17. my lord, I shall not depart. 18. My lord, truly Khatib 19. stands with me. 20. I and he will come. 21. My lord, the king of the Hittites 22. has come into Nukhashshi, 23. so that I cannot come. 24. Would that the king of the Hittites would depart! 25. Then truly I would come, 26. I and Khatib. 27. May the king, my lord, my words 28. hear! My lord, I fear 29. on account of the face of the king, my lord, 30. and on account of the face of Dûdu. 31. And now by my gods 32. and my angels verily I have sworn, 33. O Dûdu and nobles 34. of the king, my lord, that truly I will come. 35. And so, Dûdu 36. and the king, my lord, and the nobles, 37. “Truly we will not conceive anything 38. against Aziru that is unfavorable,”-- 39. even thus may ye swear 40. by my gods and the god A! 41. And truly I 42. and Khatib are faithful servants of the king. 43. O Dûdu, thou shalt truly know 44. that I will come to thee. The Aziru of these letters was the chieftain or petty king of the Amorites, who were living at the time to the eastward of Phœnicia, between the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon mountains. The way in which he addresses Dûdu is significant. Dûdu is classed continually with the king. Aziru fears to offend Dûdu as he fears to offend the king; the words of Dûdu are of equal importance with those of the king. Dûdu clearly occupied a position of power with the king of Egypt similar to that ascribed to Joseph in Genesis 41. Moreover, Dûdu is a Semitic name; vocalized a little differently, it becomes David. The king to whom this letter was written was Amenophis III or Amenophis IV, in whose reigns Semitic influence was especially strong in Egypt. Amenophis III took as his favorite wife a woman named Tiy, daughter of Yuaa and Tuau, whose mummies, discovered a few years ago, show, some think, that they were Semitic. Queen Tiy was very influential during the reign of her son, Amenophis IV, and was in part the cause of the remarkable religious reform which he undertook (Part I, Chapter I, § 6 (vii)). It is not, accordingly, strange to find that the chief minister of one of these kings was a Semite. Of course, Dûdu cannot be identified with Joseph, but his career shows that such careers as that of Joseph were not impossible at this period of Egyptian history. =5. The Seven Years of Famine.= The following inscription was found cut on a rock between the island of Elephantine and the First Cataract, and was first published by Brugsch in 1891. It is written in hieroglyphic characters, and was apparently inscribed in the reign of Ptolemy X, 117-89 B. C. It relates how King Zoser, of the third dynasty, who began to reign about 2980 B. C., nearly 2,800 years before the inscription was written, appealed to Khnum, the god of Elephantine, because of a famine. The part of the text which interests us is as follows:[439]