Further excavations of Dr. Neville have shown that Goshen, the Egyptian Goshen (now Saft el-Henneh), is the modern Wadi Tumilat, between Zagazig and Ismailia. A dispatch dated in the eighth year of the reign of Meneptah, the son and successor of Rameses II, state that Bedouin from Edom has been allowed to pass the Khetam or "fortress" in the district of Succoth (Thukot), in order to feed themselves and their herds on the possessions of Pharaoh. Khetam is the Etham of Exodus 13:20. The geography of the Exodus agrees remarkably with that of the Egyptian papyri of the time of Rameses II and his son. [14] The search for evidence of the truth of the Bible has not been confined to Egypt. Equal interest has been awakened in those ancient empires that occupied the valley of the Euphrates; in Palestine, and the Sinaitic Peninsula. European scholars with keen interest followed the study of the cuneiform characters found on Babylonian tablets and monuments. Progress made in deciphering this ancient method of writing led M. Botta, in 1842, to begin excavations upon the ancient site of Nineveh, but he met with little success. Later, however,--1845--Mr. Henry Layard (subsequently Sir Henry Layard) undertook excavations at the same place for the Trustees of the British Museum, and succeeded in uncovering the palaces of Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, and Assur-banipal, and in bringing to light the terra cotta tablets which formed the great library founded by these kings at Nineveh, and of which some twenty-two thousand are now preserved in the British Museum. An examination of these tablets soon showed that they consisted of historical inscriptions, astronomical reports and calculations, grammatical lists, etc., and scholars began to apply Sir Henry Rawlinson's system of decipherment of the Babylonian version of the Behistun inscription to the texts inscribed upon these tablets. A large portion of the history of Babylonia and Assyria through the translation of these tablets is now revealed to us, and the knowledge of the language of these countries has thrown much light upon the language, literature, history, and learning of the Jews. The excavations which have been carried on in Mesopotamia for the last fifty years have yielded the most valuable results; and the inscribed slabs, monolithic stelae, boundary stones, gate-sockets, bricks, seal-cylinders and tablets, now preserved in the British Museum, afford an abundant supply of material from which Bible customs and language may be freely explained and illustrated. The cuneiform writing is, at least, as old as B. C. 3,800, and there is evidence to show that it was in use as late as B. C. 80. [15]