incense and a libation of wine to the god, the adjacent hieroglyphs describing him as

His loving Adorer, his Son, beloved of him, rejoicing in his service, of Royal Birth, the Heir to the Throne, Royal Scribe, Chief of the Soldiers, great Royal Son, Mer-en-ptah deceased.

But all these titles are the peculiar distinctions of Seti-Menephtah. And it was only natural that he should be represented as professing relationship to, and delight in the service of, that god whose name he bore. The change that had befallen the father and reigning King Menephtah was the untimely death of his matchless son, so very dear to his heart and already exalted so near to his own rank and seat.

6. The Tablet of Four Hundred Years. All the foregoing monuments are, in some measure, introductory to, and serve as so many keys for unlocking the purpose of, the longest witness in this series. A double obscurity has always surrounded the Tablet of Four Hundred Years. After discovering it within the inmost shrine of the Great Temple, under a heap of similar stela and mural inscriptions, for the most part broken to fragments, Mariette Bey concealed it on the site, near by, so they say; and when he died he carried the secret of its hiding-place with him into the other world.

But its subject-matter has always been a riddle. A confusion lurks under an evident combination-in its vignette of two unrelated pictures, and in its record of two unconnected stories, pertaining to two different persons.

Referring to illustration 29, the first of these occupies the left-hand side of the vignette a, and the first seven lines of the horizontal inscription. Here the vignette sketches an apotheosized forefather, Aa-peh-peh, under the form of the deity Sutekh, or Set, holding a scepter in one hand, the symbol of life in the other; wearing the white crown, rendered quite odd by a forked horn in front, and from its apex by a long waving streamer, likewise forked at the end. Here Rameses II. is the actor, as well as the epigraphist of this part of the tablet, identified by his cartouches and defined by the intermediate hieroglyphics as

Giving wine to his beloved god that He may make him a giver of life.

The upper seven horizontal lines of the record explain the meaning of these sketches of god and king, and reveal the original simple purpose of the tablet to be, on the part of Rameses, to acknowledge and honor the Shepherd king Set Aa-peh-peh, who lived four hundred years before, as the father of Rameses' fathers: the great king hereby seeks to immortalize an act of ancestor worship. Literally, this part of the legend runs as follows:

VOL. XXXVIII.—95-96.

LINE 1. The living Horus, the living Sun, the powerful Bull beloved of Ma, Lord of the Festivals of Thirty years like his father Ptah, King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Ra-user-ma Sotep-en-ra, Son of Ra, Rameses Mer-amen, Giver of life,

2. Lord of the Vulture and Uræus Diadems, Protector of Egypt, Chastiser of Provinces, Sun born of the gods, Possessor of Lands, the Hawk of gold, Rich in years, Greatest of the Victors, 3. King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Ra-user-ma Sotep-en-ra, Son of Ra, Rameses Mer-amen, Chieftain enriching the Lands with memorials of his name.

4. The sun has shone as the king liked, the king of Upper and Lower Egypt, Ra-user-ma Sotep-en-ra, Son of Ra, Rameses Mer-amen.

5. His Majesty ordered that a great Tablet of granite should be made in the great name of the

Father of his fathers

6. (The King of Upper Egypt, Ra-mer-en-ma, Son of Ra, Mer-en-ptah-Seti, being firm and prosperous forever, like Ra every day)

7. In the Four Hundredth year, on the fourth day of the month Mesori, of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Set Aa-peh-peh, Son of Ra, beloved of him, Nubti Set, beloved of Harmakhis,

who is forever and forever.

No regnal year of Rameses II. is supplied to serve as a date for the monument, because, as line 6 shows, the reign of Rameses had not yet begun; this stela was set up when he was acting as a regent only at Zoan, in Lower Egypt, while his father, Setî I., was still living at Thebes, in Upper Egypt, and continuing to rule as king firmly and prosperously over the land.

But the second personage is the one in whom our special interest lies: he is treated on the right-hand side of the vignette and in the lower portion of the horizontal inscription b, b. By a fracture of the slab his portrait and head are lost; but the two vertical lines of hieroglyphics expressing a petition in his behalf, addressed also to the deity Sutekh on the left, a, imperfectly read:

Thy service, O Set, son of Nut, Grant Heir to the Throne, Royal Scribe, Commander of thou a long time in thy service to the ka of the the Cavalry, Controller of Provinces, and Superin

tendent of the fortress-town Tsar-on-the-frontier.

Here the single fact that the prayer is offered for the benefit of the ka of the person prayed for would indicate that we have in these words a petition for the welfare of some one no longer in life. Who was he? Already we encounter some of the titles familiar as those belonging to the subject of our study; but the last five lines of the horizontal inscription offer many more:

LINE 8. Having come [before the god represented at a in the vignette]—

The Heir to the Throne, Governor of the Nome, Fan-bearer at the King's right hand, Commander

side of a royal family the children were ineligible to the crown.

I

Here also we have apparently the last of King Menephtah's works. Since the tablets described under 1 of this series were placed on the walls of the Speos at Silsilis, this "Princess," the royal wife and mother, had departed; she, too, had gone before to recover her lost boy. The queen was no more, and the heir to the throne was not. What lament could be greater? These are the words of one bereaved indeed. Who inscribed those mortuary strokes? Manifestly, he who had both consort and prince to mourn-Menephtah the King, the desolate survivor. No possibility now remained of another heir or successor in his line to perpetuate his dynasty.

Either Menephtah found the parts of the vignette on the right and the bottom of the tablet (b, b) without tracing, or he made them so, and then he engraved them between his

tears.

Such is the resolution of the "peculiarity," the incongruity, of the Tablet of Four Hundred Years. He who wrote his name upon several monuments of other rulers, his predecessors at Zoan,- he who bequeathed to us a statue composed of the body of Amen-em-hat and the face of Menephtah,- he it was who has caused us to puzzle over a tablet presenting the original worship of Rameses II., supplemented by an imitation of it imputed to SetiMenephtah his son, who, because no longer with him on earth, was conceived to be entering the presence of an ancestral deity in the world of the gods. So overmastering was Menephtah's misery that he could not refrain from draughting and rehearsing the honors of his painfully absent child upon every monument, no matter whose, that offered an opportunity. Upon three of these six memorials the youth referred to has been called Menephtah, upon two Setî-Menephtah, and upon one Setî: no argument is required to show that they all refer to one and the same individual.

Every one of the six, at its end, has confessed just such an unlooked-for death in youth as the Bible attributes to the first-born of Pharaoh and the tomb at Thebes concedes.

Four reasons ascribe the authorship of all these retrospective sketches to Menephtah the King.

First. He was the last survivor of the whole family.

Second. No one except Menephtah would have done such things: Amen-meses and Siphtah who followed, descendants of other or irregular lines, were usurpers, rivals, anti-kings, full of antagonism to the house of Menephtah. They would have struck out, effaced, covered up by their own cartouches and claims to

the throne, had they done anything; whereas this sort of regretful work reveals the parental hand. Menephtah was now left a broken-down old man. The high expectation cherished two short years ago, that this vigorous youth would shortly become the sole wearer of Egypt's crown in spite of earth and heaven, the Lord had extinguished in a moment of time. The bright hope was blasted, and in its seat was bitter grief. The stricken father was beside himself: we can fairly hear him moan, not unlike David over Absalom, "O my son Menephtah, my son, my son Menephtah! would God I had died for thee, O Setî, my son, my son!" By day he sought him and by night he missed him. Stooping under the blow, his faltering limbs led him to those spots where his boy had lived, had fought, had worshiped. What wonder if, in this aberration of distress, this agony of loneliness, he should exhibit a weakness for wandering among the monuments of Zoan to picture on them the image that was ever before his eyes, and to remind the people,-who by no means needed to have their memory quickened,-in words that wept, of the lad who was once alive. He would have the world remember his loved one till the world itself should die.

Third. Whatever had been conferred on the son now reverted to the father. Setî-Menephtah had been real ruler and nominal sovereign; the plan that these were to be permanent and finally merge into kingship had been frustrated by a higher power. Both the crown and the government had fallen back wholly upon Menephtah; his reign was continuing as before, and, on account of the absence of other heirs, it must continue till he should die. Then the question must have arisen, How is Setî's brief regency, accompanied by his assumption of kingly prerogative, to be regarded? What would have been reckoned as part of another reign under the nineteenth dynasty could not now be counted. Officially it must be treated as if it had never happened, it must be recognized as such no longer; indeed, measures must be taken to show that he lived and died while yet a prince and not as a king. Accordingly he was represented on the monuments, after his death, just as Khamus was (illustration 3), a deceased prince, distinguished by the sidelock of a royal infant who had not reached the throne as sole ruler after the death of the king.

Fourth. The juxtaposition on the monuments 3, 4, and 5 above-described, of the cartouches and inscriptions of Menephtah the King to those of Setî-Menephtah the son, indicates synchronism.

To the six monumental witnesses of SetîMenephtah's minority, already considered, another might be added from the papyri. Having

been Chief of the Scribes, where now are his fellows? Have those whom he cherished in his court, and the poets who sought his favor when living, nothing to say of him when dying? Did no others in the realm share the heartache of the father?

They wrote his elegy, and voiced a universal wail when they sang

THE DIRGE OF SETI-MENEPHTAH.

O Fan-bearer at the right of the king,
Crown-prince in the grand hall of Seb,
Royal Scribe of truth!

Thy mouth and thy lips were full of health:
Thou wast in favor with the king all thy life.
O Horus, friend of things that are just!
Thou shalt dwell a thousand years on the earth,
Thou reposest upon the mountain

Whose mistress is on the west of Thebes, in the necropolis.

Thy soul is renewing itself among the living,
And mingling among the perfected spirits.
Descending into the divine bark, thou art not re-
pulsed,

Thou passest even to the jaws of the tomb;
Thou art judged before the deity [Osiris;
Thou art proclaimed righteous].

Observe that the poets neither call him king nor imply that he had been such, but only "Fan-bearer" and "Crown-prince," and that after having passed the portal of the tomb and been weighed in the balance of the judgment hall of Osiris, they had no more to wish for him than all the beatitudes of the Egyptian Paradise. They assure him of a thousand years on earth by embalmment, which insured against a second death. And by "the living" they meant the departed, who were supposed scarcely to begin, and not to enjoy, life until they reached the Elysian Fields.

Menephtah, his father, owed his promotion to the throne not to personal merit, but to the removal of most of his elder brothers by death on the field of battle: it is safe to infer that he had kept himself far away from all such dangerous ground. On reaching the throne he had grown too old to learn how to wield the sword or to direct others in actual combat.

But he was an adept in the science of magic, and a believer in the great significance of dreams, visions, and the oracles of the gods. And whenever he was driven into a corner he managed to make superstition avail to extricate him without bodily harm.

When the Libyans, with their allies, were crossing his boundaries and marching on Memphis, he ought to have been at the head of the troops and in the forefront of the defensive works. But as the opposing expedition was about to set out, lo! by night he had a dream, which he naïvely related, to this effect:

Then his Majesty saw in a dream as it were a statue of the god Ptah standing in front of him so as to prevent the king from advancing. It was as high as ... and it said to him, "Remain where you now are"; and giving him a scimiter, "Put away anxiety from your heart."

Thereupon his Majesty asked, "What am I to do?" And the god replied, "Let the cavalry in great numbers advance in front of the infantry to the cultivated land in the defiles of the nome of Pa-ari-sheps." And so it was done: Menephtah, the incompetent king, trembling with fear, held back clinging to the bank of the Nile, while his army, commanded by his generals, sallied out and won the victory without him.

Later, the goddess Isis appeared to him in another dream, complaining that her temple had been demolished; and this led to that rebellion of his foreign population that drove him to Ethiopia.

From the face of the combined forces of rebels and Jebusites he turned back, as he professed because, forsooth, after a priest had prophesied they were to conquer Egypt and hold it thirteen years, to contend with them would be to fight against the gods; whence, also, the return from Ethiopia at the end of twelve years.

Such inexperience in warfare and such shrinking from exposure to personal harm has some bearing on what he would do in the Exodus at the crossing of the sea: analogy indicates at least a probability.

Had his son been living, the father, now about eighty years of age, certainly again would not have left the bank of the Nile. But the warrior Setî-Menephtah lay motionless on his bier in the palace; and the cavalry, requiring a leader, must now be led forth by the venerable king himself. Though blinded by the shadow of death, though bleeding from his fresh wound of bereavement, though frenzied with rage against those who had brought calamity on him, he made ready his chariot, and all the chariots of Egypt, "The Cavalry of Pa-Rameses," and his army, and pursued after escaping Israel. When Pharaoh drew nigh, the children of Israel were sore afraid.

Did he follow them into the midst of the sea, leading his forces after him?

If he did, it was the first time in all his life that he led an attack. Judging from his constitutional cowardice and his record of absence from every field of hostilities, we may be sure he would have had another revelation from heaven sooner than risk his person by such a collision in such a place. For this, too, his feebleness unfitted him, and recent events had unnerved him. Undoubtedly, having brought his host up to the fugitives, remaining in camp

himself he sent his forces forward into the depths to bring Israel back.

And there, standing on the beach at the break of day, he saw the returning waters ingulf his troubled, baffled, mighty yet impotent hosts, and, as the day wore on, toss them up at his feet. Why should we expect the father to perish with the son? For him to live was the greater penalty; shall the less be required? Imagine him, as he furtively fled back to Zoan, unattended by a single one of the gallant charioteers who rode out with him, utterly crushed under multiplied horrors, to linger and suffer out a

retributive existence.

Just how long he continued to linger and suffer is unknown. His remaining days were devoted to the pardonable diversion of inscribing upon the monuments at Zoan mementos of him who was his pride, so darkly slain by the mysterious God of the Hebrews. For the sake of these we indulge no regrets that he was spared the sea. No doubt, too, during his last years he was diligently engaged in completing his sepulcher at Thebes. Though not to finish it entirely, he lived long enough to make it in extent and in style of decoration second only to the magnificent tomb of Setî I., his grandfather. Yet his mummy was not there as far back as classic times, when tourists from Italy and Greece left memoranda of pilgrimage in numbers on the spot.

Reference has been made to a single date recorded shortly before King Menephtah's decease. It was observed by Dr. Heinrich Brugsch at Thebes in 1853, and made note of as follows:

Here we meet with the ruins of a temple belonging to the era of Amenhotep III., containing many cartouches of the kings both of earlier and later time; and the remnants of a statue of Menephtah Hotephima, carved out of black granite, with its inscription whose highest date may be the year 33, the lowest not less than the year 25 of this king. ("Reiseberichte," s. 194.)

As we have followed his career, the Exodus and the death of his son must have occurred in the twenty-second or the twenty-third year of his reign: accordingly, if he died in the twentyfifth year of his reign, he had only two or three years more to live after those critical events; but if he endured to the thirty-third year of his reign, he had about ten to wear away. He must have been between eighty-five and ninetyfive years old when at length he was rejoined to his idol.

THE DIRGE OF MENEPHTAH.

Amen gave thy heart pleasure,
He gave thee a good old age,
A lifetime of pleasure followed thee:
Blessed was thy lip, sound thine arm,
Strong thine eye to see afar.
Thou hast been clothed in linen;
Thou hast guided thy horse and chariot
of gold with thy hand,

The whip in thy hand, yoked were the steeds;
The Syrians and the Negroes marched before thee.
A proof of what thou hast done-
Thou hast proceeded to thy boat of acacia wood,
A boat made of it before and behind;
Thou hast approached the Beautiful Tower
Which thou thyself made.

Thy mouth was full of wine, beer, bread, and flesh :

Cattle were slaughtered and wine opened.
The chief anointer anointed thee with balsam.
The sweet song was made before thee:
The superintendent of thy fields brought birds,
The fishermen brought fish;

Thy galleys came from Syria laden with good things;
Thy stable was full of horses;
Thine enemies were placed fallen :
Thy female slaves were strong.
Thou hast gone before the gods, the victor, the
Thy word no one opposed.
departed.

It is often asserted that the Egyptians naturally would not confess a misfortune, and that their antiquities afford no trace of the first-born son of Pharaoh brought low under the last of those ten judgments which liberated Israel. But may not such statements themselves be fallible? As in the example of the Oppressor's daughter, may not the monumental concealment of his son's son, who died for the freedom of God's chosen people, be due rather to our dullness of vision? Is not their ingenuous testimony on record, and waiting only for our unerring discernment?

John A. Paine.