son of Seti-Menephthah, the puissant, and grandson of RamessesRamenpehti, the puissant, and Ramesses-Meriamen, the puissant, &c., undertook to be a good friend and brother to Khitasir, the puissant, &c. Khitasir engaged under no circumstances to invade the land of Egypt, to carry away anything from it, for ever; and Ramesses engaged under no circumstances to invade the land of Khita, to carry away anything from it, for ever. Each bound himself, if the other were attacked, either to come in person, or to send his forces to the other's assistance. Each pledged himself to the extradition both of criminals fleeing from justice and of any other subjects wishing to transfer their allegiance. Each, at the same time, stipulated for an amnesty of offences in the case of all persons thus surrendered. The treaty was placed under the protection of the gods of the two countries, who were invoked respectively to protect observers and punish infringers of it.'

Some years later the friendship was cemented by an intermarriage. Ramesses seems to have proposed and the Hittite monarch to have given his consent to the connection. The daughter of Khitasir, who on her marriage exchanged her Hittite name for the Egyptian one of Ur-maa-nefru-ra, was conducted by Khitasir himself, "clad in the dress of his country," to the palace of the Egyptian monarch; the nuptials were celebrated; Ur-maa-nefru-ra was proclaimed as Queen Consort of her royal spouse, and Khitasir, after receiving hospitable entertainment, returned to his own land. The two contiguous empires. were thus brought into perfect harmony and agreement; peace was secured, at any rate for some considerable space; and Ramesses was able to turn his thoughts to those gigantic works which mainly occupied his later years.

These works were of various kinds. Some were temples, either built in the ordinary way of huge blocks of hewn stone, or else carved out of the solid rock, as that of Ipsambul in Nubia. Others were palaces for his own abode, with corridors, and courts, and pillared halls, and huge colossi representing his own august person, and internally ornamented with coloured bas-reliefs commemorative of his own actions. A considerable number were cities, either begun by his father and completed by himself, or entirely of his own construction, as Pa-Tum "Records of the Past," vol. iv. pp. 27-32.

• Brugsch, "History of Egypt," vol. ii. p. 75.

(or Pithom), Pa-Ramessu (Raamses), Pa-Phthah, Pa-Ra, PaAmmon, &c. Among them were also his Great Canal, and his Great Wall, the former connecting the Nile with the Red Sea, and running from near Bubastis by way of Pithom to the Bitter Lakes, and thence to Suez-the other carried from a point near Pelusium across the Isthmus to the inner recess of the western arm of the Red Sea. It was in the execution of these works that the Israelites suffered the main portion of their afflictions. Pithom and Pa-Ramessu, begun by Seti, but completed by Ramesses II., were certainly the work of their hands; and they were not improbably employed also in building the other cities. Or, if they did not build them, they at any rate made the bricks for them. And they probably were largely employed in the construction of the Great Canal and the Great Wall. The Great Wall skirted the edge of their special country, Goshen, which lay along the eastern frontier, between the Pelusiac branch of the Nile and the Desert; the Great Canal was in their immediate neighbourhood, and passed close to Pithom-— one of the cities which they are expressly stated to have built. Ramesses had, no doubt, an enormous command of human labour by reason of the multitude of prisoners taken in his many wars; but still his constructions were so vast and so numerous, that this multitude would not have sufficed had not their services been supplemented by that of the subject races dwelling in Egypt-Hebrews, Shartana, and others.

66

And the motive, which had originally lain at the root of the Israelite oppression, was still active and vigorous, still one that ruled the policy of Egypt, and was regarded in governmental circles as of constraining force. The Hebrew people were still viewed as a danger, their multiplication as a thing to be checked, their aspirations and energies as needing repression. Philo tells us' that the taskmasters continually became more and more savage, that many of them were wild beasts in human shape, as cruel as poisonous snakes and carnivorous tigers, with hearts as hard as steel or adamant, utterly pitiless, and unwilling to make allowance for any shortcoming, whatever its cause." And he declares that the result was a great mortality among the oppressed people, who perished in heaps, as though they had been stricken by some fearful plague, and were not even allowed burial, but were cast out beyond the borders of the land, to "Vit. Mosis," pp. 86, 87.

moulder away on the bare sand, or to be devoured by vultures and jackals.

"In process of time," however, the king, who had inflicted all this misery-of whom a modern writer says, that "there was not a stone in his monuments which had not cost a human life"'went the way of all flesh, sickened and died (Exod. ii. 23). He had reached the age of seventy-seven years, one rarely attained by Egyptian monarchs, and was in the sixty-seventh year of his reign, counting from the time when he was associated upon the throne by his father. In person, tall and handsome, with a good forehead, a large, well-formed, slightly aquiline nose, a wellshaped mouth, lips that are not too full, a small delicate chin, and eyes that are thoughtful and pensive; he had well trained himself in warlike exercises, and was physically a perfect type of the most highly-bred, partly Semitized, Egyptian. In his early wars he greatly distinguished himself, and the "Epic Poem " of Pentaour, engraved upon the walls of more than one of his temples, is an undying commemoration of his martial exploits. He seems not to have been wanting in natural affection, and both towards his father and towards his eldest son he expresses himself upon his monuments with tenderness. But all this promise, all these natural advantages and endowments, were marred and spoilt by an overweening vanity and arrogance, fostered by the circumstances of his life, by his father's too partial fondness, by his own successes, by the flattery and adulation that surrounded him, and increasing ever more and more as time went on, until it became an absorbing and impious egotism. Notwithstanding his professed regard for his father, Ramesses in his later years showed himself his father's worst enemy, by erasing his name from the monuments upon which it had been in. scribed, and in many instances substituting his own. Amid a great show of regard for the deities of his country, and for the ordinances of the established worship, he contrived that the chief result of all that he did for religion should be the glorification of himself. Other kings had arrogated to themselves a certain qualified divinity, and after their deaths had sometimes been placed by some of their successors on a par with the real national gods; but it remained for Ramesses II. to associate himself during his lifetime with such leading deities as Ra and Tum, as Phthah, Ammon, and Horus, and to claim equally with them the religious Lenormant, "Manuel d'histoire Ancienne," vol. i. p. 423.

regards of his subjects. As vanity made him trench on the prerogatives of the gods, so it made him careless of the lives and sufferings of men. To obtain the glory of being, as he is, indisputably the greatest of Egyptian builders, he utterly disregarded the cries and groans of those over whom he ruled; he exacted forced labour from all the subject races within his dominions pitilessly. As M. Lenormant observes: "It is not without a feeling of absolute horror that one can picture to oneself the thousands of captives who must have died under the rod of the taskmasters, or victims of excessive fatigue and of privations of all sorts, while they were erecting by their forced labour the gigantic constructions in which the insatiable vanity of the Egyptian monarch took a delight.""

Ramesses, however, was dead-the God, of whom he had made himself the rival, and whose people he had used so cruelly, had called him to his last account-and the unfortunate wretches employed upon the public works in progress may have momentarily breathed more freely, and felt a sense of relief. Princes are always popular on their coronation day; and the son who had succeeded Ramesses II., a weak prince, not credited with much ambition, might have seemed unlikely to continue his father's policy of severe and cruel oppression. But it soon became apparent, that Menephthah had neither the goodness of heart nor the strength of character that would lead him to initiate a change. Though, comparatively speaking, unambitious, and free from any desire to astonish posterity by vast constructive works of any kind, he was yet inclined to carry on various constructions left incomplete by his father, and even to set others on foot in different parts of the empire. Thus, any expectations which the Israelites may have formed of their sufferings being alleviated in consequence of his accession, were disappointed. "The king of Egypt died; and the children of Israel" still "sighed by reason of the bondage; and they cried, and their cry came up unto God by reason of the bondage." The affliction continued equally bitter, the labour equally hard; the taskmasters still plied their sticks (Exod. iii. 7); the Israelites "groaned" (Exod. ii. 24); and their cry went up to heaven. Under these circumstances God once more 66 came down (Exod. iii. 8), not, however, this time to investigate, but to de

Lenormant, "Manuel," vol. i. p. 423.

n

• As when the Tower of Babel was built (Gen. xi. 5), and when Sodom was about to be punished (Gen. xviii. 21)

liver. "He had seen, He had seen the affliction of His people which were in Egypt "-He "had heard their groaning" (Exod. ii. 24), and remembered His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob; He had determined within Himself that the time was come both for vengeance and for deliverance, and had settled what should be the method of the deliverance, and who should be the deliverer. It remained that He should execute His purposes.

The first step was to recall Moses from the land of Midian to Egypt, and formally to give him a commission to deliver the people. "Moses kept the flock of Jethro, his brother-in-law, the priest of Midian; and he led the flock to the back of the wilderness"-far from the shores of the Red Sea, where Jethro seems to have dwelt, "and came to the mountain of God, even to Horeb" (Exod. iii. 1). We do not know the precise place; but "a tradition, reaching back to the sixth cen tury of the Christian era, fixes it in the same deep seclusion as that to which in all probability Moses afterwards led the Israelites. The convent of Justinian is built over what was supposed to be the exact spot where the shepherd was bid to draw his sandals from off his feet." This spot is on the right flank of Sinai, in a narrow valley, called the Wady Shoaib, which runs south-eastward from the great plain in front of the Ras-Sufsâfeh, whence it is almost certain that the Law was delivered, and the narrower plain of the Wady-Sebayeh at the eastern foot of the Jebel Mousa. Here, or at any rate in this neighbourhood, as Moses walked with his flock, pasturing it, there suddenly appeared to him, a little out of his direct path (Exod. iii. 4), a wonderful sight. Upon the mountain-side was a wellknown shittim, or acacia, tree-"the thorn-tree of the desert, spreading out its tangled branches, thick-set with white thorns, over the rocky ground."" This tree, as Moses approached, appeared to him all ablaze with light, as if on fire; but instead of the branches crackling and shrivelling up, as they would have done naturally had the fire been real, the whole tree remained unconsumed, the flames merely playing about it. Then said Moses: "I will now turn aside, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt" (Exod. iii. 3). Accordingly, he ascen led the hill-side, and approached the phenomenon to examine it,

'Stanley, "Lectures on the Jewish Church," vol. i. p. 107.

Stanley, in Smith's " Dictionary of the Bible," vol. ii. p. 427.