According to Manetho, the well-known Egyptian historian, somewhere about the twenty-first century B.C. a most objectionable sheep-herding tribe of Arabs began to infest {134} lower Egypt. Manetho is prejudiced; but just as in modern Western America where the sheep herder is rated among cattle men as something rather lower than a dog, it is amusing to see how the poet in Genesis admits that shepherds were an abomination in the eyes of the Egyptians. If one dates Abraham's visit to Egypt in the twenty-first instead of the nineteenth century B.C. old Manetho and the Hebrew poet are perfectly agreed as to the Hyksos-Israelite invasion. The Genesis narrative shows the insidious way in which the children of Israel drifted down into Egypt, then how they made themselves agreeable as office holders, and by introducing frogs, flies, lice, cattle sickness and other improvements until at last the Egyptians waxed desperate and ran them out of the country. Manetho says that these Hyksos people occupied lower Egypt east of the Nile from Memphis to the sea, and later on established a dynasty with six Kings in the succession. After five centuries the Egyptians combined under the Thebaid Kings of upper Egypt, and drove the Hyksos across the Desert of Sin into Palestine. It is quite possible that in Genesis, and Manetho's History we have the two sides of one story, and that it was the {135} possession of the Libyan chariot which made the Egyptians powerful enough to rid themselves of the artful but not very warlike children of Israel. It is amusing to note the ways of the tribal poet in Israel who describes the murrain of cattle as killing off every horse in the length and breadth of Egypt, then out of spite kills them all over again by drowning in the Red Sea. [Sidenote: Chariots and horsemen] Setting the date of the Exodus at B.C. 1580, it would be about B.C. 1540 that the Israelites were afraid to attack the Canaanites who had good iron chariots. In the same way a nation armed with muzzle loading guns might hate to molest an army with quick-firing artillery. Forty years later, about B.C. 1500, horses began to appear in Mesopotamia, a bad lookout for Israel, destined some six centuries afterwards to be trampled under by Babylonian chariotry. Some day we shall have a science of comparative chronology to guide us in our studies, and so be able to see how little improvements in horse-breeding, or the use of iron in building chariots, affected the rise and fall of nations. In the meantime some known facts of Red Indian history may help us to understand events in ancient Asia.