The votive inscriptions, in which the 18th and 19tli Dyntisties recorded their conquests, have pre- served the names of many towns, etc., in SjTia, of which, however, the majority are still unidentilied. The campaigns of Thutmosis III. furnish the best of such material ; the lists of his successors are often mere copies of his, and of relatively small value. The Amarna tablets show several of these same names in a cuneiform transcription. Of the localities identilied the following are among the best known : Aleppo, Carchemish, Kadesli (on Orontes), Damascus, Hamath, liyblos, Simyra, Beirflt, Sidon, Tyre, Megiddo, Akko, Joppa, Gaza, Ashkelon, Janoah, Tatmak. In one group of the Amarna letters Jerusalem is often mentioned, but in hieroglyphic texts it has not been found. Certain Dames, though not yet identified, are compounded of interesting elements : for example, Jl'rir Vni.i, jB'<y' .Tn'3, in which the divine names appear — the second already (Dyn. 18) abbreviated ; or Y'^bi'r, Yi'pir, in which have been recognized the names 3)3;^; and 'js'' combined with ^{((asin Israel, Ishmael). These much-discussed names are more likely to have then had local than ethnic significance.t A connexion between tliem and the names of the patriarchs, Jacob and Joseph, cannot of course be proved ; indeed the equation YS'p = '\'iy has consider- able phonetic difficulties. It may here be noted that certain scarabs, probably of the Hyksos period, appear to bear royal (?) names compounded of y'kb and kr (? Sk), which might pomt, at any rate, to the Semitic name Jacob at an unex- pectedly early period. The whole tradition of Israel's early connexion with Egypt — the sojourn there of the patriarchs and the exodus of their descendants — is still obscure, and the recent discovery for the first time of ' Israel ' in a hiero- glyphic text seems but further to complicate the prolilem.
The facts as to this document are the following : In 1896 an immense stele was discovered, one text of which commemorates the victory of MrnjUh, son and successor of Ramses II., over the Libyans in his 5th year.; In the latter part of the text where other triumphs are enumerated, the locali- ties subjugated occur in the following order : the Hittite land, Canaan (? land or town), Ashkelon, Gezer, Janoah (?), y>ir«'r-Israel, S. Palestine, 'all lands.' There is no corroborative evidence for an Asiatic campaign of Mrnpth ; possibly, in the fashion of the age, he is here merely assuming to himself the conquests of his predecessors. The
• 8m StMltberg In Indoger. For. v1. 1S4. t The (omier, which oocun twice, c&n b« localized tn the district Ephmlm-Dan (aee W. M. .Mullcr, Alien, 164). I His rei^n lii-ts^an, occordintf to Mahler, ill 12SU,
name Israel is written so as unmistakably to indicate a people, not, like the other names, a locality. Further, the words used of its condition imply devastation and the destruction of crops. The obvious and only safe conclusions to be drawn from these facts are that Israel, or a part of that people, was already in some part of Syria, and had been in hostile contact with Egypt. On the assumption that 'Pithom and Haamses' were built for Ramses U., whose long reign answereil the requirements of Ex ii. 23, the Pharaoh of the Exodus has been identified as Mmjdh ; * though, owing to the supposed more appropriate political conditions, others would place the Exodus 30 or 40 years later, about the time of Stnht.
If we assume that by the reign of Mrnpth the Exodus had already been accomplished, — the name Isrw is found in the previous reigns in the territory of the tribe of Asher, — we have an argument for the jjroposed identification of the Hebrews with the Khabiri, of whose invasion of Palestine, some 150 years earlier, the Amarna letters say so much, and whom it is proposed to identify with the S'sw chastised by Sethos l.t The story of the priest Osarsiph (? = Osiris + z) and the impious lepers, whose revolt he led, converted by Josephus into a history of Moses and the Hebrew struggle for freedom, has been with some probability re- ferred rather to a reminiscence of the expulsion of the heretics of Amenophis iv.J The name Hebrews has not been met with in Egyptian texts. That of the foreign tribe of ' prw, found variously employed throughout the 19th Dynasty, is rarely now held to represent it, and may be merely a form of a familiar Egyptian term for 'workmen.' The Egyptian names given to Joseph, his wife, and father-in-law in Gn xli. 45 have received various inadmissible interpretations. The only transcriptions which conform to Egyptian gram- mar and u.sage are ( 1 ) JcphnouttfOncfi, ' God speaks (and) he lives'; (2) \^N]asncith, 'devoted to (the goddess) Neith ' ; (3) Pedephri, ' he whom the sun- j;od gives.' AU three names are cast in forms increasingly frequent from the time of the 22nd Dynasty onwards, but |>ractically unknown earlier — except, indeed, the .second ; and this fact agrees with tlie date (8th cent.) to which the document E is assigned. § For a dilficult word used in the story of Joseph, ■^iik Gn xli. 43, a parallel ex- pression has been noticed in a text of the 21st Dynasty, where the words ib rk seem to form an interjection, 'Give hccdl' or the like.H