offices which they received at court.

It would seem that the Israelites entered Egypt when the country was
governed by the last of those foreign dynasties from Asia which had
conquered the kingdom of the Pharaoh, and are known by the name of the
Hyksos or Shepherd kings. The Egyptian monuments have shown us that
during their dominion its internal constitution underwent precisely the
change which is described in the history of Joseph. Before the Hyksos
conquest there was a great feudal aristocracy, rich in landed estates
and influence, which served as a check upon the monarch, and at times
even refused to obey his authority. When the Hyksos conquerors are
finally expelled, we find that this feudal aristocracy has disappeared,
and its place has been taken by a civil and military bureaucracy. The
king has become a supreme autocrat, by the side of whom the priests
alone retain any power. The land has passed out of the hands of the
people; high and low alike are dependent for what they have on the
favour of the king.

The Hyksos dynasties were allied in race and sympathies with the
settlers from Asia. Joseph must have died before their expulsion, but it
is probable that he saw the outbreak of the war which ended in it, and
which after five generations of conflict restored the Egyptians to
independence. The Eighteenth dynasty was founded by the native princes
of Thebes, and the war against the Asiatic stranger which had begun in
Egypt was carried into Asia itself. Canaan was made an Egyptian
province, and the Egyptian empire was extended to the banks of the
Euphrates.

But the conquest of Asia brought with it the introduction of Asiatic
influences into the country of the conqueror. The Pharaohs married
Asiatic wives, and their courts became gradually Asiatised. At length
Amenophis IV., under the tutelage of his mother, attempted to abolish
the national religion of Egypt, and to substitute for it a sort of
pantheistic monotheism, based on the worship of the Asiatic Baal as
represented by the Solar Disk. The Pharaoh transferred his capital from
Thebes to a new site farther north, now known as Tel el-Amarna, changed
his own name to Khu-n-Aten, "the Glory of the Solar Disk," and filled
his court with Asiatic officials and the adherents of the new cult. The
reaction, however, soon came. The native Egyptians rose in revolt; the
foreigner fled from the valley of the Nile, and the capital of
Khu-n-Aten fell into ruin. A new dynas