[1014] In a letter to A. Dalziel, Sept. 3, 1803, Porson states that these lines were an effort made to English an epigram by an Etonian friend, in imitation of Phocylides’s saw (Strabo, X. p. 487):
καὶ τόδε φωκυλίδου. Λέριοι κακοί, οὐχ ὁ μέν, ὃς δ’ οὔ, πάντες, πλὴν Προκλέους· καὶ Προκλέης Λέριος.
[1015] Op. cit., p. 53.
[1016] The inscription mentions the existing conditions of foreign affairs with neighbouring countries as satisfactory. It is in this connection that the “people of Israel” come in. Their Exodus, according to Pharaonic fashion, would have been described by the King as an expulsion and not as an escape against his will. The author of the inscription, who wrote from a point of view which was not that of the Biblical account, seems not unsupported by Exodus xii. 39, “Because they were thrust out of Egypt and could not tarry.” Even stronger is the Revised Version marginal rendering in Exodus xi. 1, “When he shall let you go altogether, he shall utterly thrust you out hence.” Sir Hanbury Brown, Journal of Egyptian Archæology (Jan. 1917), p. 19.
[1017] In connection with, perhaps even helping to fix, the date of the Exodus, it is in the victorious hymn of Menephtah that the earliest written reference to Israel appears: “Israel is desolated: her seed is not. Palestine has become a (defenceless) widow of Egypt” (Breasted), or “The Israelites are swept off: his seed is no more” (Naville). Petrie’s translation, “The people of Israel is spoiled: it has no corn (or seed),” does not for various reasons seem to find favour. The majority of Egyptologists now identify Aahmes I. with the “new king who knew not Joseph,” c. (1582), Rameses II. as the first Pharaoh of the Oppression, and of Exodus ii. 15 (c. 1300), and Menephtah the son of Rameses II. with the Pharaoh of the Plagues and the Flight from Egypt (c. 1234).
[1018] Egyptian Archæology (1902), 3-4. Erman, op. cit., 417. The English translators state that the bricks were usually unburnt and mixed with short pieces of straw.
[1019] If the Egyptian Rod was unknown, “the Egyptian fish (probably salted) that came in baskets” were regularly imported. Mishna Makhshirin, VI. 3.
[1020] See 1 Kings iv. 33, “And he spake also of beasts, and of fowl, and of creeping things, and of fishes.” Some authorities hold that this mention of Solomon’s natural history researches is quite late, and meant to be a set off against Aristotle’s.
[1021] Herod seems, from notices in Josephus, to have been quite a sportsman, for he kept a regular stud (Ant., XVI. 10, s. 3), and hunted bears, stags, wild asses, etc., with a record bag of forty head in one day (ibid., XV. 7, s. 7; and B. J., I. 21, s. 13).
[1022] It is fair to record that some of the Assyrian monarchs preferred a battle mid safer surroundings, for in representations the head keepers are seen letting the lions, etc., out of cages for their royal master to pot! Parks (παράδεισοι) and districts were strictly preserved by both Assyrian and Persian rulers; in England for several reigns the penalty for poaching in the New and other Royal Forests was death.