The legend of Joseph is very touching and beautiful, but it may just as well be a novel as history, and this suspicion is strengthened by the fact that the episode of Potiphar's wife is almost verbatim the same as one of the chapters of the Egyptian novel of the _Two Brothers_. Nor does it seem likely that such a seven years' famine and such a momentous change as the conversion of all the land of Egypt from freehold into a tenure held from the king subject to payment of a rent of one-fifth of the gross produce, should have left no trace in the records. Again, the age of 110 years assigned to Joseph, and 147 to his father, are a sufficient proof that we are not upon strictly historical ground; and on the whole this narrative does not go far, in the absence of any confirmation from monuments, to assist us in fixing dates, or enabling us to form any consistent idea of the real conditions of the sojourn of the people of Israel in Egypt. It places them on far too high a level of civilization at first, to have fallen to such a low one as we find depicted in the Books of Exodus, Joshua, and Judges. Further excavations in the mounds of ruined cities in Judæa and Palestine, like those of Schliemann on the sites of Troy and Mycenæ, can alone give us anything like certain facts as to the real condition of the Hebrew tribes who destroyed the older walled cities of the comparatively civilized Amorites and Canaanites. If the conclusion of Mr. Flinders Petrie from the section of the mound of Lachish, as to the extremely rude condition of the tribes who built the second town of mud-huts on the ruins of the Amorite city, should be confirmed, it would go far to negative the idea that the accounts of their having been trained in an advanced code of Mosaic legislation, can have any historical foundation.