Manetho.

some of them Memphis, as part of their kingdom. We are told the names of seventeen who reigned in This; after which that city fell, and Thebes rose to be capital of Upper Egypt; and it was perhaps in the reign of the second or third Theban king that Abraham entered the Delta.

The city of Elephantine, on an island in the Nile, just below the cataract at the southern boundary of Egypt, was also the capital of a little kingdom; and we know the names, and nothing but the names, of nine kings who had reigned there. Elephantine no doubt fell when Thebes rose over the city of This.

Memphis was the capital of the rich corn-fields of Lower Egypt, or the land of Mizraim as it is called in the Old Testament; and perhaps the tenth of those Memphite kings whose names are known to us was reigning in the time of Abraham.

We likewise have the name of one king who reigned at Heracleopolis; and, as that city is close to Memphis, it is most likely that he ruled over Memphis, and made Heracleopolis the capital of Lower Egypt during his reign.

The people of both Upper and Lower Egypt seem to have been Copts, children of Cham or Ham, and from him they called their country Chemi; and they spoke a language which, after it has undergone the changes of so many ages, we even now know as Coptic. Their religion was the same as what Herodotus and Diodorus afterwards found there: many cities had already their sacred animals; the bull Apis in Memphis, the bull Mnevis in Heliopolis, and the goat Mando in Mendes, were fed and waited upon at the cost of those cities, and worshipped as images of Chem, or Amun-Ra, the Sun.

Their buildings were much the same as those which afterwards rose in such massive grandeur. Venephres, king of This, had al

Thebes.

ready built pyramids at a city named Cochome; the older part of wilkinson's the great temple of Thebes, now called the temple of Karnak, was already begun; and Abraham most likely saw the obelisk of Osirtesen I., which even yet stands at Heliopolis.

plate 6.

The carved writing, by means of figures of men and animals, which was afterwards, when easier ways of writing came into use, called sacred carving, or hieroglyphics, was even then not new. Egypt.Inscrip. The inscriptions of the Osirtesens do not show us hieroglyphics in their earliest form; in them we see many words spelt alphabetically mixt up with the symbols or pictures of objects and actions. There had been, most likely, many ages before their time during which the hieroglyphics were wholly symbolic, before alphabetic spelling had been thought of.

Manetho.

The journey of Abraham into Egypt was not that of a single family; there was at the same time a great migration going on, of Phenicians, moving out of their own country into Lower Egypt, and along the African coast of the Mediterranean. We shall hereafter see that the Greek settlers at Cyrene had to drive them back Pausanias, from the coast, and tradition says that Phenician Dido was kindly received by them at Carthage. They were peaceably driven out of Canaan by other troops of herdsmen who were moving westward from Chaldæa and Mesopotamia, and who made the pasture-land too crowded for their loose and scattered way of life.

Abraham found Lower Egypt a well-tilled corn country; the king, or Pharaoh, was surrounded by princes and servants, and was by no means looked upon by Abraham as his equal, as the little kings of Canaan had been.

Abraham did not remain long in Lower Egypt; from the head of the Red Sea he went southward, and returned home by Mount Sinai and Petra; but the Phenicians settled in crowds in the Delta,

lib. i. 7.

Gen. xi.

Gen. xii.

Eratosthenes. and may have been a cause of great wealth to the country, as about that time Suphis, and his brother and successor Sensuphis, who were Coptic kings of Memphis, were strong enough to conquer Thebes, and rich enough to build the two largest of the pyramids near Memphis.

Manetho.

But the Phenicians soon got too strong for the country which had given them a home; they chose a king of their own, named Salatis, who at first ruled over his countrymen without rebelling against the Egyptians; but he afterwards seized Memphis, and from thence sent forth his armed bands, each year, at harvest time, to gather in a duty upon corn, and the pay for his troops. He had an army of two hundred and forty thousand men; and he strongly fortified the city of Avaris, perhaps that afterwards called Pelusium, as a frontier town against the Assyrians. In the third or fourth reign of these Phenician shepherds, or herdsmen, or Hycsos as they Eratosthenes. were called by the Egyptians, they even conquered Thebes, and reigned over all Egypt.

Gen. xxxvii.

It was in the reign of Apophis, one of these Phenicians, when the two countries of Canaan and Lower Egypt were filled by the same people, that, among other slaves brought into Egypt by the caravans from the east, was a young Jew named Joseph, who chanced to be sold into the service of the captain of the guard. Little could his master have foreseen the coming greatness of his slave, or how much his name would be known in after ages.

Joseph soon rose to the head of his master's household, and afterwards to be the king's chief minister. He foresaw a scarcity of corn, and bought up the harvest in years of plenty; and with these stores, in the years of scarcity, he bought from the starving Egyptians the freeholds of their estates, which he afterwards let them hold as tenants of the crown, at a rent of one-fifth of the crop. The

priests, however, were allowed to keep their freeholds, as being a privileged order in the state.

Thus this Asiatic minister made the king the landlord of the country, and the land was held by what is now known in Asia as Jones on Rent. the Ryot tenure. But in Asia the farmers are tenants at a changeable rack-rent of about one-half of the crop; whereas the Egyptians paid a fixt and low rent of one-fifth. The Egyptian landholder was therefore rich enough to have peasants or slaves under him, while the Indian Ryot is himself the peasant-tenant of the crown. This rent was in the place of all direct taxes, and, except the duties upon manufactures, and upon the exports and imports, no other tax was laid upon Egypt till it was conquered by the Persians.

Asseth, one of these Phenician kings, is said to have brought, no doubt from Babylon the birth-place of astronomy, a better knowledge of the length of the year than was then found in Egypt. The Egyptian year had been divided into twelve months of thirty days each, and Asseth, without altering the months, added to the end of the year five days, which were called by the Greeks the epagomenæ. But this change in the calendar seems not to have been generally received till a hundred years later, when it was ordered by one of the Coptic kings of Thebes.

Soon after the death of Apophis, the kings of Thebes and Memphis made common cause against the Phenicians, and, driving them out of the rest of the country, blocked up their forces in the strong city of Avaris. Here they were besieged by Amosis king of Thebes, and then driven through the desert into Syria, where they built the city of Jerusalem, while the unarmed part of the nation remained as slaves in Lower Egypt.

Manetho.

From this time we find Upper Egypt rising in wealth and power; and though we are still told the names of the kings of Memphis, they seem to have been under the sceptre of their more powerful Wilkinson's Theban neighbours. The inscriptions of the reigns of Amun-mai Thor II. and Osirtesen II., at Cosseir, the port on the Red Sea which is nearest to Thebes, prove that the trade to Arabia and across Arabia had begun even before the Phenicians had been driven out of Egypt.

Thebes.

Manetho.

Exodus, i. 8.

i. 11.

Chebros, the son of Amosis, reigned after him; and the Jews, who had been well treated in the Delta in grateful recollection of the services of Joseph, now began to be harshly used by the Theban kings; task-masters were set over them, and they were cruelly over-worked at the fortifications of Memphis and Heliopolis, and at the other buildings of Lower Egypt.

Amunothph I., the son-in-law of Chebros, reigned next. He is the first of the kings whose tombs are now found in the Valley of Tombs near Thebes. These royal burial-places are tunnelled into the side of the hills, and are wide and lofty rooms, whose ceilings are upheld by columns, and whose walls are covered with paintings Wilkinson's and sculptures. In the tomb of Amunothph I. are well-formed statues, and sculptures in high relief; on one of the walls is painted a funeral procession by water, with a mummy lying in one of the boats, which shows how very early were the customs both of making mummies and of ferrying the dead over the river, which Diodorus saw in use thirteen hundred years later, and from which the Greeks borrowed the boat of Charon.

Thebes.

Mesphra-Thothmosis I. made some additions to the great temple at Thebes, which had been begun by Osirtesen I.; he also built at Tombos in Ethiopia, whence we learn that part of that country had already been brought under the sceptre of Egypt.