their squadrons into Syrian Asia, and waging a dubious battle with the Hittites before the walls of Hamath, where Rameses in his lion-guarded chariot performs prodigies of valor, and from which he returns not only to paint on sacred walls the picture of his victory, but also to inscribe a copy of the treaty of peace with the Hittite king, the earliest treaty in the preserved annals of diplomacy.  Well wrought that Rameses the Great for eternal fame in the sixty years of his reign, fifteen centuries before the birth of our Lord.  But what fame had been his, had not explorers and excavators and scholars dug and found and copied and translated what the sands had covered for centuries?  And to-day the curious traveller stops in sight of the pyramids on the banks of the Nile, and enters the Bulaq Museum, and there he sees set up before him the very mummy of Rameses himself and of a dozen other royal personages, rifled from their tombs and displayed for your amazement and mine.  There is the very Pharaoh—­you can see his features, you can touch his coffin—­who chased the Children of Israel out of Egypt.  There are the household implements, the furniture of their homes, the jewelry their queens wore,—­queens who were also sisters of the kings, as Sarah was the sister of Abraham.

Or would you know of some great revolution in Egypt?  These decipherers of the inscriptions will tell you how the Shepherd Kings overthrew the native dynasty, coming with their armies from Asia long before Rameses, and changed religion and customs; under whom Jacob and his sons found hospitable welcome, until their hated race was expelled by a stronger native dynasty that knew not Joseph.  Or they will tell you of the royal reformer Khuenaten, son of a famous Eastern mother, a queen from the banks of the Euphrates.  Taught by her, perhaps, a purer religion, he attempted to replace the worship of Egypt’s bestial gods by the worship of the one only great God, whose symbol was the sun.  But the priestly clan was too strong for him, and the succeeding Pharaohs destroyed his records and chiselled out his name where it had been cut in stone that no memory of his sacrilege might be preserved.  A royal Moses there could not be.  The worshipper of one God, whether king or son of Pharaoh’s daughter, could bring no reformation to Egypt.

Or would you learn how Egypt ruled its subject territory?  You can read the correspondence of a dozen local Egyptian governors in Palestine and Syria in the century before Moses led the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt.  There is the letter of the King of Jerusalem, where Melchizedek reigned in the times of Abraham; and they tell of rebellions against the fading power of Egypt, and of the fear of the advancing Hittites.  The earliest kings, those that built the pyramids, appear before us real in their personality, emerging out of misty legend or myth, and, earlier still, even the prehistoric races that antedated the very beginning of civilization.