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 B.C., 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 Hamamât, 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 Ethiopia 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

relation to it which is certainly very curious. The religious monuments of the Egyptians, whether stone or papyrus, bear testimony everywhere to the fact, that the priests had originally a distinct conception, and taught the doctrine of the unity of God; and that, however much this doctrine may have been perverted afterwards by the people in their worship of animals, it was still preserved by the priests in their mysteries, and revealed to the initiated, and to them alone, although a dark allusion to it was made in the papyrus roll which was put into the mouths of the dead to accompany them to the grave. The name, however, of the one God was not mentioned in these rolls it was only paraphrased in the profound words, nuk pu nuk, — "I am that I am," words which recall at once the similar phrase in Exodus (iii. 14) with which God names himself to Moses and the children of Israel, and which, in its Hebrew form Jahveh (mispronounced Jehovah), signifies the same as the Egyptian formula, nuk pu nuk, — I AM THAT I AM.

H. J. W.

GEOGRAPHY AND TRAVELS.

whose names

TRAVELS in Turkey are, for the most part, a dismal record of days wasted in weariness, and nights sleepless with fatigue and misery. Read one book, and you have read all. Now and then, indeed, some clever writer appears, who unites the gift of style with considerable knowledge of the country and the languages, and then we can really get through his book. But this is an exception, unfortunately a rare one; and one to which the two brave ladies. figure on the titlepage of the bulky book on the Turks, the Greeks, and the Slavons, which has just reached us damp from the London press cannot fairly lay claim. The expectations raised by the title are by no means satisfied. It is not a book about the Turks or the Greeks, but chiefly about the Serbians, as the writer (for there is obviously but one) terms them in deference to their national pride, which is offended by spelling the word with a v, as giving their enemies a ground to taunt them with its derivation from the Latin servus. The Serbians are, however, an interesting people in many respects; their history, especially that chapter in it which relates to the enfran

*

*The Turks, the Greeks, and the Slavons: Travels in the Slavonic Provinces of Turkey in Europe. By G. MUIR MACKENZIE and A. P. IRBY. With maps and numerous illustrations by F. Ranitz. London: Bell & Daldy, 1867.

chisement of a part of them from the Turkish yoke, is highly honorable; and it is encouraging to know, from the careful observation of these ladies, that they are such a clean and thrifty race. Montenegro and the Herzegovina, and Albania also, countries which are so rarely visited, bordering though they do upon the Adriatic, whose waters are ploughed daily by the merchant steamers of the Mediterranean, were included in the travels of these adventurous English women. The descriptions which they give of the scenery and the people of the Black Mountains and the Albanian hills are certainly valuable, because fresh and truthful. But the book is twice as heavy as it ought to have been, and the title twice as ambitious.

That the Turks misrule the country, as they have misruled every country they were once strong enough to conquer, nobody outside the arid circle of English political prejudices and timidity need be told. That the leading prelates of the Greek Church are in many cases the supple tools of Turkish despotism over the Slavic races, is a fact, too, which will hardly be disputed by one familiar with the history of the vast country which stretches from the borders of Thrace to the Julian Alps, between the Danube and the Adriatic. Nor again is it to be doubted, that, in obedience to that law of nationality which has drawn the Italians under one flag, which is giving a head to Germany, and is marshalling the Greeks to assert their independence and their unity, the Slavic races south of the Danube will join hands under a common standard, and, inspired by a common patriotism, redeem their land from the long blight of Islam, and open it to commerce and the civilizing arts.

These things are clear to the careful observer. No one can open a book of travels in these countries without perceiving it. But, meantime, there is immense popular ignorance about the condition and characteristics of this South Slavic people; and one who cares to be enlightened should study this book, we cannot say read it. There is a good colored map accompanying the work; and one is thus able to take in at a glance the variety of races of which the population of this great region is somewhat confusedly made up. The Greeks, it will be observed, occupy, with a trifling exception, the whole Ægean coast, and are massed up heavily against the Sea of Marmora. They are essentially a commercial, maritime race; and, when the Turks withdraw, as withdraw they must, into Asia, the Greeks will very likely be masters of the country south of the Balkan range.. Further north they cannot go: nor should they, for the Slavic race is