Pliny's notice of the obelisks (//. jY. xxxvi, 64), that known to be of Thothmes III is said to belong to Mt-s- phres, which, says Bunsen (iv, 130), " would be tlie pop- ular distinctive name given to this Thothmes." Just so ! And in the statement of Theon the king is pre- sented by " his popular distinctive name," Menophres. (4.) "There was (sa3's Dr. Hincks, Trans. R, Irish. Acad. vol. xxi, pt. 1) a tradition, if it does not deserve another name, current among the Egyptians in the time of An- toninus, to the effect that the Sothiac Cycle, then end- ing (A.D. 139), commenced in the reign of Thothmes III. The existence of such a tradition is evidenced by a number of scarabwi, evidently of Roman workmanship, referring to the Sothiac Cycle, and in which the royal legend of this monarch appears." These are sufficient grounds for believing that the Menophres of Theon is no other than Thothmes III, and that his reign was supposed (rightly or wrongly) to include tlie year B.C. 1322. It may be, also, that when Herodotus was told that Moeris lived about 900 years before the time of his visit to Egypt — a date not very wide of B.C. 1322 — Thothmes was named to him by his popular distinctive appellation, Mai-Re, only confused with J/a?Ts = Ame- nemha III, the Pharaoh of the Lab\'rinth and its Lake. (Other explanations of the name Menophres may be seen in Bijckh, Manetho, p. 691 sq. ; Biot, Recherches, in- terprets it as the name of Memphis, Men-nnfru, im])ort- ing that the normal date, 20th July, for the heliacal rising of Sirius and epoch of the cycle, is true only for the latitude of Memphis.) "What has been said is suffi- cient to show that there is no necessity for altering a letter of the name; consequently that the time of Jle- nephtha is not defined by the authority of Theon. De Rouge emphatically rejects Lepsius's notion of IMeno- phres (Recue Archeol. ix, 664; Journal Asiatique, Aug. 1858, p. 268). He thinks the year 1322 lies in the reign of Rameses HI.
In support of his date, B.C. 1314, for the exode, Lep- sius {Chronol. p. 859 sq.) has an argument deduced from the modern Jewish chronology (Hillel's Mundane Era^, in which he says that it is the precise year assigned to that event. Hillel, he is confident, was led to it by Ma- netho's Egyptian tradition, which gave him the name of the Pharaoh, and this being obtained would easily give lum the time. Bunsen, though finally settling on the year B.C. 1320, had previously declared with Lepsius for B.C. 1314, "decided by the circumstance that a tradition not compatible irith the usual chronoliH/ieal systems of the Jews, but which cannot be accidental, jilaces the exode at that year. This fact seems, from Lepsius's account of the Seder Olam Rabija, to admit of no doubt" (iv, 336). It admits of more than doubt — of absolute refu- tation. Hillel's whole procedure, from first to last, was simply Biblical. Daniel's prophecy of the seventy weeks gave hitn B.C. 422 for 11 Zedekiah ; thence up to 6 Hez- ekiali he found the sum— 133 years; for the kings of Israel the actual numbers were 243, of which he made 240 years ; then 37 years of Solomon ; 480 years of 1 Kings vi, 1, atlded to these, made the total 890 years, whence the date for the exode was B.C. 422 -|- 890 = 1312; for that this, not 1314, was Hillel's year of the exode is demonstrable (Review of Lepsius on Bible Chro- nolofpj,hy II. Browne, in Arnold's Theolog. Critic, i, 52-59, 1851). Yet, though the process by which Hillel got his date is so trans])arent, it is spoken of as " an important tradition" by those who take ready-made conclusions at second-hand, without inquiry into their grounds. So Duncker, Gesch. des Alterthums, i, 196, note; Dr. Wil- liams, in Essays and Reviews, p. 58.
It is alleged that an indication confirmatory of the low date assigned by these writers is furnished by the month-date of the Exodus passover, 14 Abib, a name which occurs only in connection with that history (Exod. xii,2; xiii,4; xxiii,15; xxxiv, 18; Deut.xvi.l). This argument proceeds on the presumption that Abib is the Hebraized form of the Egyptian Epep, Coptic Epiphi, of which the Arabic rendering is also A bib. The Egyp-
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tian month takes its name from the goddess Apap : the change of 7) to b is intended to make the word pure He- brew, denoting the time of year, n^nNn Cinn = the month when the barley is in the ear {abib) (Exod. ix, 31). "At the time assigned, the vague montli Epep would pretty nearly coincide with the Hebrew Abib" (Lepsius, Chron. p. 141). Hardly so, for in the year named 1 Epiphi would fall on 14tli May, and it is scarce- ly conceivable that the passover month (whose full moon is that next to the vernal equinox, which in that cen- tury fell cir. 5th April) should begin so late as the mid- dle of May. Not till a hundred years later would the vague month Epiphi and the Hebrew passover month coincide. The argument proves too much, unless we are prepared to lower the exode to cir. B.C. 1200. (To some it may imply that the narrative of the exode was written about that time — Mr. SiiaTpe, Ilision/ of Egypt, i. Go — but one can hardly suppose that the Hebrews re- tained the vague Egyptian months as well as their names so long after their settlement in Palestine.) If in any year from B.C. 1300 upwards, the full moon next the vernal equinox fell in the month Epiphi, it would follow that the Coptic month-names (which, it is well imdcrstood, never occur on the monuments) belonged then to a different form of the year.