Egypt is the most conservative of countries, and the children of Israel still have their representatives in it. The Bedâwin still feed their flocks and enjoy an independent existence on the outskirts of the cultivated land, and in that very district of Goshen where the descendants of Jacob once dwelt. Even when they adopt a settled agriculturist life, like the villagers of Gizeh, they still claim immunity from the burdens of their fellahin neighbours on the ground of their Bedâwin descent. They are exempt from the conscription and the corvée, the modern equivalents of the forced brickmaking of the Mosaic age. The attempt to interfere with these privileges has actually led to an exodus in our own time.[[153]] The Wadi Tumilât, the Goshen of old days, was colonised with Arabs from the Nejd and Babylonia by Mohammed Ali, who wished to employ them in the culture of the silkworm. Here they lived with their flocks and cattle, protected by the Government, and exempt from taxation, from military service, and the corvée. Mohammed Ali died, however, and an attempt was then made to force them into the army, and lay upon them the ordinary burdens of taxation. Thereupon, in a single night, the whole population silently departed with all their possessions, leaving behind them nothing but the hearths of their forsaken homes. They made their way back to their kinsfolk eastward of Egypt, and the Wadi remained deserted until M. de Lesseps carried through it the Freshwater Canal.
We owe to Dr. Naville the recovery of Goshen. In 1884 he excavated at Saft el-Henna an ancient mound close to the line of railway between Zagazig and Tel el-Kebîr. The monuments he found there showed that the mound represents the ancient Qosem or Qos, called Pha-kussa by the Greek geographers, which was the capital of the Arabian nome. The Septuagint, with its Gesem instead of Goshen, implies that the site of Goshen was still remembered in Alexandrine times.[[154]]
The Arabian nome took its name not only from its proximity to Arabia, but also from the fact that its inhabitants were mainly of the Arab race. But the name did not come into existence until after the age of the nineteenth dynasty. When Ramses II. was Pharaoh, the whole region from the neighbourhood of Cairo to the Suez Canal was included in the nome of On or Heliopolis. It was only at a subsequent date that the nomes of Arabia and of Bubastis were carved out of that of On.
Previously to this, Qosem was the name of a district as well as of its chief city. It comprised not only the fertile fields immediately surrounding Saft el-Henna, and stretching from the mounds of Bubastis, close to Zagazig, on the west to Tel el-Kebîr on the east, but also the Wadi Tumilât, through which the railway now runs eastward as far as Ismailiya. Belbeis, south of Zagazig, was also included within its limits. At the eastern extremity of the Wadi was Pithom, now marked by the ruins of Tel el-Maskhûta.
Meneptah II., the Pharaoh of the Exodus, thus refers at Karnak to the arable land about Pi-Bailos, the modern Belbeis. ‘The country around it,’ he says, ‘is not cultivated, but left as pasture for cattle because of the foreigners. It has been abandoned (to them) since ancient times.’ They had settled with their herds in the neighbouring-valley of Tumilât, and the richer land which adjoined the valley was also assigned to them. Here they were in the nome of Heliopolis, the daughter of whose high-priest was married by Joseph, as well as in the near neighbourhood of Bubastis, where Dr. Naville has found Hyksos remains.
When the great inscription of Meneptah II. was engraved on the walls of Karnak the Exodus would have already taken place. The ‘foreigners,’ therefore, to whom he alludes must have been the Israelites, who had now deserted the spot. The district accordingly would once more have needed inhabitants, and the Pharaoh had the power of handing it over to the first Bedâwin tribe who begged for pasturage in the Delta. He had not long to wait. Among the papyri in the British Museum there is a letter dated in the eighth year of Meneptah’s reign, and addressed to the king. In this the scribe writes as follows:—‘Another matter for the consideration of my master’s heart. We have allowed the tribes of the Shasu from the land of Edom to pass the fortress of Meneptah in the land of Thukut (Succoth), (and go) to the lakes of Pithom of Meneptah in the land of Thukut, in order to feed themselves, and to feed their herds on the great estate of Pharaoh, the beneficent sun of all countries. In the year 8.’[[155]]
The Wâdi Tumilât was accordingly regarded as crown-land, as indeed it is to-day, and it was handed over to the Edomites by officers of the Pharaoh, just as it had been to the Israelites several centuries before. But now the Israelites had fled from it, and disappeared into the wilderness, and it was necessary to fill their place.
The Biblical writer distinguishes the Pharaoh of the Oppression from the Pharaoh of the Exodus (Exod. ii. 23). It was after the death of the great royal builder of Egypt that the Hebrews were delivered from their bondage. The Pharaoh of the Oppression and not the Pharaoh of the Exodus was ‘the new king which knew not Joseph.’
The full meaning of the phrase has been explained to us by the tablets of Tel el-Amarna. They have made it clear that towards the end of the eighteenth dynasty the Egyptian court became semi-Asiatic. The Pharaohs married Asiatic wives; and eventually Amenophis IV., under the influence of his mother Teie, publicly abandoned the religion of which he was the official head, and avowed himself a convert to an Asiatic form of faith. Amon, the god of Thebes, was dethroned by a new deity, Aten-Ra, ‘the Solar Disk.’ The Solar Disk, however, was but the visible manifestation of the one Supreme God, who was diffused throughout nature, and corresponded in many respects with the Semitic Baal. The Egyptians accordingly identified him with Ra, the ancient Sun-god of Heliopolis, who in earlier times had similarly been identified with the Hyksos Baal.
Amenophis, the cast of whose face taken immediately after death displays the features and expression of a philosopher and enthusiast,[[156]] endeavoured to force the new faith upon his unwilling subjects. The very name of Amon was proscribed and was erased wherever it occurred, the followers of the old religion of Egypt were persecuted, and the Pharaoh changed his own name to that of Khu-n-Aten, ‘the radiance of the Solar Disk.’ A violent struggle ensued with the powerful hierarchy of Thebes. Khu-n-Aten was finally compelled to leave the capital of his fathers, and build himself a new city further north, where its site is now marked by the mounds of Tel el-Amarna. He carried with him the State-archives, consisting mainly of foreign correspondence in the Babylonian language and cuneiform script, and these were deposited in one of the public buildings adjoining the palace, every brick of which was stamped with the words, ‘Aten-Ra! the Record-Office.’[[157]]