ashes the fasts commemorating the successive stages in the destruction of
their city (Zech. 7:3-7). While their lot was pitiable and their character
seemingly unpromising, these people of the land were important factors in
the re-establishment of the Judean community.

VI. Fortunes of the Jews in Egypt. The narrative in Jeremiah states
definitely that the large proportion of those who had rallied about
Gedaliah after his death found a temporary asylum on the eastern borders
of Egypt. Here they were beyond the reach of Chaldean armies and within
the territory of the one nation which offered a friendly asylum to the
Jewish refugees. Most of this later group of exiles settled at the towns
of Tahpanhes and Migdol. The latter means tower and is probably to be
identified with an eastern outpost, the chief station on the great highway
which ran along the southeastern shore of the Mediterranean directly to
Palestine and Syria.

The excavations of the Egypt Exploration Fund at Tahpanhes, which was the
Daphnae of Herodotus, has thrown much light upon the home of this Jewish
community. The town was situated in a sandy desert to the south of a
marshy lake. It lay midway between the cultivated delta on the west and
what is now the Suez Canal on the east. Past it ran the main highway to
Palestine. Its founder, Psamtik I, the great-grandfather of Hophra, had
built here a fort to guard the highway. Herodotus states that he also
stationed guards here, and that until late in the Persian period it was
defended by garrisons whose duty was to repel Asiatic invasions (II, 30).
Here the Ionian and Carian mercenaries, who were at this time the chief
defence of the Egyptian king, were given permanent homes. By virtue of its
mixed population and its geographical position, Tahpanhes was a great
meeting place of Eastern and Western civilization. Here native Egyptians,
Greek mercenaries, Phoenician and Babylonian traders, and Jewish refugees