xli. 6) betrays an acquaintance with the peculiarities of the Egyptian

climate. Those who have sailed up the Nile know that the wind feared alike by the peasant and the sailor is that which blows from the south-east; while the crops of spring are matured by the northern breeze, they are parched and destroyed by the evil wind from the south-east.

The golden collar placed around the neck of the royal favourite is equally characteristic of Egyptian customs, at all events in the age of the Hyksos and the eighteenth dynasty. ‘Captain’ Ahmes, whose tomb is at El-Kab, and who took a prominent part in the final struggle which drove the Hyksos strangers out of the Delta, describes the rewards bestowed upon him by the Pharaoh for his deeds of valour, and chief among the rewards are the chains of gold. Before Joseph was allowed to enter the presence of the monarch, he was not only clad in new raiment, but shorn as well. This, too, was in accordance with Egyptian custom. None could appear before Pharaoh unless they had been freshly shaven, and in the eyes of the Egyptian not the least part of the ‘impurity’ of the Asiatic Semite was his habit of growing a beard.[108]

The change of name, moreover, which marked Joseph’s elevation was again characteristic of Egypt. The monuments have told us of other cases in which an Asiatic from Canaan, or a Karian from Asia Minor, became an Egyptian official, and in so doing was required to adopt an Egyptian name.[109] That the name of Zaphnath-paaneah is of Egyptian origin has long been recognised, and that it contains the Egyptian _pa-ânkh_, ‘life’ or ‘the living one,’ is clear. It is only over its first elements that discussion is possible.

It is hardly necessary to notice further points which prove how intimately the writer of the history of Joseph was acquainted with Egyptian life and manners, language and soil. The Egyptians, he notes, could not eat together with the Hebrews, for that would have been ‘an abomination’ to them. It would, indeed, have defiled them ceremonially, and have caused them to participate in the impurity of those whom they termed ‘the unclean.’ So, too, we read, ‘every shepherd is an abomination to the Egyptians,’ not indeed, as has been imagined, because Egypt had been conquered by the ‘Shepherd’ kings, but because the flocks of the Delta were tended partly by Bedâwin, partly by half-caste Egyptians, whose unclean habits and unshorn faces were the butt of the literary world. The ‘marshmen,’ as they were contemptuously called, were looked upon as pariahs.[110]

While, however, the narrative is thus thoroughly Egyptian in character, the Egypt it brings before us is the Egypt of the age of the Hyksos. Chariots and horses have already been introduced. It has been supposed that the horse came with the Hyksos; at all events, there is no trace of it before the conquest of the country by the Asiatic stranger. The Pharaoh, moreover, holds his court in the Delta, not far from the Canaanitish border and the land of Goshen; and the waggons which carried Jacob and his family travelled easily from Beth-lehem to the Egyptian capital. Zoan consequently must still have been the residence of the Pharaoh; and Thebes, in Upper Egypt, had not as yet taken its place.

There is one fact, furthermore, which stands out prominently in the history of Joseph, and points unmistakably to the Hyksos age. We are told that it was his policy which reduced the people of Egypt to the condition of serfs. Pressed by famine, they were compelled by him to sell their lands for corn, and to receive it again as tenants of the Pharaoh, with the obligation of paying him a fifth part of the produce. The priests, or rather, the temples, were alone allowed to retain their old possessions; henceforward the land of Egypt was shared between them and the king. In the language of modern Egypt, it became either Government property or _waqf_.

Now, this fact corresponds with a change in the tenure of land which the monuments have informed us must have taken place under the dominion of the Hyksos dynasties. When Egypt was conquered by the Asiatics, it was divided among a number of feudal families who were landowners on a large scale, and at times the rivals of the sovereign himself. By the side of this higher aristocracy there was also a lower one, answering in some measure to the yeomen farmers of the northern counties, but equally owners of land. When, however, the Hyksos were finally driven out, a new Egypt comes into view. The feudal aristocracy has disappeared—or almost disappeared—along with the other landowners of the country, and the only proprietors of land that are left are the Pharaoh and the priests, to whom in after times the military caste was added. Only in Southern Egypt, where the struggle against the foreigner first began, do we find instances of private ownership of land, and this, too, only in the earlier years of the eighteenth dynasty. Before long the Pharaoh had absorbed into his own hands all the land that had not been given to the gods; the old nobility had disappeared, and their place been taken by an army of officials who derived all their wealth and power from the king. The Pharaoh, the priests, and the bureaucracy henceforth are the rulers of Egypt.

This momentous change must have had a cause, but we look in vain for such a cause in the Egyptian monuments. It has been suggested that the War of Independence may have brought it about by increasing the power of the king as leader in the struggle.[111] But this would not explain his absorption of the land; and even if all the older families had perished in the war, which is not very probable, the lesser landowners would have remained. Moreover, the generals of the king would in this case have claimed similar spoils to those of their leader. What their commander had seized would have been seized also by the officers under him.

However great may be our reluctance to accept the explanation offered by the story of Joseph, certain it is that it is the only adequate explanation forthcoming. And there is one strong argument in its favour. Under Ahmes, the conqueror of the Hyksos and the founder of the eighteenth dynasty, there are still instances of land being held by private individuals. But this was at El-Kab, in Upper Egypt, where the Hyksos rule had long been nominal rather than real, and where it had not been obeyed at all for three generations previously.[112] As soon as the eighteenth dynasty kings were established firmly on the throne of the Hyksos Pharaohs in the north as well as in their ancestral homes in Southern Egypt, even these instances of individual ownership in land came to an end. It was only where the Hyksos supremacy had been weak that they had lingered on. When once the Prince of Thebes had become in all respects the successor of the foreign Pharaohs who had reigned at Zoan, they cease altogether.

The account of Joseph’s procedure is true to facts in another point also. From the time of the eighteenth dynasty onwards we hear repeatedly of the public _larits_ or granaries which were under State control.[113] The peasantry were required to contribute to them yearly in a fixed proportion, and the corn stored up in them was only sold to the people in case of need. It was out of these granaries, furthermore, that many of the Government officials were paid in kind, as well as the workmen employed by the State. The office of ‘superintendent of the granaries’ was therefore a very important one: once each year he presented to the king an ‘account of the harvests of the south and the north’; and if the account was exceptionally good, if the inundation had been abundant and the harvest better than ‘for thirty years,’ his grateful sovereign would throw chains of gold around his neck.[114] The origin of these royal granaries and of the office of their superintendent which thus characterise the ‘new empire’ of Egypt is explained by the history of Joseph.

Before the days when the conquests of the eighteenth dynasty had created an Egyptian empire in Asia, and brought foreign supplies of food to Egypt, the rise of the Nile was a matter of vital interest. The very existence of the people depended upon it. Too high a Nile meant scarcity, too low a Nile famine. It was only when the river rose to its normal level and overflowed the fields at the stated time that the heart of the agriculturist was gladdened, and he knew that the gods had given him a year of plenty.

The seven years’ famine of Joseph’s age is not the only seven years’ famine which Egypt has had to endure. El-Makrîzî, the Arabic historian of Egypt, describes one which lasted for seven years, from A.D. 1064 to 1071, and, like that of Joseph, was caused by a deficient Nile. A stela discovered by Mr. Wilbour on the island of Sehêl, in the middle of the First Cataract, and engraved in the time of the Ptolemies, similarly records a famine that was wasting the country because ‘the Nile-flood had not come for seven years.’[115] And it is possible that a memorial of the famine of Joseph has been discovered by Brugsch in one of the tombs of El-Kab. Here the dead man, a certain Baba, is made to say, ‘When a famine arose, lasting many years, I issued out corn to the city.’ Baba must have lived in the latter part of the Hyksos domination, so that the date of his inscription would agree with that of Joseph.[116]

Whether the power of Joseph and his master would still have extended as far south as El-Kab in the age of Baba, we do not know. But we do know that a famine which prevailed in Lower Egypt in consequence of a low Nile would have equally prevailed in the Thebaid. It would not, however, have prevailed in Canaan. In Canaan the ground is watered, not by the Nile, but by the rains of heaven, and in Canaan, therefore, it was only a want of rain that could have caused a scarcity of food.

Famines, indeed, did occur in Palestine from time to time, and we hear of Egyptian kings sending corn to that country to supply its needs.[117] As Egypt was the granary of Italy in the days of the Roman Empire, so too it had been the granary of Western Asia in an earlier age. A dry season in Canaan brought famine in its train; and if that dry season coincided with a deficient Nile in Egypt, there was no other land to which its inhabitants could look for food. It is quite possible that one of these famines in Canaan may have happened at the very time when the Nile refused to irrigate the fields of Egypt. When, however, we read that ‘the famine was over all the face of the earth,’ and that ‘all countries came into Egypt to Joseph to buy corn because the famine was sore in all lands,’ it is evident that the narrative has been written from an Egyptian point of view. The Egyptians might have supposed that when a low Nile produced a scarcity of food all other countries would equally suffer—such, indeed, was the case with Ethiopia—but a supposition of the kind is inconceivable in the mind of a Canaanite. An inhabitant of Palestine knew that the crops of his country were dependent on the rain, not on the waters of the Nile; it was only the Egyptian who modelled the rest of the world after that part of it which was known to him.

Here, then, we have a clear indication that the story of Joseph must have been written in Egypt, and further probability is added to the theory that it has been translated into Hebrew from an Egyptian original. But more than this. Is it likely that the Hebrew translator, if he had been acquainted with the climate of Canaan, would have left the words of the story just as we find them? Can we imagine that the language he employed about the extent of the famine would have been so definite, so comprehensive, so Egyptian in character? Like the Egyptian words embodied in the narrative, it points to a writer or translator who lived in Egypt, and not in Canaan.

Who was the Pharaoh under whom Joseph became the first minister of the State? Chronology shows that he must have been one of the kings of the last Hyksos dynasty. George the Syncellus makes him Aphophis, Apopi Ra-aa-kenen, or Apopi II. of the monuments, and the date would suit very well.[118] Apopi II. was the last powerful Hyksos sovereign. His authority was still obeyed in Upper Egypt, but it was in his reign that the War of Independence broke out. According to the story in the Sallier Papyrus, it was caused by his message to the _hiq_ or vassal prince of Thebes, requiring him to renounce the worship of Amon of Thebes and acknowledge Sutekh, the Hyksos Baal, as his supreme god.[119] The war lasted for four generations, and ended in the expulsion of the foreigner.

But long before this took place the family of Israel was settled in the land of Goshen, on the outskirts of Northern Egypt. The geographical position of Goshen has been rediscovered by Dr. Naville. It corresponded with the modern Wadi Tumilât, through which the traveller by the railway now passes on his way from Ismailîyeh to Zagazig. It took its name from Qosem or Qos, the Pha-kussa of Greek geography, and the capital of the Arabian nome, the site of which is marked by the mounds of Saft el-Hennah.[120] The very name of the ‘Arabian nome’ indicates that its occupants belonged to Arabia rather than to Egypt. It was, in fact, a district handed over to the Bedâwin by the Pharaohs, as it still is to-day. Meneptah, the son of Ramses II., says in his great inscription at Karnak that ‘the country around Pa-Bailos (now Belbeis, near Zagazig) was not cultivated, but left as pasture for cattle, because of the strangers. It was abandoned since the time of the ancestors.’[121] Abandoned, that is to say, by the Egyptians themselves. But the Semitic nomad pitched his tent and fed his flocks there, partly because it was on the road to his own country and countrymen, partly because it was fitted for grazing and not for agriculture. Here, too, he was not in immediate contact with the Egyptian fellah, though the court of the Hyksos Pharaoh at Zoan was nigh at hand.

Joseph’s brethren were made overseers of the royal cattle, an official post of which we also hear in the native Egyptian texts. After a while, Jacob died, full of years, and his body was embalmed in the Egyptian fashion. The actual process of embalming occupied forty days, the whole period during which ‘the Egyptians mourned for him,’ being threescore and ten. The statement is in accordance with other testimony as to the length of time needed to embalm a mummy. Herodotos (ii. 86) states that the corpse was kept in natron during seventy days, ‘to which period they are strictly confined.’ According to Diodoros,[122] ‘oil of cedar and other things were applied to the whole body for upwards of thirty days,’ the full period during which the mourning for the dead and the preparation of his mummy lasted being seventy-two days. Between the age of Joseph and that of Diodoros it would seem that little change had taken place in this part, at any rate, of the Egyptian treatment of their dead. When, however, the Hebrew text states that the corpse was embalmed by ‘the physicians, the slaves’ of Joseph; the word ‘physicians’ must be understood in a restricted sense. Pliny,[123] it is true, avers that during the process of embalming physicians were employed to examine the body of the dead man and determine of what disease he had died. But the _paraskhistæ_, who made the needful incision, were regarded with the utmost abhorrence; they were the pariahs of society, who lived in a community apart. It was the embalmers who were the associates of the priests, and whose persons, in the words of Diodoros, were looked upon as ‘sacred.’ Nor is it easy to see who could have been the physicians who were the ‘slaves’ of the Hebrew vizier. The physician in Egypt was usually a free man, who followed a profession which brought with it honour and respect. The doctor belonged to the learned classes, and, like the scribe, had no mean opinion of his worth and dignity. But such physicians were employed in healing the sick, not in embalming the dead, and must have stood in a very different position from that of Joseph’s ‘slaves.’ More light is still wanted on the subject from monumental sources; in spite of the papyri which describe the ceremonies attendant on the various acts of the embalmment, we are still ignorant of its practical details.

When at last the days of mourning were past, Joseph spoke, we are told, to ‘the house of Pharaoh.’ The expression is purely Egyptian, and refers to the signification of the word ‘Pharaoh’ itself. Pharaoh, the Egyptian Per-âa, is the ‘Great House’; ‘the son of the Sun-god’ was too highly exalted to be spoken of as a man, and it was therefore to ‘the Great House’ that his subjects addressed themselves. Modern Europe is familiar with a similar phrase; when we allude to the ‘Sublime Porte’ we mean the Turkish Sultan, who once administered justice from the ‘High Gate’ of his palace.

Jacob was buried in the cave of Machpelah. A long procession of soldiers and mourners, partly in chariots, partly on foot, accompanied the mummy on its way out of Egypt. Such a procession was no unusual thing. The wealthy Egyptian desired to be buried near the tomb of Osiris at Abydos, and it was therefore not unfrequently the custom to convey his mummy in solemn procession to that sacred spot, and then to carry it back once more to its own final resting-place. The procession which accompanied the body of the patriarch must have followed the high-road which led through the Shur, or line of fortification on the eastern border of the desert, and brought the traveller with little difficulty to Southern Palestine. The reference in the narrative to the threshing-floor of Atad, on the eastern side of the Jordan, is an interpolation, which embodies merely a local etymology. The chariot-road from Egypt to Palestine naturally never ran near the Jordan; and the threshing-floor of Atad would have been far out of the way. But popular imagination had seen in the name of Abel-Mizraim, where the threshing-floor was situated, a ‘mourning of Egypt,’ and had accordingly connected it with the great mourning that was made for Jacob. As a matter of fact, however, Abel-Mizraim really signifies ‘the meadow of Egypt,’ _abel_, ‘a meadow,’ being a not uncommon element in the geographical names of ancient Canaan.[124]

Two sons had been born to Joseph by his Egyptian wife, whom the Israelites knew by their Hebrew names. They had been born before the death of his father, and had thus received his blessing. Joseph himself lived ‘an hundred and ten years.’ This was the limit of life the Egyptian desired for himself and his friends, and in the inscriptions the boon of a life of ‘an hundred and ten years’ is from time to time asked for from the gods. It is the term of existence a court poet promises to Seti II. ‘on earth,’ and Ptah-hotep, the author of ‘the oldest book in the world,’ who flourished in the days of the fifth dynasty, assures us that, thanks to his pursuit of wisdom he had already attained the age.[125]

Joseph was embalmed, but his mummy was not carried to Hebron for burial, like that of his father. If Apopi II. had been the Pharaoh who had transformed him from a Hebrew slave into the highest of Egyptian officials, the War of Independence must have broken out long before his death. The Hyksos dynasty was hastening to its decay. Its strength had departed from it, and the Pharaohs of Zoan, who had lost all power in Upper Egypt, would still more have lost all power in Asia. Their soldiers were needed for other purposes than that of escorting the coffin of the dead vizier across the desert of El-Arish. Moreover, Joseph was an Egyptian official, and by his marriage into the family of the high priest of Heliopolis had become as much of an Egyptian as his Hyksos master. We are told that he made the Israelites swear to carry his corpse with them should they ever return to Palestine; the triumph of the Theban princes was growing more assured, and Joseph knew well that the vengeance of the victorious party would be wreaked upon the dead as well as upon the living. The history of Egypt had already shown that the tomb and the mummy were the first to suffer.

A change of sepulchre was no unheard-of thing. King Ai of the eighteenth dynasty had two, if not three, tombs made for himself, and the mummy could be transported from one place of burial to another. All knew where it was interred; year by year offerings were made to the spirit of the dead, and in many cases the estate of the deceased was taxed to support a line of priests who should perform the stated services at the tomb. As long as the sepulchre of Joseph was in the neighbourhood of his people it would have been easy to protect his mummy from violence, and to carry the coffin out of Egypt when the needful time should come.

Footnote 1:

See Brugsch, _Egypt under the Pharaohs_, Eng. tr., second edit., ii. p. 134.

Footnote 2:

_Records of the Past_, new ser., v. pp. 66 _sqq._

Footnote 3:

Thus in an Assyrian hymn (K 890), published by Dr. Brünnow in the _Zeitschrift für Assyriologie_, July 1889, we have (line 8) _istu pan Khabiriya iptarsanni âsi_, ‘from the face of my confederates he has cut me off, even me.’

Footnote 4:

_Records of the Past_, new ser., vi. p. 39.

Footnote 5:

Thus Kharbi-Sipak, a Kassite or Kossæan, from the western mountains of Elam, is called a ‘Khabirâ’ (W. A. I. iv. 34, 2, 5). The name is probably connected with that of Khapir or Âpir, originally applied to the district in which Mal-Amir is situated, south-east of Susa, but afterwards in the Persian period extended to the whole of Elam (see my memoir on the _Inscriptions of Mal-Amir_ in the Transactions of the Sixth Oriental Congress at Leyden, vol. ii.). Kharbi-Sipak himself, however, seems to have been employed by the Assyrian king in Palestine in the neighbourhood of the cities of Arqa and Zaqqal (Hommel in the _Proceedings_ of the Society of Biblical Archæology, May 1895, p. 203).

Footnote 6:

W. A. I. ii. 50, 51 (where Khubur is said to be a synonym of Subarti).

Footnote 7:

W. A. I. ii. 51, 4.

Footnote 8:

Hommel, _The ancient Hebrew Tradition as illustrated by the Monuments_, pp. 196, 245-262, 323-327; Glaser in the _Mittheilungen_ of the Vorderasiatische Gesellschaft, ii. 1897.

Footnote 9:

K 3500.

Footnote 10:

That _Ebir-nâri_ signified the country west of the Euphrates in the later days of Babylonian history is shown by a contract-tablet, dated in the third year of Darius Hystaspis, and translated by Peiser (_Keilinschriftliche Bibliothek_, iv. p. 305), in which mention is made of ‘Ustanni, the governor of Babylon and Ebir-nâri’ (line 2). Meissner (_Zeitschrift für Alttestament_, _Wissenschaft_, xvii.) has pointed out that Ustanni is the Tatnai of Ezra, v. 3, 6; vi. 6, 13, who is there called the ‘governor of the land beyond the river’ (_’Abar Nahara_).

Footnote 11:

See Hilprecht, _The Babylonian Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania_, i. 2, p. 31.

Footnote 12:

An inscription of Sargon recently published by M. Dangin (_Revue Sémitique_, April 1897) states that ‘the governor’ of the subjugated Amorites was Uru-Malik, where the name of Malik or Moloch is preceded by the determinative of divinity. Uru-Malik, which is an analogous formation to Uriel, Urijah, Melchi-ur (or Melchior), etc., shows that what we call Hebrew was already the language of Canaan. The inscription has been found at Tello in Southern Chaldæa.

Footnote 13:

Zabsali, also written Savsal(la) or Zavzal(la), probably represents the Zuzim or Zamzummim of Scripture. See my article in the _Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology_, February 1897, p. 74.

Footnote 14:

We possess a list of the kings of Babylonia, divided into dynasties, from the first dynasty of Babylon, to which Khammu-rabi belonged, down to the time of the fall of Nineveh. The number of years reigned by each king is stated, as well as the number of years each dynasty lasted. But, unfortunately, the compiler has forgotten to say what was the duration of the dynasty to which Nabonassar (B.C. 747) belonged; and as the tablet is broken here, the regnal years of most of the kings who formed the dynasty have been lost. There are, however, a good many synchronisms between the earlier period of Babylonian history and that of Assyria, and by means of these the chronology has been approximately restored. We can also test the date of Khammu-rabi in the following way. We learn from Assur-bani-pal that Kudur-Nankhundi, king of Elam, carried off the image of the goddess Nana from the city of Erech 1635 years before his own conquest of Elam, and therefore 2280 B.C. As Eri-Aku boasts of his capture of Erech, and as he was assisted in his wars by his Elamite kinsmen, it seems probable that the capture of the image by Kudur-Nankhundi was coincident with the capture of the city by Eri-Aku.

The discovery of Mr. Pinches has been supplemented by that of Dr. Scheil, who has found letters addressed by Khammu-rabi to Sin-idinnam of Larsa, in which mention is made of the Elamite king Kudur-Laghghamar. Sin-idinnam had been driven from Larsa by Eri-Aku with the help of Kudur-Laghghamar, and had taken refuge at the court of Khammu-rabi in Babylon. Fragments of other letters of Khammu-rabi are in the possession of Lord Amherst of Hackney (see _inf._ pp. 27, 28).

Footnote 15:

The name of Khammu-rabi himself is written Ammu-rabi in Bu. 88-5-12, 199 (_Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets in the British Museum_,