We need not wonder, therefore, if Amenophis IV. found himself compelled to quit Thebes. The old aristocracy might have condoned his religious heresy, but they could not condone his supplanting them with foreign favourites. The rise of the nineteenth dynasty marks the successful reaction of the native Egyptian against the predominance of the Semite in the closing days of the eighteenth dynasty. It was not the founder of the eighteenth dynasty (Aahmes, who drove out the Hyksos) but the founder of the nineteenth dynasty that was "the new king who knew not Joseph." Ever since the progress of Egyptology had made it clear that Rameses II. was the Pharaoh of the Oppression, it was difficult to understand how so long an interval of time as the whole period of the eighteenth dynasty could lie between him and that "new king," whose rise seems to have been followed almost immediately by the servitude and oppression of the Hebrews. If Aahmes began the Oppression, how was it that a whole dynasty passed away before the Israelites cried out? The tablets of Tell-el-Amarna now show that the difficulty does not exist. Up to the death of Khu-en-Aten the Semite had greater influence than the native in the land of Mizraim.
How highly educated this old world was we are but just beginning to learn. But we have already learned enough to discover how important a bearing it has on the criticism of the Old Testament. It has long been tacitly assumed by the critical school that the art of writing was practically unknown in Palestine before the age of David. Little historical credence, it has been urged, can be placed in the earlier records of the Hebrew people, because they could not have been committed to writing until a period when the history of the past had become traditional and mythical. But this assumption can no longer be maintained. Long before the Exodus Canaan had its libraries and its scribes, its schools and literary men. The annals of the
