The excavations of the Egypt Exploration Fund at Tahpanhes, which was the Daphnae of Herodotus, has thrown much light upon the home of this Jewish community.  The town was situated in a sandy desert to the south of a marshy lake.  It lay midway between the cultivated delta on the west and what is now the Suez Canal on the east.  Past it ran the main highway to Palestine.  Its founder, Psamtik I, the great-grandfather of Hophra, had built here a fort to guard the highway.  Herodotus states that he also stationed guards here, and that until late in the Persian period it was defended by garrisons whose duty was to repel Asiatic invasions (ii, 30).  Here the Ionian and Carian mercenaries, who were at this time the chief defence of the Egyptian king, were given permanent homes.  By virtue of its mixed population and its geographical position, Tahpanhes was a great meeting place of Eastern and Western civilization.  Here native Egyptians, Greek mercenaries, Phoenician and Babylonian traders, and Jewish refugees met on common ground and lived side by side.  It corresponded in these respects to the modern Port Said.

Probably in remembrance of the Jewish colony that once lived here, the ruins of the fort still bear an Arab name which means The Palace of the Jew’s Daughter.  The term palace is not altogether inappropriate, for apparently the fort was occasionally used as a royal residence.  Many wine-jars, bearing the seals of Psamtik, Hophra, and Amasis, have been found in the ruins.  In the northwestern part of these ruins has been uncovered a great open-air platform of brickwork, referred to in Jeremiah 43:8-10.  It was the place of common meeting found in connection with every Egyptian palace or private home.  When Amasis, in 564 B.C., came to the throne of Egypt he withdrew the privileges granted by his predecessors to foreigners.  The Greek colonists were transferred to Naukratis, and Tahpanhes lost most of its former glory.  About this time, if not before, the great majority of the Jewish refugees, who had settled in these frontier towns, probably returned to Palestine to find homes in its partially depopulated towns.

Ezekiel from distant Babylon appears to have regarded the Jews in Egypt with considerable hope (Ezek. 29:21).  But Jeremiah, who knew them better, was keenly alive to their faults.  In their despair and rage many of them evidently rejected the teachings of the prophets and became devotees of the Aramean goddess, the Queen of Heaven, mentioned in the recently discovered Aramean inscription of Zakar, king of Hazrak (cf.  Section LXV:vii).  Jeremiah’s closing words to them, therefore, are denunciations and predictions that they should suffer even in the land of Egypt, at the hand of Nebuchadrezzar, the same fate that had overtaken their fellow-countrymen at Jerusalem.  Both Jeremiah and Ezekiel (Ezek. 30) predicted that Nebuchadrezzar would invade and conquer Egypt.  In 568 B.C. his army actually did appear on the borders of Egypt; but how far he succeeded in conquering the land is unknown.  The complete conquest of Egypt certainly did not come until the Persian period under the leadership of the cruel Cambyses.