Such changes of name are not unknown to the inscriptions. From time to time we meet with the records of foreigners who had settled down in the valley of the Nile and there received new names of Egyptian origin. Thus a monument found at Abydos tells us of a Canaanite from Bashan called Ben-Azan, who received in Egypt the new name of Yu-pa-â and was the father of a vizier of Meneptah, the Pharaoh of the Exodus. The Hittite wife of Ramses II. similarly adopted an Egyptian name, and the tombstones of two Karians are preserved, in which the Karian names of the dead are written in the letters of the Karian alphabet, while a hieroglyphic text is attached which gives the Egyptian names they had borne in Egypt. The exact transcription in hieroglyphics of the Egyptian name of Joseph is still doubtful. But it is plain that it contains the Egyptian words _pa-ânkh_, “the life,” or “the living one,” which seem to be preceded by the particle _nti_, “of.” The term _pa-ânkh_ is sometimes applied to the Pharaoh, and since Kames, the last king of the seventeenth dynasty, assumed the title of Zaf-n-to, “nourisher of the land,” it is possible that in Zaphnath-paaneah we may see an Egyptian Zaf-nti-pa-ânkh, “nourisher of the Pharaoh.” But the final solution of the question must be left to future research. It is now more easy to explain the cry which was raised before Joseph when he went forth from the presence of the Pharaoh with the golden chain around his neck and the royal signet upon his finger. “_Abrêk!_” they shouted before him, and an explanation of the word has been vainly sought in the Egyptian language. It really is of Babylonian origin. In the primitive non-Semitic language of Chaldæa _abrik_ signified “a seer” or “soothsayer,” and the term was borrowed by the Semitic Babylonians under the two forms of _abrikku_ and _abarakku_. Joseph was thus proclaimed a seer, and his exaltation was due to his power of foreseeing the future. It was as a divinely-inspired seer that the subjects of the Pharaoh were to reverence him. How a Babylonian word like _abrek_ came to be used in Egypt it is idle for us to inquire. Those who believe in the late origin and fictitious character of the story of Joseph would find an easy explanation of it. But easy explanations are not necessarily true, either in archæology or in anything else. And since we now know that Canaan, long before the time of Joseph, had fallen under Babylonian influence, that the Babylonian language and writing were employed there, and that Babylonian words had made their way into the native idiom, it does not require much stretch of the imagination to suppose that such words may have also penetrated to the court of the Asiatic rulers of northern Egypt. Up to the era of the Exodus, Egypt and Canaan were for several centuries as closely connected with each other as were England and the north of France in the age of the Normans and Plantagenets.