peopled regions, governed by petty chiefs jealous one of another, fought scarcely a single great battle, and succeeded in conquering two regions of a moderate size, Syria and Upper Mesopotamia, as far as the Khabour river.  Alexander overran and subdued the entire tract between the AEgean and the Sutlej, the Persian Gulf and the Oxus.  He conquered Egypt, and founded a dynasty there which endured for nearly three centuries.  Thothmes subdued not a tenth part of the space, and the empire which he established did not endure for much more than a century.  It is thus absurd to compare Thothmes III. to Alexander the Great as a conqueror.

Alexander was, besides, much more than a conqueror; he was a first-rate administrator.  Had he lived twenty years longer he would probably have built up a universal monarchy, which might have lasted for a millenium.  As it was, he so organized the East that it continued for nearly three centuries mainly under Greek rule, in the hands of the monarchs who are known as his “successors.”  Thothmes III., on the contrary, organized nothing.  He left his conquests in such a condition that they, all of them, revolted at his death.  His successor had to reconquer all the countries that had submitted to his father, and to re-establish over them the Egyptian sovereignty.

In person the great Egyptian monarch was not remarkable.  He had a long, well-shaped, and somewhat delicate nose, which was almost in line with his forehead, an eye prominent and larger than that of most Egyptians, a shortish upper lip, a resolute mouth with rather over-full lips, and a rounded, slightly retreating chin.  The expression of his portrait statues is grave and serious, but lacks strength and determination.  Indeed, there is something about the whole countenance that is a little womanish, though his character certainly presents no appearance of effeminacy.  He died after a reign of fifty-four years, according to his own reckoning, having practically exercised the sovereign power for about thirty-two of the fifty-four.  His age at his death must have been about sixty.

[Illustration:  BUST OF THOTHMES III.]

During these stirring times, what were the children of Israel doing?  We have supposed that Joseph was minister of the last of the Shepherd Kings, under whose reign his people had entered upon the peaceful occupation of the land of Goshen, where they were received with hospitality by a population of the same simple pastoral habits with themselves; and it seems probable that, under Thothmes III., they were increasing abundantly and waxing mighty, and that the land between the Sebennytic and Pelusiac branches of the Nile was gradually being filled by them.  Their period of severe oppression had not yet begun; there had as yet arisen no sufficient reason for any measures of repression, such as were pursued by the new king who “knew not Joseph.”  The name and renown of the great minister seems still to have protected his kinsmen in the peaceful enjoyment of their privileges in the land that must by this time have lost for them most of its strangeness.