had carried the seed of Oriental wisdom to the distant west.  The acquaintance, however, was a slight one.  At the court of the Ptolemies, on the threshold of Europe and Asia, they met at last.  On the shores of the Mediterranean, on the soil where lay the traces of the ancient Egyptian civilisation, in the silent avenues of mysterious sphinxes, amongst hieroglyphic-covered obelisks, Greek and Hebrew thought stood face to face.  The two civilisations embodied the principles of the Beautiful and the Sublime, of Morality and AEstheticism, of religious and philosophic speculation.  The result of this meeting marks a glorious page in the annals of human thought.  Among the monuments of a great historic past, the speculative spirit of the East made love to the plastic beauty of the West, until, at last, they were united in happy union.  Hellenic taste and sense of beauty and Semitic speculation not only evolved side by side in Egypt but mixed and commingled; their thoughts were intertwined and interwoven, giving rise to a new intellectual movement, a new philosophy of thought:  the Judaeo-Hellenic.  Alexandrian culture, during the reign of the Ptolemies, is the offspring of a mixed marriage between two parents belonging to two widely different races, and, as a cross breed, is endowed with many qualities.  It had the seriousness of the one parent and the delicacy of the other.

The Ptolemies encouraged the movement towards fusion.  The result was that the Jews in Egypt, not being hampered by reactionary endeavours from the side of conservative parties, and with an adaptability peculiar to their race, soon acquired the language of the people in whose midst they dwelt.  They conversed and wrote in Greek; they moulded and shaped their own thoughts into Greek form; they clothed the Semitic mode of thinking in Hellenic garb.  The immediate result was the translation of the Pentateuch into Greek.  Vanity, of which no individual or race is free, had embellished this literary production, which has acquired a high degree of importance alike among Jews and Christians, with many legends.  This translation, known as the Septuaginta (LXX), was followed by independent histories relating to Biblical events.  One of the best known authors is the chronographer Demetrius, who lived in the second half of the third century, and whose work Flavius Josephus is supposed to have utilised.  Not to speak of the Greek authors in Judaea and Syria, we may mention Artapanos, who, following the fashion of the day, wrote history in the form of a romance, and showed traces of an apologetic character.  He endeavoured to attribute all that was great in Egyptian civilisation to Moses.  This was due to the fact that Manetho, the Egyptian historian, and others following his example, had spread fables and venomous tales about the ancient sojourn and exodus of the Hebrews and their leader.  To counterbalance these accusations, fables had to be interwoven into history, and history became romance.  Moses was thus identified with