this word no explanation can be found either in Hebrew or in Egyptian. But the language of the Babylonian inscriptions has unexpectedly come to our aid. In Chaldæa _abarakku_ was the title of one of the highest officers of State, and _abriqqu_, borrowed from the earlier Sumerian _abrik_, signified ‘a seer.’ We have said that the history of Joseph is marvellously true in all its details to what archæology has informed us were the facts of Egyptian life. Thus the prison in which ‘the king’s prisoners’ were confined is called by the strange name of ‘the round house.’ Such, at least, would seem to be the literal meaning of the Hebrew phrase, the second element of which signifies ‘roundness.’ The word is written _sohar_, though there is evidence of another reading, _sokhar_. _Sohar_ or _sokhar_, however, is really an Egyptian word. The royal prison at Thebes, where the State prisoners were kept under guard, was: called _suhan_, in which we have the same interchange of final _r_ and _n_ that is still a characteristic of Egyptian Arabic.[103] The term _bêth has-sohar_, ‘the house of the Sohar,’ is found nowhere else in the Old Testament: it is, in fact, one of the peculiarities which distinguish the story of Joseph, and at the same time testify to the acquaintance of its writer with the details of Egyptian life. The titles of the royal cupbearer and the chief of the bakers have been found in the lists of Egyptian officials; the Pharaoh’s kitchen was organised on an elaborate scale;[104] and the Egyptians were famed for their skill in confectionery and in making various kinds of bread.[105] On the monuments we may see depicted the cupbearer offering the goblet of wine, and the baker carrying on his head the baskets filled with round ‘white loaves.’ The ‘birthday of the Pharaoh’ was a general festival, on which, as the decrees of Rosetta and Canopus have taught us, the sovereign proclaimed an amnesty and released such prisoners as were thought deserving of pardon.[106] The dreams that Pharaoh dreamed are in full accordance with Egyptian mythology and symbolism. The seven kine fitly represent the Nile, which from time immemorial had been likened to a milch-cow. The cow-headed goddess Hathor or Isis watched over the fertility of the country, and the fertilising water of the river was called the milk that flowed from her breasts. The number seven denotes the ‘seven great Hathors,’ the seven forms under which the goddess was adored. The dreams themselves fall in with the Egyptian belief of the age. Throughout Egyptian history they have been a power not only in religion, but in politics as well. It was in consequence of a dream that Thothmes IV. cleared away the sand from before the paws of the Sphinx, and a thousand years later Nut-Amon of Ethiopia was summoned by a dream to invade Egypt. The dreams usually needed an interpreter to explain them, such as is mentioned in a Greek inscription from the Serapeum at Memphis.