and at its head stood Ramses I., its founder, about the middle of the sixteenth century before Christ. About 1400 в.с., his grandson, Ramses II., began his reign, which lasted for sixty-six years; and it is then that the first monumental synchronism occurs with the records of the Hebrews in the Bible. On the eastern side of the Delta, Ramses constructed a series of bulwarks, from Pelusium to Heliopolis, against the inroads of Asiatic hordes, - bulwarks which served also to overawe the Semitic population of his kingdom. And among these fortified places were two, named Ramses and Pachtum : "And they built for Pharaoh treasure cities, Pithom and Raamses" (Exod. i. 11); the word for Pharaoh, which the Hebrews applied to the king, being merely a title signifying "the great house," as we say of the Sultan, "the Sublime Porte" (Gate). It was under this Pharaoh, Ramses II., that Moses was born and brought up, in the first half of the fourteenth century before Christ.

In one of the papyrus rolls preserved in the British Museum, the Egyptian scribe, Pinebsa, reports to his chief, Amenemaput, the condition in which he has found the city Ramses: "It is incomparable," he says, "and life there is sweet; the streets are filled with men, the ponds and canals with fish, and the fields with birds; fragrant flowers bloom on the meadows, and the fruits taste like honey; and the granaries are bursting with corn." And then he records the preparations which had been made for the reception of the king at his entry into the city; and adds that there was a dense multitude of people to greet him, but more especially to address to him, "great in victory," their prayers and complaints. On the back of this withered papyrus, moreover, there is a memorandum of the structures erected in the city, so that there has thus descended to us a contemporary account, indeed, of the cities described in Exodus as built by the Israelites for their taskmasters in Egypt.

We should naturally expect to find the children of Israel designated on the monuments by the term applied to them by foreign nations; and in point of fact this has been discovered to be the case, the foreign appellation of the Hebrews being found in their Egyptian designation, - Apuru. In a papyrus roll preserved in Leyden is found the following writing from the scribe Kanitsir to his chief, the scribe Bakenpthah:

"May my master find content therein that I have accomplished the task which he assigned to me in the words, to wit, Give food to the soldiers, and also to the Hebrews who transport the stones to the great city of the King Ramses -- Miamun, Lover of Truth, [and who] are under command of the Police - soldiers, Ameneman. I supplied them with food each month, according to the excellent command which my master hath given unto me."

And again, on the rocks in the valley of Hamamat, along which went the old Egyptian highway from Coptos, on the Nile, to the port of Berenice, on the Red Sea, is an inscription in which is included, among other things, an enumeration of the number of men employed in constructing the road; and among them is a troop of eight hundred Hebrews, under the escort of Egyptian soldiers of the police, of Libyan descent, called mazai.

Two things, therefore, may be considered established: first, that the Egyptian records named Ramses as the builder of the cities Pithom and Ramus; and, secondly, that the same records speak of the Hebrews in a way to indicate that their position in respect to the building of these cities was that of forced laborers under police superintendence. Now in the Bible the builder of Pithom and Raamses appears at once as a tyrannical oppressor of the children of Israel, and as a new king in Egypt who "knew not Joseph," - a fact which shows that Joseph never came to the court of an Egyptian Pharaoh, but to one of those Semitic conquerors in the Delta, who, as we have seen, lived at Avaris (Tanis), and thence governed the country as far as Memphis and Heliopolis. After the liberation of their country, therefore, from these usurpers, the Pharoahs of Egyptian race had no feeling for the kindred of the former, and for three hundred years exercised an oppressive sway over them, which reached its culmination under Ramses II. and his successor. The birth of Moses falls under Ramses II.; and under his successor, whom the monuments call Menephthes, occurred the Exodus, when Moses was eighty years of age. If, therefore, Menephthes reigned twenty years, as the Egyptian lists of kings state, Moses must have been born about the sixth year of Ramses, which corresponds with the statement of the Biblical records, that the building of Pithom and Raamses occurred in the first year of Ramses.

Now, the building of these cities had a strong political motive at the bottom of it; for they were designed to serve, not merely as a defence against invasion from Canaan, but as centres for the troops employed to keep down their own Semitic subjects. For, on one of the

walls at Thebes, a treaty has been found, made between Ramses II., in the twenty-first year of his reign, and Chetasar, the king of the Hittites, which contains, among other things, the following clause: "If the subjects of King Ramses come over to the king of the Hittites, the king of the Hittites is not to receive them, but to compel them to return to the king of Egypt."

But it was not merely by military measures that the Pharaohs endeavored to control the restless spirit of their Semitic subjects: they had recourse to other less cruel and more insidious devices. According to the ancient belief, the gods of various countries were in fact the same, though designated by different names. Ramses took advantage of this notion, and offered sacrifices to the god of the strangers, to Baal (Sutech), and erected temples to him in the old Semitic city of Tanis (the Zoan of the Bible), remains of which have been discovered in modern times; for it was in Tanis that the cult of Baal had survived from the days of the Semitic protectors of Joseph. The colossal sitting statue of Ramses, in Berlin, is the one which he had made for this very temple, and must therefore have been seen by Moses; for the Bible mentions Zoan (Tanis) as the place where, at the command of the Lord, Moses worked his wonders before Pharaoh (Ps. lxxviii. 12, 43).

And still more did Menephthes, the Pharaoh of the Exodus, resort to these arts of conciliation. Too weak to dominate as his ancestor had done, he contented himself with inscribing on his banner the words, "the adorer of Sutech, Baal of Tanis;" and he even went so far, in his attempt to soothe the turbulent Semitic population of his kingdom, as to represent the god Baal on the back of one of his own colossi, together with his own son as the priest of Baal.

Touching the Egyptian origin of the name of Moses, Brugsch says there can now be but one opinion. The monuments make mention of several persons who bore the name Mas, or Massu, a word signifying "the child;" among others, one of the governors of Æthiopia, under the Pharaoh of Exodus, with whom, indeed, Josephus seems to have confounded Moses the lawgiver, when he speaks of the latter as having led an Egyptian army to Æthiopia in his youth, and having penetrated to Meroe and married the Egyptian princess, Tharbis, who, out of the love she had conceived for him, traitorously opened the gates of the city to him.

It has often been remarked, that the whole legislation of Moses shows traces of his Egyptian origin; and Brugsch mentions a fact in

!