sovereign against whom
Manasseh rebelled and before whom he was brought. In this case
Manasseh's revolt would have been part of that general revolt of the
Assyrian provinces under the leadership of Babylon, which shook the
empire to its foundations, and in which the Assyrian king expressly
tells us Palestine joined. The Jewish king would thus have been carried
to Babylon after the capture of that city by the Assyrian forces of
Assur-bani-pal.

But the recent history of Oriental archaeology is strewn with instances
of the danger of historical scepticism where the evidence is defective,
and a single discovery may at any moment throw new and unexpected light
on the materials we possess. Who, for instance, could have supposed that
the name of the Israelites would ever be found on an Egyptian monument?
They were but a small and despised body of public slaves, settled in
Goshen, on the extreme skirts of the Egyptian territory. And yet in 1886
a granite stela was found by Professor Flinders Petrie containing a hymn
of victory in honour of Meneptah the son of Ramses II., and declaring
how, among other triumphs, "the Israelites" had been left "without
seed." The names of all the other vanquished or subject peoples
mentioned in the hymn have attached to them the determinative of place;
the Israelites alone are without it; they alone have no fixed
habitation, no definite locality of their own, so far at least as the
writer knew. It would seem that they had already escaped into the
desert, and been lost to sight in its recesses. Who could ever have
imagined that in such a case an Egyptian poet would have judged it worth
his while even to allude to the vanished serfs?

Still more recently the tomb of Menes, the founder of the united
Egyptian monarchy, and the leader of the first historical dynasty, has
been discovered by M. de Morgan at Negada, north of Thebes. It was only
a few months previously that the voice of historical criticism had
authoritatively declared him to be "fabulous" and "mythical." The
"fabulous" Menes, nevertheless, has now proved to be a very historical
personage indeed; some of his bones are in the museum of Cairo, and the
objects disinterred in his tomb show that he belonged to an age of
culture and intercourse with distant lands. The hieroglyphic system of
writing was already complete, and fragments of obsidian vases turned on
the lathe indicate commercial relations with the AEgean Sea.

If we turn to Babyl