“Before I wrote I sought me out a Mohar who knows his power and leads the jeunesse, a chief in the armee, [who travels] even to the end of the world.

“Answer me not ‘This is good; this is bad;’ repeat not to me your opinion.  Come, I will tell thee all that lies before thee at the end of thy journey.

“I begin for thee with the palace of Sesetsu (Sesostris).  Hast thou not set foot in it by force?  Hast thou not eaten the fish in the brook ...?  Hast thou not washed thyself in it?  With thy permission I will remind thee of Huzana; where is its fortress?  Come, I pray thee, to the palace of the land of Uazit, even of Osymandyas (Ramses II.) in his victories, [to] Saez-el, together with Absaqbu.  I will inform thee of the land of ’Ainin (the two Springs), the customs of which thou knowest not.  The land of the lake of Nakhai, and the land of Rehoburta thou hast not seen since thou wast born, O Mohar.  Rapih is widely extended.  What is its wall like?  It extends for a mile in the direction of Gaza.”

The French words introduced from time to time by Dr. Brugsch into the translation represent the Semitic words which the Egyptian writer has employed.  They illustrate the fashionable tendency of his day to fill the Egyptian vocabulary with the words and phrases of Canaan.  It was the revenge taken by Palestine for its invasion and conquest by the armies of Seti and Ramses.  Thus armee corresponds to the Semitic tsaba, “army,” jeunesse to na’aruna, “young men.”  The Egyptian scribe, however, sometimes made mistakes similar to those which modern novelists are apt to commit in their French quotations.  Instead of writing, as he intended, ’ebed gamal Mohar na’amu ("a camel’s slave is the Mohar! they say"), he has assigned the Canaanite vowel ayin to the wrong word, and mis-spelt the name of the “camel,” so that the phrase is transformed into abad kamal Mohar n’amu ("the camel of the Mohar has perished, they are pleasant"). (It is curious that a similar mistake in regard to the spelling of ’ebed, “slave” or “servant” has been made in an Aramaic inscription which I have discovered on the rocks near Silsileh in Upper Egypt, where the name of Ebed-Nebo is written Abed-Nebo.)

Most of the geographical names mentioned in the papyrus can be identified.  Aupa, the Ubi of the Tel el-Amarna tablets, was on the borders of the land of the Hittites, and not far from Aleppo.  The Zar or “Plain” of Sesostris makes its appearance in the lists of conquered towns and countries which were drawn up by Thothmes III., Seti I., Ramses II., and Ramses III., in order to commemorate their victories in Syria.  The word probably migrated from Babylonia, where the zeru denoted the alluvial plain which lay between the Tigris and the Euphrates.  Kadesh, the southern capital of the Hittites, “in the land of the Amorites,” lay on the Orontes, close to the lake of Horns, and