The testimony of the oldest Biblical narratives regarding the sojourn of the Hebrews in Egypt is, also, in perfect accord with the picture which the contemporary Egyptian inscriptions give of the period.  Furthermore, the Egyptian historians never distinguished the different races in their midst, but rather designated the foreign serf class by a common name.  The absence of detailed reference to the Hebrews is therefore perfectly natural.  It seems probable that not all but only part of the tribes which ultimately coalesced into the Hebrew nation found their way to Egypt.  The stories regarding Joseph, the traditional father of Ephraim and Manasseh, imply that these strong central tribes, possibly together with the southern tribes of Benjamin and Judah, were the chief actors in this opening scene in Israel’s history.

The Biblical narratives apparently disagree regarding the duration of the sojourn in Egypt.  The reference in Gen. 15:16, which, some writers think, comes from the northern Israelite group of stories, implies that it was a period of between one hundred and one hundred and fifty years.  The same duration is suggested by the priestly writer in Numbers 26:57-59.  The later traditions tend to extend the period.  If, as seems probable, the Hebrews first found their way to Egypt during the reign of Amenhotep IV, who reigned between 1375 and 1358 B.C., the older Hebrew chronology would make Ramses II, who reigned between 1292 and 1225, the Pharaoh of the oppression.  Of all the Pharaohs of this period in Egypt’s history the great builder and organizer Ramses II corresponds most closely to the Biblical description.  He it was who filled Egypt from one end to the other with vast temples and other buildings which could have been reared only through the services of a huge army of serfs.  The excavations of the Egypt Exploration fund have identified the Biblical Pithom with certain ruins in the Wady Tumilat near the eastern terminus of the modern railroad from Cairo to the Suez Canal.  This probably lay in the eastern boundary of the Biblical land of Goshen, which seems to have included the Wady Tumilat and to have extended westward to the Nile delta.  Here were found several inscriptions bearing the Egyptian name of the city P-Atum, house of the god Atum.  The excavations also laid bare a great square brick wall with the ruins of store chambers inside.  These rectangular chambers were of various sizes and were surrounded by walls two or three yards in thickness.  Contemporary inscriptions indicate that they were filled with grain from the top and were probably used for the storing of supplies to be used by the armies of Ramses II in their Asiatic campaigns.  This city was founded by Ramses II, who during the first twenty years of his reign, developed and colonized the territory east of the Nile delta including the Biblical land of Goshen.  A contemporary inscription also states that he founded near Pithum the house of Ramses, a city with a royal