The mounds from which the monuments had been disinterred are about twelve miles to the west of Ismailîyeh, and are called Tel el-Maskhuteh, “the Mound of the Image.” In the last century, however, they were known as Abu Kêshêd, and were famous for a half-buried monolith of granite representing Ramses ii. seated between Tum and Râ, the hieroglyphic inscription on the back of which has been published by Sir Gardner Wilkinson. The canal made by the Pharaohs for uniting the Nile with the Red Sea, and afterwards cleared of the sand that choked it by Darius, by Trajan, and by the Arab conqueror 'Amru, skirted the southern side of the mounds. At present the modern Freshwater Canal runs along their northern edge, to the north of which again is the line of the railway from Cairo to Suez. The fortifications erected by Arabi, however, hide the site of the old city from the traveller in the train.
Dr. Naville's excavations proved him to have been right in identifying Tel el-Maskhuteh with Pithom. The inscriptions he found there showed that its ancient name was Pi-Tum, and that it stood in the district of Thukut, the Succoth of the Old Testament. The name of this district was already known from papyri of the age of the nineteenth dynasty, and Dr. Brugsch had pointed out its identity with the Biblical Succoth.
But the discovery of the ancient name was not the only result of the explorer's work. It turned out that the city had been built by Ramses ii., and that it contained a number of large brick buildings which seem to have been intended for magazines. Here, then, at last was a proof that the Egyptologists were correct in making Ramses ii. the Pharaoh of the Oppression.
The site of Raamses or Ramses, the companion city of Pithom, has still to be discovered. But it cannot be far distant from Tel el-Maskhuteh, and, like the latter, must have been in that land of Goshen in which the Israelites were settled. The discoveries which enabled Dr. Naville to determine the boundaries of the land of Goshen and to fix the site of its ancient capital have already been described. The site of Zoan, the modern Sân, had long been known, and the excavations, first of Mariette Pasha and then of Professor Flinders Petrie, have laid bare the foundations of its temple and brought to light the monuments of the kings who enriched and adorned it. Built originally in the age of the Old Empire, it was restored by the Hyksos conquerors of Egypt, and became under them a centre of influence and power.
Goshen, Zoan and Pithom, the sites around which the early history of Israel gathered, have thus been brought to light. The disputes which have raged [pg 079] about them are at last ended. Here and there a persistent sceptic, who has been reared in the traditions of the past, may still express doubts concerning the discoveries of recent years, but for the Egyptologist and the archæologist the question has been finally settled. We can visit “the field of Zoan” and explore the mounds of Pithom with no misgivings as to their identity. When the train carries us from Ismailîyeh to Cairo, we may feel assured that we are passing through the district in which Jacob and his family were settled, and where the kinsfolk of Moses had their homes. The Egypt of the patriarchs and the Exodus was an Egypt narrow in compass and easily traversed in these days of steam; it represented the western part of the Delta, more especially the strip of cultivable land which stretches along the banks of the Freshwater Canal from Zagazig to Ismailîyeh: that is all. The eastern and northern Delta, Upper Egypt—even the district in which Cairo now stands—lay outside it. The history which attaches itself to them is not the history of the early Israelites.
Chapter III. The Exodus And The Hebrew Settlement In Canaan.
Ramses ii. was the last of the conquering Pharaohs of native Egyptian history. The Asiatic empire of Thothmes iii. was in some measure restored by the victories of his father and himself. The cities of Palestine yielded him an unwilling obedience. Gaza, and the other towns in what was afterwards the territory of the Philistines, were garrisoned by Egyptian troops, and on the walls of the Ramesseum were depicted his conquest of Shalem or Jerusalem, Merom, Beth-Anath, and other Canaanite states, in his eighth year. Egyptian armies again marched northward into Syria along the highroad that led past the Phœnician cities, and on the banks of the Nahr el-Kelb, or Dog's River, near Beyrût, the Pharaoh erected a tablet in commemoration of his successes. On the eastern side of the Jordan also Egyptian authority once more prevailed. In front of the northern pylon of the temple of Luxor, Ramses [pg 081] erected six colossal figures of himself, and on their recently-uncovered bases are inscribed the names of the various nations he claimed to have subdued. Among them we find, for the first time in the Egyptian records, the name of Moab, following immediately upon that of Assar, the Asshurim of Genesis xxv. 3. That the insertion of the name was not an idle boast we learn from a discovery lately made by Dr. Schumacher. On the eastern side of the Jordan, but at no great distance from the Lake of Tiberias, is a monolith called the “Stone of Job.” On this the German explorer has found Egyptian sculptures and hieroglyphs. Above the figure of the Pharaoh are the cartouches of Ramses ii., and opposite the king, on the left, a local deity is represented with a full face and the crown of Osiris, over whom is written the name of Akna-zapn, or “Yakin of the North.” The monument is an evidence of a permanent occupation of the country by the Egyptians, as the name and figure of the god indicate that it was erected, not by the Egyptians themselves, but by the Egyptianised natives of the land.
Along the Syrian coast Seti i. had already carried his arms. His campaigns were followed by those of his son. Arvad, the shores of the Gulf of Antioch, and even Cilicia, are enumerated among the conquests of the Pharaoh. He even claims to have [pg 082] defeated the armies of Assyria, of Matena or Mitanni, the Aram-Naharaim of Scripture, and of Singar in Mesopotamia. At Luxor, on the western walls of the newly excavated court, we hear of his having been at Tunip (now Tennib), “in the land of Naharaim,” of his capture of a fortress of the Kati in the same district, and of how “the Pharaoh” had taken a city in “the land of Satuna.” Satuna was one of those countries in the far north whose name is never mentioned elsewhere in the Egyptian texts.