he wall of
the shrine he built at Karnak is a genuine and authentic record.

So too are the lists given by the kings who immediately followed
Thothmes III., Amenophis III. of the eighteenth dynasty, Seti I. and
Ramses II. of the nineteenth, and Ramses III. of the twentieth. It is
true that in some cases the list of one Pharaoh has been slavishly
copied by another, but it is also true that these Pharaohs actually
overran and subjugated the countries to which the lists belong. Of this
we have independent testimony.

At one time it was the fashion to throw doubt on the alleged conquests
of Ramses II. in Western Asia. This was the natural reaction from the
older belief, inherited from the Greek writers of antiquity, that Ramses
II. was a universal conqueror who had carried his arms into Europe, and
even to the confines of the Caucasus. With the overthrow of this belief
came a disbelief in his having been a conqueror at all. The disbelief
was encouraged by the boastful vanity of his inscriptions, as well as by
the absence in them of any details as to his later Syrian wars.

But we now know that such scepticism was over-hasty. It was like the
scepticism which refused to admit that Canaan had been made an Egyptian
province by Thothmes III., and which needed the testimony of the Tel
el-Amarna tablets before it could be removed. As a matter of fact,
Egyptian authority was re-established throughout Palestine and even on
the eastern bank of the Jordan during the reign of Ramses II., and the
conquests of the Pharaoh in Northern Syria were real and not imaginary.
Such has been the result of the discoveries of the last three or four
years.

We have no reason to doubt that the campaigns of Ramses III. in Asia
were equally historical. The great confederacy of northern barbarians
and Asiatic invaders which had poured down upon Egypt had been utterly
annihilated; the Egyptian army was flushed with victory, and Syria,
overrun as it had been by the invaders from the north, was in no
position to resist a fresh attack. Moreover, the safety of Egypt
required that Ramses should follow up the destruction of his assailants
by carrying the war into Asia. But it is noticeable that the places he
claims to have conquered, whether in Canaan or further north, lay along
the lines of two high-roads, and that the names of the great towns even
on these high-roads are for the most part conspicuously absent. The
names, however, are practically those alr