four hundredth year of the era of Noubti." M. de Rougé, in his account of Mariette's discovery, says that "Noubti belonged incontestably to the Shepherd dynasty, and is a local form of Sutekh," one of the Hycsos kings who preceded Pharaoh Apophis. So that," continues de Rougé," the four hundredth year of Noubti means the same as the four hundredth year of the god Sutekh."* The year of Ramessu's reign when this tablet was set up is not stated. But assuming that it was in the early part of his reign, which extended, according to Brugsch, B.C. 1407-1341, and that 1404 was the exact year, this would give the terminus a quo for the era of Noubti-Sutekh as B.C. 1804, when Joseph was entering upon his government as viceroy of the king of Egypt.

But if Noubti-Sutekh was the actual Hycsos king who made Joseph his prime minister, Joseph may equally have been in office during the whole of Apophis' (the successor of Noubti) reign. It has been further proved from the monuments that the deity exclusively worshiped by the shepherds under the name of "SUTEKH" was the local god of Syria, from which country Joseph and his patron, the king of Egypt, had alike come: as it is written of Jacob: "A Syrian ready to perish was my father, and he went down to Egypt and sojourned there with a few, and became there a nation, great, mighty, and populous." Deut. xxvi, 5. A papyrus now in the British Museum, entitled "Sallier I.," of the time of Ramessu the Great, throws considerable light on this subject, and it shows Apophis, the Hycsos king, supreme over all the land of Egypt, and acknowledging Sutekh, the Syrian god, as the sole deity whom he worshiped. This important passage reads as follows: "It came to pass when the land was held by the Hycsos, Ra-skenen was ruling in the south, and Pharaoh Apophis was in his palace at Avaris. The whole land paid homage to him with their manufactures and all the precious things of the country. Pharaoh Apophis had set up Sutekh for his lord; he worshiped no other god in the whole land."

This noticeable fact of the Hycsos king having been devoted to the worship of Sutekh has been confirmed by the discovery of a colossal statue at Avaris, the capital of the Пycsos sovereigns, with the following inscription, "PHARAOH APOPHIS, WORSHIPER OF THE GOD SUTEKH." Hence observes Brugsch-Bey, "The mention of this god in combination with the Shepherd king proves most clearly what is stated in the papyrus concerning Apophis having been specially devoted to the worship of this god, to the exclusion of all the other deities of the whole country."

* Revue Archéologique for 1865, vol. xi, p. 169; and likewise vol. x, p. 130. In a work published at Leipzig in 1875, entitled, "The Sun and Sirius Year of the Ramesides, with the Secret of the Intercalation and the Year of Julius Cæsar," the author, Herr Karl Riel, adduces evidence in great detail to prove that the four hundredth year of the era Noubti extended from B.C. 1766 to 1366, which, if correct, would do equally well with our conjecture in the text, the only difference being that Karl Riel's estimate would make it fall toward the end, in place of the beginning, of Ramessu's long reign.

Brugsch, Histoire d'Egypte, p. 79.

FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XXXII.—47

The well-known hieroglyphic of the god Sutekh represents him under the form of a nondescript quadruped animal, with the head of an ass. He is so represented in the time of Apophis,* and 400 years later in that of Ramessu the Great, when Sutekh had long been admitted into the Pantheon of the native Pharaohs. In the treaty of peace between Ramessu and the Hittites of Syria, under Khitasir their king, which is still to be seen on an outer wall of the grand temple of Karnac, the inscription reads, "That which is in the middle of this silver tablet and on its front side is a likeness of the god Sutekh," surrounded by an inscription to this effect, This is the picture of the god SUTEKH, king of heaven and earth. †

There is ample monumental proof that very shortly after the conquest of the Shepherds, Sutekh came to be regarded by the Egyptians under a very different aspect from what they did when they considered him as the deity of their enemies the Hycsos. Mariette says he will "not be surprised if fresh discoveries show that Amosis, the conqueror of the Hycsos, in his turn sacrificed to the god Sutkeh." At all events it is certain that Amosis' grandson, Thothmes III., acknowledged this deity; for in a fine tablet on a wall in the Temple of Karnac, Sutekh is represented as instructing that Pharaoh in the use of the bow. And two and a half centuries later the Temple of Abou-Simbel was dedicated by Ramessu the Great to the four principal deities in the Egyptian Pantheon at that period of history, namely, Ammon, Phthah, Ra, and Sutekh. In the reign of Ramessu's son a monument at Thebes represents Manepthah worshiping "the god Sutekh of Avaris." Ewald, in his Geschichte des Volkes Israel, p. 450, asserts that Avaris means philologically nothing less than "the city of the Hebrews;" and De Rougé shows from the monuments that Avaris is the same as the Tanis of the Greeks, and the Zoan of Scripture, which in Hebrew signifies "motion," and the equivalent in the old Egyptian tongue for "the place of departure," from which the Israelites went forth at the time of the Exodus. Hence we may not be far wrong if we interpret the inscription "The god Sutekh of Avaris," as bearing in its esoteric meaning the sense of "JEHOVAH, THE GOD OF THE CITY OF THE HEBREWS."

Although no monumental proof has yet been discovered in Egypt, speaking of a FAMINE of exactly seven years' duration, such as followed the seven years' plenty when Joseph became viceroy of Egypt, yet Brugsch has produced satisfactory evidence that such a famine did occur during the reign of Pharaoh Apophis, which affords additional confirmation to the opinion that he was in reality the patron of the Hebrew slave. Brugsch-Bey adduces very strong evidence in favor of a tomb inscription, of the time of Pharaoh Apophis, bearing on this portion of the story of the Exodus as related in Holy Writ. "We have," he says, "great

*See Lepsius, Königsbuch der Alten Agypten, Tafeln xv.

+ Brugsch, "History of Egypt under the Pharaohs," vol. ii, p. 74.
Burton's Excerpta Hieroglyphica, plate xxxvii.

satisfaction in adding another very remarkable and clear confirmation of our remarks on the tradition preserved by Syncellus and received by the whole world, that Joseph ruled the land in the reign of King Apophis, whose age within a few years corresponds with the commencement of the eighteenth dynasty. Upon the grounds of an old Egyptian inscription, hitherto unknown, whose author must have been a contemporary of Joseph and his family, we hope to adduce a proof that Joseph and the Hycsos cannot henceforth be separated from one another. The inscription which appears to us so important exists in one of the tombs at El-Kab. From the style of the internal pictorial decoration of the rock chambers, but principally from the name of its owner, BABA, we consider that the tomb was erected in the times immediately preceding the eighteenth dynasty. Although no royal cartouche ornaments the walls of the tomb, to give us certain information about the exact time of its erection, yet the following considerations are calculated to inform us on this point, and fortunately to fill up the gaps." Then Brugsch continues to describe the tomb of this Baba, which contains the following simple child-like representation of his happy existence on earth, owing to his great riches in point of children: "The chief of the table of princes, Baba, the risen again, he speaks thus: I loved my father, I honored my mother; my brother and my sisters loved me; I stepped out of the door of my house with a benevolent heart; I stood there with refreshing hand, and splendid were the preparations of what I collected for the feast day. Mild was my heart, free from noisy anger. The gods bestowed upon me a rich fortune on earth. The city wished me health and a life full of freshness. I punished the evil doers. My children, which stood opposite to me in the town during the days I have fulfilled, were sixty in number, small as well as great, and they had as many beds, chairs, and tables as they required. My speech may appear somewhat facetious to my enemies, but I call the god Month to witness to its truth. I collected in the harvest, a friend of the harvest god. I was watchful at the time of sowing. And now, when a famine arose, lasting many years, I issued out corn to every hungry person in the city which I ruled."

"The only just conclusion," adds Brugsch on this remarkable discovery, "is that the many years of famine in the time of Baba must precisely correspond with the seven years of famine under Joseph's Pharaoh, one of the Shepherd kings." Then he continues to show how applicable the details recorded in Scripture respecting the story of Joseph are to the history of Egypt at this period, by remarking: "Joseph's Hycsos-Pharaoh reigned in Avaris or Zoan, the later Ramses-town, and held his court in the Egyptian style, but without excluding the Semitic language. His Pharaoh has proclaimed before him in Semitic language an Abrek, that is, bow the knee,' a word which is still retained in the hieroglyphic dictionary, and was adopted by the Egyptians to express their feeling of reverence at the sight of an important

person or object. He bestows on him the high dignity of a Zaphnatpancakh, governor of the Sethroitic nome. On the Egyptian origin of the offices of an Adon and Ab, which Joseph attributes to himself before his family, I have already made all the remarks necessary. The name of his wife, Asnat, is pure Egyptian, and almost entirely confined to the old and middle empire. It is derived from the very common female name Sant, or Snat. The father of his wife, the priest of On-Heliopolis, is a pure Egyptian, whose name, Potiphera, meant in the native language Putiper'a, (or pher'a,) the gift of the sun.""*

Brugsch's admission that Joseph became viceroy of Egypt under one of the Hycsos kings is a sufficient reply to those Egyptologers who consider that the reading of Genesis xlvi, 34, in the Authorized Version, "every shepherd is an abomination unto the Egyptians," contradicts the idea. But we think that a careful examination of the context of that very passage proves that Brugsch is right. For did not Joseph, when his father and his brethren had come down to Egypt, and he was about to present them to his patron the reigning sovereign, prompt them to declare to the king that they were "shepherds" whose trade had been to feed cattle? "When Pharaoh shall call you and shall say, What is your occupation? ye shall say, Thy servants' trade hath been about cattle from our youth even until now, both we and also our fathers: that ye may dwell in the land of Goshen; for every shepherd is an abomination unto the Egyptians." Now how could Joseph have advised his brethren to give such an answer to the inquiring king, unless that he had been a Pharaoh of the Hycsos or Shepherd dynasty?

Another instance of the harmony between the histories of Israel and Egypt is to be found in the record of Joseph's death. The Book of Genesis closes with these words: "So Joseph died, being a hundred and ten years old, and they embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt." Now it is an interesting fact that the monuments show that about this very period of history the Egyptians recognized the term of 110 years as the limit of human longevity; and, as this can be traced for several centuries back, to almost the period of Joseph's death, we may infer that the expression "the happy life of 110 years "became proverbial among the Egyptians from the very high esteem in which their greatest benefactor was held. An inscription in the British Museum from the tomb of one Raka, of the time of Ramessu the Great, (fourteenth century B. C.,) and another in the Munich Museum, on a statue of Baken-Konsoro, the high-priest of Ammon in the following century, with a third in the British Museum, carved on a black stone in hieratic characters in place of hieroglyphs, (a most unusual circumstance,) belonging to the time of Amenophis III., of the sixteenth century B.C.—all these speak alike of thankfulness for repose in the tomb "after a happy

*

* Brugsch, “History of Egypt under the Pharaohs,” vol. i, pp. 262–265.

life of 110 years on earth." And in the select papyri of the British Museum, named Anastasi, 3, pl. 4, we find similar expressions which remind us of the death of the great lawgiver of the Jews, about a century and a half after the death of Joseph. "Thou approachest the fair Amenti [the place of repose for the dead] without growing old, without being feeble; thou completest the happy life of 110 years upon earth, thy limbs being still vigorous and strong." And so Scripture records that "Moses was a hundred and twenty years when he died; his eye was not dim nor his natural force abated."* Moreover, Mariette-Bey has shown, in his description of the tombs belonging to the first six dynasties, and therefore prior to the time of Joseph by some centuries, that the limit of human longevity was higher among the Egyptians, (as it was with the Hebrews,) in those early times, than it subsequently became in after ages. Thus in place of the later formula, "May you obtain repose in the tomb after a happy life of 110 years on earth," the earlier one ran as follows: "May you obtain repose, etc., after a happy and prolonged old age, without any number of years being specified. From these circumstances we gather that the monuments of Egypt confirm the Scripture narrative respecting the age of Joseph at his death.

ERA OF ISRAEL'S EGYPTIAN BONDAGE.

"The age of King Apophis," says Brugsch, "corresponds within a few years with the commencement of the eighteenth dynasty." This affords the most important synchronism between the histories of Israel and Egypt, not only in respect to chronology, but respecting the great change which must have ensued when Amosis, the head of the eighteenth dynasty, conquered the Hycsos, and the favored race of Israel, who were until that time dwelling "in the land of Goshen, the best part of the land of Egypt," were reduced to the condition of bond slaves. We have already seen that the death of Levi, the last of Joseph's brethren, occurred, according to the Hebrew computation, confirmed by secular chronology, B.C. 1707; and that the following year, according to Brugsch's reading of Manetho, saw the conquest of the Hycsos by the chief of the eighteenth dynasty, which is thus tersely announced in the book of Exodus: "Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph." Then immediately commenced the enslavement of the Israelites, occasioned by the fear of the new king that "the people of the children of Israel (might become) more and mightier than we. Therefore they did set over them task-masters to afflict them with their burdens. And the Israelites built for Pharaoh treasure cities, Pithom and Raamses. But the more they afflicted them the more they grew. And the Egyptians made the children of Israel to † Revue Archéologique, for 1868, p. 388. Our readers will note in this shortening of human life a remarkable suggestion in regard to the still greater longevity of the antediluvian age.-ED.

*Deut. xxxiv, 7.