the Israelites alone are without it; they alone have no fixed
habitation, no definite locality of their own, so far at least as the
writer knew. It would seem that they had already escaped into the
desert, and been lost to sight in its recesses. Who could ever have
imagined that in such a case an Egyptian poet would have judged it worth
his while even to allude to the vanished serfs?

Still more recently the tomb of Menes, the founder of the united
Egyptian monarchy, and the leader of the first historical dynasty, has
been discovered by M. de Morgan at Negada, north of Thebes. It was only
a few months previously that the voice of historical criticism had
authoritatively declared him to be "fabulous" and "mythical." The
"fabulous" Menes, nevertheless, has now proved to be a very historical
personage indeed; some of his bones are in the museum of Cairo, and the
objects disinterred in his tomb show that he belonged to an age of
culture and intercourse with distant lands. The hieroglyphic system of
writing was already complete, and fragments of obsidian vases turned on
the lathe indicate commercial relations with the Ægean Sea.

If we turn to Babylonia the story is the same. Hardly had the critic
pronounced Sargon of Akkad to be a creature of myth, when at Niffer and
Telloh monuments both of himself and of his son were brought to light,
which, as in the case of Menes, proved that this "creature of myth"
lived in an age of advanced culture and in the full blaze of history. At
Niffer he and his son Naram-Sin built a platform of huge bricks, each
stamped with their names, and at Telloh clay _bullæ_ have been
discovered, bearing the seals and addresses of the letters which were
conveyed during their reigns by a highly organised postal service along
the highroads of the kingdom. Numberless contract-tablets exist, dated
in the year when Sargon "conquered the land of the Amorites," as Syria