tine on both sides of the
Jordan, a possession, however, which it lost soon after Ramses' death.
The treaty was cemented by the marriage of the Hittite princess with the
Pharaoh.

Ramses II. was the great builder of Egypt. Go where we will, we find the
remains of the temples he erected or restored, of the cities he founded,
and of the statues he set up. His architectural conceptions were
colossal; the temple of Abu-Simbel, hewn out of a mountain, and the
shattered image of himself at Thebes, are a proof of this. But he
attempted too much for the compass of a single reign, however long. Much
of his work is pretentious but poor, and indicative of the feverish
haste with which it was executed.

Among the cities he built in the Delta were Ramses and Pithom. Pithom,
or Pa-Tum, is now marked by the mounds of Tel el-Maskhuta, on the line
of railway between Ismailia and Zagazig; it lay at the eastern extremity
of Qoshem or Goshen, in the district of Succoth. Like Ramses, it had
been built by Israelitish labour, for the free-born Israelites of Goshen
had been turned into royal serfs. None had suffered more from the
revolution which overthrew the Asiatised court of the Eighteenth dynasty
and brought in a "new king which knew not Joseph."

They had been settled in the strip of pasture-land which borders the
Freshwater Canal of to-day, and is still a place of resort for the
Bedawin from the east. It lay apart from the cultivated lands of the
Egyptian peasantry, it adjoined the desert which led to Asia, and it was
near the Hyksos capital of Zoan. Meneptah, the son and successor of
Ramses II., tells us that from of old it had been given by the Pharaohs
to the nomad shepherds of Asia; and after the departure of the
Israelitish tribes the same king is informed in a letter from one of his
officials that the deserted district had been again handed over to
Bedawin from Edom. This was in the eighth year of the king's reign,
three years later than that in which the Exodus must have taken place.

For 400 years the Israelites had been "afflicted" by the Egyptians. But
while the Eighteenth dynasty was in power their lot could not have been
hard. They still remained the free herdsmen of the Pharaoh, feeding
their flocks and cattle on the royal demesne. During the reign of
Khu-n-Aten, indeed, their own Semitic kinsmen from Canaan held the chief
offices of state, and the Pharaoh was endeavouring to force upon his
subjects a form of monotheism