syllabary of Babylonia, and Egyptian culture had succeeded
in supplanting that which had come from the East.

The nineteenth dynasty ended even more disastrously than the eighteenth.
It is true that the great confederacy of northern and Libyan tribes
which attacked Egypt by sea and land in the reign of Meneptah, the son
and successor of Ramses II., was successfully repulsed, but the energy
of the Egyptian power seemed to exhaust itself in the effort. The throne
fell into the hands of usurpers, and the house of Ramses was swept away
by civil war and anarchy. The government was seized by a Syrian, Arisu
by name, and for a time Egypt was compelled to submit to a foreign yoke.
The overthrow of the foreigner and the restoration of the native
monarchy was due to the valour of Set-nekht, the founder of the
twentieth dynasty and the father of Ramses III.

It was under one of the immediate successors of Ramses II. that the
exodus of the Israelites out of Egypt must have taken place. Egyptian
tradition pointed to Meneptah; modern scholars incline rather to his
successors Seti II. and Si-Ptah. With this event the patriarchal history
of Canaan ought properly to come to an end. But the Egyptian monuments
still cast light upon it, and enable us to carry it on almost to the
moment when Joshua and his followers entered the Promised Land.

Palestine still formed part of the kingdom of Meneptah, at all events in
the earlier years of his reign. A scribe has left us a record of the
officials who passed to and from Canaan through the frontier fortress of
Zaru during the middle of the month Pakhons in the third year of the
king. One of these was Baal- ... the son of Zippor of Gaza, who carried
a letter for the Egyptian overseer of the Syrian peasantry (or
Perizzites), as well as another for Baal-[sa]lil-ga[b]u, the
vassal-prince of Tyre. Another messenger was Sutekh-mes, the son of
'Aper-dagar, who also carried a despatch to the overseer of the
peasantry, while a third envoy came in the reverse direction, from the
city of Meneptah, "in the land of the Amorites."

In the troubles which preceded the accession of the twentieth dynasty
the Asiatic possessions of Egypt were naturally lost, and were never
again recovered. Ramses III., however, the last of the conquering
Pharaohs, made at least one campaign in Palestine and Syria. Like
Meneptah, he had to bear the brunt of an attack upon Egypt by the
confederated hordes of the north which threa