Abram, the Hebrew, first pitched his tent near the future Shechem, under ‘the terebinth of Moreh.’ Moreh is the Sumerian Martu, ‘the Amorite,’ in Hebrew letters; and the fact gives point to the statement which follows immediately, that ‘the Canaanite’—and not the Amorite—‘was then in the land’ (Gen. xii. 6). ‘The mountain of Shechem’ is mentioned in an Egyptian papyrus which describes the travels of an Egyptian officer in Palestine, in the fourteenth century B.C.,[29] but the book of Genesis represents the city as founded only in the lifetime of Jacob (Gen. xxxiv. 6). Hence we are told that it was to ‘the place’ or ‘site’ of Shechem that Abram made his way, not to the town itself. And after the foundation of the town its Canaanite inhabitants are still called Amorites, in accordance with ancient Babylonian custom (Gen. xlviii. 22). We next find the Hebrew patriarch in Egypt. There was famine in Canaan, and Egypt was already the granary of the eastern world. In the Tel el-Amarna tablets we hear of Egyptian corn being sent to the starving population of Syria; and Meneptah, the son of the Pharaoh of the Exodus, tells us that he had loaded ships with wheat for the Hittites when they were suffering from a famine. The want of rain which destroyed the crops of Canaan did not affect Egypt, where the fertility of the soil depends upon the irrigating waters of the Nile. Egypt at the time must have been under the sway of the Hyksos kings. They were Asiatic invaders who had overrun the country from north to south, and established themselves on the throne of the Pharaohs. In three successive dynasties did they govern the land, and the descendants of the native monarchs sank into _hiqu_ or vassal ‘princes’ of Thebes. At first, it is said, they laid Egypt waste, destroying the temples and massacring the people. But the influence of Egyptian culture soon led them captive. The Hyksos court became Egyptianised; the Hyksos king assumed the titles and state of the ancient sovereigns; Sutekh, the Hyksos god, was identified with Ra, the Sun-god of On, and the official language itself remained Egyptian. A treatise on mathematics, one of the few scientific works that have survived the shipwreck of Egyptian literature, was written under the patronage of the Hyksos king, Apophis I.[30]