time of Ahmosis.  The outcasts formed themselves into a nation under the rule of a Heliopolitan priest called Osarsyph, or Moses, who gave them laws, mobilised them, and joined his forces with the descendants of the Shepherds at Jerusalem.  The Pharaoh Amenophis, taken by surprise at this revolt, and remembering the words of his minister Amenothes, took flight into Ethiopia.  The shepherds, in league with the Unclean, burned the towns, sacked the temples, and broke in pieces the statues of the gods:  they forced the Egyptian priests to slaughter even their sacred animals, to cut them up and cook them for their foes, who ate them derisively in their accustomed feasts.  Amenophis returned from Ethiopia, together with his son Ramses, at the end of thirteen years, defeated the enemy, driving them back into Syria, where the remainder of them became later on the Jewish nation.*

     * A list of the Pharaohs after Ai, as far as it is possible
     to make them out, is here given: 

[Illustration:  281.jpg Table]

This is but a romance, in which a very little history is mingled with a great deal of fable:  the scribes as well as the people were acquainted with the fact that Egypt had been in danger of dissolution at the time when the Hebrews left the banks of the Nile, but they were ignorant of the details, of the precise date and of the name of the reigning Pharaoh.  A certain similarity in sound suggested to them the idea of assimilating the prince whom the Chroniclers called Menepthes or Amenepthes with Amen-othes, i.e.  Amenophis III.; and they gave to the Pharaoh of the XIXth dynasty the minister who had served under a king of the XVIIIth:  they metamorphosed at the same time the Hebrews into lepers allied with the Shepherds.  From this strange combination there resulted a narrative which at once fell in with the tastes of the lovers of the marvellous, and was a sufficient substitute for the truth which had long since been forgotten.  As in the case of the Egyptians of the Greek period, we can see only through a fog what took place after the deaths of Minephtah and Seti II.  We know only for certain that the chiefs of the nomes were in perpetual strife with each other, and that a foreign power was dominant in the country as in the time of Apophis.  The days of the empire would have Harmhabi himself belonged to the XVIIIth dynasty, for he modelled the form of his cartouches on those of the Ahmesside Pharaohs:  the XIXth dynasty began only, in all probability, with Ramses I., but the course of the history has compelled me to separate Harmhabi from his predecessors.  Not knowing the length of the reigns, we cannot determine the total duration of the dynasty:  we shall not, however, be far wrong in assigning to it a length of 130 years or thereabouts, i.e. from 1350 to somewhere near 1220 B.C. been numbered if a deliverer had not promptly made his appearance.  The direct line of Ramses II. was extinct, but his innumerable sons by innumerable concubines