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tions this fact.* The two or three ill-fated indivividuals that succeeded Amun-timæus on the tottering throne of the Mencherian Pharaohs all took the crocodile in the second ring of their royal names. And when the Lower Egyptians, or the famine, or both, drove them from the Faium and Middle Egypt, they instituted the worship of the crocodile in the two cities they founded in the Upper country, Elethya and Ombos.

The name Sukenes, therefore, plainly indicates that the family of Nahrai had remained faithful to the royal house of their patrons. The inscription

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he has engraven on the wall tells as plainly that it had shared in their disasters also. It was probably inscribed after the expulsion of the Lower Egyptians from this part of Middle Egypt, late in the eighteenth dynasty. Sukenes tells us in it, that he had put up a door of wood to the banquet-hall, and a fence of wood to the porch of the tomb, which remains to this day, one of the most beautiful objects in Egypt. Both closures had originally been of metal, as the scratches on the rock still show visibly. He also commemorates certain other repairs that he had made, so that the tomb had been plundered by the conquerors. He concludes with an address to the mummy of Nahrai the excavator of the tomb, inviting him to come in and lie down in the restingplace which the piety of his descendant had thus made ready for him.

Here then was the mummy of a man who had died almost two centuries before the times of Joseph, but was not interred until more than two centuries afterwards.

So pregnant is this illustration, that we presume it will be an apology for the long historical detail which has been required to introduce it.

We have already explained the extraordinary notions and customs that prevailed in Egypt regarding the body after death, its embalming, and its final resting-place. Their prevalence may possibly have prepared the reader in some measure for a state

ment we are very reluctant to make, so little does it seem to comport with the spirit of truth and soberness in which it is our earnest desire to carry on the present inquiry. There are at Sacchara, immediately over against Memphis, the ruins of the tomb of a prince in Egypt, whose name was that of Joseph, written in hieroglyphics. It is in the close vicinity of the largest pyramid of that group, which, from other circumstances, we assume to have been that of Aphophis and his father Meris. The titles and offices held by this personage were also those of Joseph. He was "chief ab-rech," and "director of the granaries of all Egypt,"

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as well as the possessor of several other offices. The name has been assimilated to an Egyptian phrase expressive of Joseph's function in Egypt, i-suph, "he came to save;" Copt. " he will save. The letters are so exactly those of Joseph's name

that the identity does not seem to admit of question. It may have been that, as in other cases, his tomb was carried on at the public expense, as a mark of public respect and esteem; but we must confess we incline to the opinion, that at a late period in the life of Joseph, the Egyptian successor to his offices had also assumed his name, and that he was the excavator of the tomb. We give here his portrait and his titles.

*Gen xli. 4, 5. See above, p. 55.

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CHAPTER IV.

EGYPT DURING THE SOJOURN-RISE OF THE NEW

KING.

We do not here discuss the question of the duration of the sojourn. It will soon appear that if the Greek lists of the kings of Egypt gave us reliable chronology, it must have lasted 430 years. But such was by no means the case. The question therefore still remains an open one, notwithstanding their testimony.

From our historical authorities, we obtain two certainties regarding this period. The one is, that the patron of Joseph was the shepherd king Aphophis. This (as we have already explained) is the concurrent testimony of all the Egyptian records translated by the Greeks. The other certainty appears upon the monuments, and their testimony is equally

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