ated race was expelled by a stronger
native dynasty that knew not Joseph. Or they will tell you of the royal
reformer Khuenaten, son of a famous Eastern mother, a queen from the
banks of the Euphrates. Taught by her, perhaps, a purer religion, he
attempted to replace the worship of Egypt's bestial gods by the worship
of the one only great God, whose symbol was the sun. But the priestly
clan was too strong for him, and the succeeding Pharaohs destroyed his
records and chiselled out his name where it had been cut in stone that
no memory of his sacrilege might be preserved. A royal Moses there could
not be. The worshipper of one God, whether king or son of Pharaoh's
daughter, could bring no reformation to Egypt.

Or would you learn how Egypt ruled its subject territory? You can read
the correspondence of a dozen local Egyptian governors in Palestine and
Syria in the century before Moses led the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt.
There is the letter of the King of Jerusalem, where Melchizedek reigned
in the times of Abraham; and they tell of rebellions against the fading
power of Egypt, and of the fear of the advancing Hittites. The earliest
kings, those that built the pyramids, appear before us real in their
personality, emerging out of misty legend or myth, and, earlier still,
even the prehistoric races that antedated the very beginning of
civilization. Whence came that first dynasty? Who invented writing? Were
they autochthons? Hardly. These are questions left for further explorers
to answer. Probably those first messengers of civilization came from the
East, perhaps from Arabia, perhaps from Babylonia, or perhaps the first
Babylonians and Egyptians formed a common stock somewhere near the mouth
of the Euphrates. Perhaps the Bible is right in saying that the first
seat of civilized man was in Eden, and that the Euphrates was the chief
river of Paradise. Or was it from Arabia, the immemorial home of the
Semitic tribes, that land of sand and mountain and fertile valley, land
of changeless culture and tradition, so near the centres of
civilization, and yet still the most inaccessible, the least known
portion of the inhabited earth,--was it from Arabia that the wiser,
stronger multitude came that first overran the valleys of both the Nile
and the Euphrates, bringing to Egypt and Chaldea arts and letters? We do
not know. Some future explorer must teach us. But the German Glaser has
within these few years brought back from hazardous j