The majority of Egyptologists believe that the Hebrews entered Egypt while these Hyksos kings, men of the same Semitic family and monotheistic tendencies, were ruling in Lower Egypt.  The bare subterranean temple discovered by M. Mariette, with the well near it filled with broken statues of the Egyptian gods, is an indication of those tendencies.  The “other king, who knew not Joseph,” was a king of the eighteenth dynasty, who conquered the Hyksos and drove them out of Egypt.  Apparently the course of events was like that which many centuries later occurred in Spain.  In both cases, the original rulers of the land, driven to the mountains, gradually reconquered their country step by step.  The result of this reconquest of the country would also be in Egypt, as it was in Spain, that the Semitic remnants left in the land would be subject to a severe and oppressive rule.  The Jews in Egypt, like the Moors in Spain, were victims of a cruel bondage.  Then began the most splendid period of Egyptian history, during the seventeenth, sixteenth, fifteenth, and fourteenth centuries before Christ.  The Egyptian armies overran Syria, Asia Minor, and Armenia as far as the Tigris.

Ramses II., the most powerful monarch of this epoch, is probably the king whose history is given by Herodotus and other Greek writers under the name of Sesostris.[177] M. de Rouge believes himself able to establish this identity.  He found in the Museum at Vienna a stone covered with inscriptions, and dedicated by a person whose name is given as Ramses Mei-Amoun, exactly in the hieroglyphics of the great king.  But this person’s name is also written elsewhere on the stone Ses, and a third time as Ses Mei-amoun, showing that Ses was a common abbreviation of Ramses.  It is also written Sesu, or Sesesu, which is very like the form in which Diodorus writes Sesostris, namely, Sesoosis.[178] Now Ramses II., whose reign falls about B.C. 1400, erected a chain of fortresses to defend the northeastern border of Egypt against the Syrian nomads.  One of these fortresses was named from the King Ramses, and another Pachtum.  The papyri contain accounts of these cities.  One papyrus, in the British Museum,[179] is a description by a scribe named Pinebsa, of the aspect of the city Ramses, and of the petitions of the laborers for relief against their overseers.  These laborers are called Apuru, Hebrews.  In a papyrus of the Leyden Museum, an officer reports to his superior thus:  “May my lord be pleased.  I have distributed food to the soldiers and to the Hebrews, dragging stones for the great city Ramses Meia-moum.  I gave them food monthly.”  This corresponds with the passage (Exodus i. 11):  “They built for Pharaoh treasure-cities, Pithom and Raamses."[180]

The birth of Moses fell under the reign of Ramses II.  The Exodus was under that of his successor, Menepthes.  This king had fallen on evil times; his power was much inferior to that of his great predecessor; and he even condescended to propitiate the anti-Egyptian element, by worshipping its gods.  He has left his inscription on the monuments with the title, “Worshipper of Sutech-Baal in Tanis.”  The name of Moses is Egyptian, and signifies “the child.”