But Meneptah had been ‘crowned to preserve the life’ of his subjects. In the month of Epiphi, our July, the great battle was fought which annihilated the hordes of the invaders and saved the inhabitants of Egypt. Six thousand three hundred and sixty-five Libyan slain were counted on the field of battle, and 2370 of the northern barbarians, while 9376 prisoners fell into the hands of the conqueror. It was little wonder that the Egyptian poets composed pæans in honour of the victory, or that one of these hymns of triumph should have been engraved on a stela of the temple which Meneptah raised at Thebes to Amon-Ra. It is in this latter hymn, as has been already said, that the name of the ‘Israelites’ has been found. They are included among the enemies over whom the Pharaoh had triumphed; but, unlike his other enemies, they possessed no land which they could call their own. They had no fixed habitation, there was no locality which was called after their name. But the Egyptian poet knew that they had come originally from Southern Palestine; the destruction of their male ‘seed’ had widowed the women of ‘Khar.’ It was the pressure of the Libyan invasion, therefore, which had placed Meneptah at the mercy of his Israelitish slaves. With the Libyans and their allies in the east and north, and a hostile population in the land of Goshen, he had been forced to fortify Memphis and Heliopolis, and to yield to those demands for freedom which he was not strong enough to resist. To the ten plagues of which we have the record in the book of Exodus there was added the more terrible plague of the Libyan invasion. In his inscription Meneptah speaks not only of the barbarian enemy who harassed the frontier and devastated the seaports, but also of the ‘rebels’ who were destroying the country from within, and in these rebels whose tents were pitched ‘in front of Pi-Bailos’ we must see the Israelites of the Old Testament. Crushed and unwarlike though they may have been, they were nevertheless a source of danger, and, like Mohammed Ali in the presence of the Bedâwin, the Pharaoh found it necessary to agree to their demands. Meneptah’s victory was gained in the middle of the summer. It was in the spring that the Exodus of the Israelites had taken place. Along with the descendants of Jacob had gone ‘a mixed multitude,’ fragments, it may be, of that wave of Libyan invasion which was rolling over the Delta. At any rate, it was not the Israelites only who had made their way towards Asia. There were other royal slaves also, like the ‘Apuriu who were employed in drawing the stone that was quarried on the eastern bank of the Nile. The resemblance between their name and that of the Hebrews may have led to a confusion between the brickmakers of Pharaoh and the transporters of his stone.