If Ramses II. was the Pharaoh of the Oppression, the Pharaoh of the Exodus will have been one of his immediate successors. The choice lies between Meneptah II., who succeeded him, his grandson, the feeble Seti II., and the usurper Si-Ptah, with whom the dynasty came to an inglorious end. The Egyptian legend of the Exodus given by Manetho places it in the reign of Meneptah; and a stela discovered at Thebes in 1896 by Professor Petrie makes any other dating difficult. Here the ‘Israelites’ are spoken of as having been brought low, ‘so that no seed should be left to them’; and since their name alone is without the determinative of locality which is added to the names of all the other conquered populations associated with them, we may conclude that they had already been lost in the desert, and, so far at any rate as was known to the Egyptian scribe, had no fixed local habitation.[152] As this was in the fifth year of Meneptah’s reign, B.C. 1276, according to Dr. Mahler’s chronology, the Exodus from Egypt may be approximately assigned to B.C. 1277. The period of oppression, according to the calculation in Gen. xv. 13, would consequently have commenced in B.C. 1677, or nearly a hundred years before the expulsion of the Hyksos. It must be remembered, however, that the date is more precise in appearance than in reality. It depends partly on the accuracy of Dr. Mahler’s calculations, which is disputed by Professors Eisenlohr and Maspero, partly on our regarding the round number 400 as representing an exact period of time. If we knew in what year of Ramses II.’s long reign of sixty-seven years the stela of Sân was inscribed, we should be better able to check the reckoning. As it is, we have to be grateful for what we have already learned from the excavated monuments of the past, and to look forward with confidence to more light and certainty in the future. Footnote 126: This, however, is beginning to be doubtful, in view of the discoveries made by Messrs. de Morgan and Amélineau in 1886-87. Footnote 127: For the logical goal of the ‘Higher Criticism,’ see Bateson Wright, _Was Israel ever in Egypt?_ (1895.) Footnote 128: The theory of Jean Astruc, the French Protestant physician, was set forth in his _Conjectures sur la Genèse_ published anonymously at Paris in 1753. In this he assumes that Moses wrote the book of Genesis in four parallel columns like a Harmony of the Gospels which were afterwards mixed together by the ignorance of copyists. Astruc intended his work to be an answer to those who, like Spinoza, asserted that Genesis was written without order or plan. It is interesting to note that Dr. Briggs in his able defence of the ‘critical’ hypothesis (_The Higher Criticism of the Hexateuch_, pp. 138-141) quotes with approval Professor Moore’s appeal to Tatian’s _Diatessaron_—a mere ‘patchwork’ of the Gospels—in support of the literary analysis of the Pentateuch. Footnote 129: