ive which the Egyptian monuments
afford, and the first synchronism between Jewish and Egyptian history,
appear in the reign of Ramses II., about B.C. 1400, in the nineteenth
dynasty.

It appears from the monuments and from the historians that somewhere about
B.C. 2000, or earlier, this great movement of warlike nomadic tribes
occurred, which resulted in the conquest of Lower Egypt by the pastoral
people known as Hyksos. It was perhaps a movement of Semitic races, the
Bedouins of the desert, like that which nearly three thousand years after
united them as warriors of Islam to overflow North Africa, Syria, Persia,
and Spain. They oppressed Egypt for five hundred years (Brugsch), and
appear on the monuments under the name of Amu (the herdsmen) or of Aadu
(the hated ones). Their kings resided at Tanis (in Egyptian Avaris), in
the Delta. That their conquests had a religious motive, and were made,
like that of Mohammed, in the interest of monotheism, seems possible. At
all events, we find one of them, Apapi, erecting a temple to Sutech (the
Semitic Baal), and refusing to allow the worship of other deities.[176]

The majority of Egyptologists believe that the Hebrews entered Egypt while
these Hyksos kings, men of the same Semitic family and monotheistic
tendencies, were ruling in Lower Egypt. The bare subterranean temple
discovered by M. Mariette, with the well near it filled with broken
statues of the Egyptian gods, is an indication of those tendencies. The
"other king, who knew not Joseph," was a king of the eighteenth dynasty,
who conquered the Hyksos and drove them out of Egypt. Apparently the
course of events was like that which many centuries later occurred in
Spain. In both cases, the original rulers of the land, driven to the
mountains, gradually reconquered their country step by step. The result of
this reconquest of the country would also be in Egypt, as it was in Spain,
that the Semitic remnants left in the land would be subject to a severe
and oppressive rule. The Jews in Egypt, like the Moors in Spain, were
victims of a cruel bondage. Then began the most splendid period of
Egyptian history, during the seventeenth, sixteenth, fifteenth, and
fourteenth centuries before Christ. The Egyptian armies overran Syria,
Asia Minor, and Armenia as far as the Tigris.

Ramses II., the most powerful monarch of this epoch, is probably the king
whose history is given by Herodotus and other Greek writers under the name
of Sesostr