CHAPTER III

"Say unto Tyrus, O thou that art situate at the entry of the sea, and which art a merchant of the people for many isles." -Ezek. xxvii. 3.

“Is this your joyous city, whose antiquity is of ancient days? her own feet shall carry her afar off to sojourn. Who hath taken this counsel against Tyre, the crowning city, whose merchants are princes, whose traffickers are the honourable of the earth? The Lord of hosts hath purposed it, to stain the pride of all glory, and to bring into contempt all the honourable of the earth." -Is. xxiii. 7-9.

DURING their sojourn in Egypt, the Israelites had been in contact with a highly civilised nation, from whose monuments and records many sidelights are shed upon their history. But after the Exodus, in the days when there was no king in Israel, we pass on to a time during which no intercourse took place between the Hebrews and any people whose monuments we can decipher.

With the Hittites, indeed, they had relations, and the statement in the Book of Joshua (xi. 4) that this people had horses and chariots very many is confirmed by the Egyptian monuments, which show us that just at this time the Hittites were at the height of their power, and that in their chariots lay their chiefest strength. It has been shown now, too, that the Hittites were no petty tribe of Canaan, but a great people who once ruled from the Euphrates to the Aegean Sea: and thus the Bible references to their power are amply vindicated. But as yet their inscriptions are a sealed book to us. We must wait for fresh light from the Hittite monuments until we have the key to their decipherment-until Kirjath Sepher, the "Book-town" of the Hittites, is disinterred, or until the tomb of the beautiful Hittite wife of Rameses II. is discovered, and with it, perhaps, the "silver tablet" on which Khita-sira, her father, had inscribed his version of the treaty with the great Pharaoh. (See p. 81.)

Meanwhile we know that after the time of Menephtah the decline of Egypt became very rapid. When the great and powerful xixth dynasty had come to its inglorious end, there followed, indeed, another Theban line of kings, headed by a monarch as mighty as any that had gone before Rameses III., whose name, Ramessu-Pa-netu ("Rameses the god"), formed the well-known Rhampsinitus of Greek historians.

The great Harris Papyrus, one of the finest, best written, and best preserved that have been discovered in Egypt, is entirely devoted to the praises of Rameses III., and to the commemoration of "the good and glorious works which he performed to the men of the land of Egypt, and of every land assembled together at one time; to inform the fathers, the gods and goddesses of the south and north, mortals, intelligences, mankind, of the numerous glorious actions which he did on earth while great Ruler of Egypt."

"I am king on earth, ruler of the living," he says to Amen, his god; "I made for thee a noble house ... filling its treasury with the products of the land of Egypt, gold, silver, and all precious stones for hundreds of thousands; its granaries had their heaps of corn and barley, its fields and herds multiplied like the sands of the shore" (Rec. vi. 23-26).

The list of the treasures accumulated-gold and silver, spices and jewels, fine linen and provisions

..

of food, detailed upon the Papyrus, curiously confirms the account of Herodotus, that "King Rhampsinitus was possessed, they said, of great riches in silver, - indeed to such an amount, that none of the Princes, his successors, surpassed or even equalled his wealth. The same king, I was also informed by the priests, afterwards descended alive into the region which the Greeks call Hades, and there played at dice with Ceres, sometimes winning, and sometimes suffering defeat."1 The great temple at Medinet-Abou, where gold and silver vases are portrayed upon the walls, recalls, too, the "vast chamber of hewn stone" built by Rhampsinitus. It shows, moreover, that architecture did not follow engraving and sculpture in their rapid downfall, for the temple is one of the most remarkable in Egypt.

Rameses III. was a great conqueror, as well as a powerful and wealthy ruler. "Thus have I taken from the nations the desire to direct their thoughts against Egypt," grimly says the record upon his temple of victory.

But though his reign forms a bright page in the

history; and during the XXIst dynasty the royal power passed into the hands of a succession of military pontiffs or priest-kings, who exerted little or no influence upon the fortunes of the nations round.