But long before this took place the family of Israel was settled in the land of Goshen, on the outskirts of Northern Egypt. The geographical position of Goshen has been rediscovered by Dr. Naville. It corresponded with the modern Wadi Tumilât, through which the traveller by the railway now passes on his way from Ismailîyeh to Zagazig. It took its name from Qosem or Qos, the Pha-kussa of Greek geography, and the capital of the Arabian nome, the site of which is marked by the mounds of Saft el-Hennah.[120] The very name of the ‘Arabian nome’ indicates that its occupants belonged to Arabia rather than to Egypt. It was, in fact, a district handed over to the Bedâwin by the Pharaohs, as it still is to-day. Meneptah, the son of Ramses II., says in his great inscription at Karnak that ‘the country around Pa-Bailos (now Belbeis, near Zagazig) was not cultivated, but left as pasture for cattle, because of the strangers. It was abandoned since the time of the ancestors.’[121] Abandoned, that is to say, by the Egyptians themselves. But the Semitic nomad pitched his tent and fed his flocks there, partly because it was on the road to his own country and countrymen, partly because it was fitted for grazing and not for agriculture. Here, too, he was not in immediate contact with the Egyptian fellah, though the court of the Hyksos Pharaoh at Zoan was nigh at hand. Joseph’s brethren were made overseers of the royal cattle, an official post of which we also hear in the native Egyptian texts. After a while, Jacob died, full of years, and his body was embalmed in the Egyptian fashion. The actual process of embalming occupied forty days, the whole period during which ‘the Egyptians mourned for him,’ being threescore and ten. The statement is in accordance with other testimony as to the length of time needed to embalm a mummy. Herodotos (ii. 86) states that the corpse was kept in natron during seventy days, ‘to which period they are strictly confined.’ According to Diodoros,[122] ‘oil of cedar and other things were applied to the whole body for upwards of thirty days,’ the full period during which the mourning for the dead and the preparation of his mummy lasted being seventy-two days. Between the age of Joseph and that of Diodoros it would seem that little change had taken place in this part, at any rate, of the Egyptian treatment of their dead. When, however, the Hebrew text states that the corpse was embalmed by ‘the physicians, the slaves’ of Joseph; the word ‘physicians’ must be understood in a restricted sense. Pliny,[123] it is true, avers that during the process of embalming physicians were employed to examine the body of the dead man and determine of what disease he had died. But the _paraskhistæ_, who made the needful incision, were regarded with the utmost abhorrence; they were the pariahs of society, who lived in a community apart. It was the embalmers who were the associates of the priests, and whose persons, in the words