on the one
side from the revelations of Oriental archaeology, on the other side it
sometimes clears up difficulties in the history of the great nations of
Oriental antiquity. The Egyptologist, for instance, is confronted by a
fact towards the explanation of which the monuments furnish no help.
This is the curious change that passed over the tenure of land in Egypt
during the period of Hyksos rule. When the Fourteenth dynasty fell, a
large part of the soil of Egypt was in the hands of private holders,
many of whom were great feudal landowners whose acknowledgment of the
royal supremacy was at times little more than nominal. When, however,
the Hyksos were at last driven back to Asia, and Ahmes succeeded in
founding the Eighteenth dynasty, these landowners had disappeared. All
the landed estate of the country had passed into the possession of the
Pharaoh and the priests, and the old feudal aristocracy had been
replaced by a bureaucracy, the members of which owed their power and
position to the king. The history of Joseph accounts for this, and it is
the only explanation of the fact which is at present forthcoming. Famine
compelled the people to sell their lands to the king and his minister,
and a Hyksos Pharaoh and his Hebrew vizier thus succeeded in destroying
the older aristocracy and despoiling the natives of their estates. It
was probably at this period also that the public granaries, of which we
hear so much in the age of the Eighteenth dynasty, were first
established in Egypt, in imitation of those of Babylonia, where they had
long been an institution, and a superintendent was appointed over them
who, as in Babylonia, virtually held the power of life and death in his
hands.

One of the main results, then, of recent discovery in the East has been
to teach us the solidarity of ancient Oriental history, and the
impossibility of forming a correct judgment in regard to any one part of
it without reference to the rest. Hebrew history is unintelligible as
long as it stands alone, and the attempt to interpret it apart and by
itself has led to little else than false and one-sided conclusions; it
is only when read in the light of the history of the great empires which
flourished beside it that it can be properly understood. Israel and the
nations around it formed a whole, so far as the historian is concerned,
which, like the elements of a picture, cannot be torn asunder. If we
would know the history of the one, we must know t