In the land of Goshen, the Israelitish settlers throve and multiplied. But a time came when a new king arose “which knew not Joseph,” and when the descendants of Jacob seemed to the Egyptians a source of danger. Like Abbas Pasha in a later century, the Pharaoh determined to reduce the free-born Israelites into the condition of public slaves, and by every means in his power to diminish their number. The male children were destroyed, the adults compelled to labour at the cities the Egyptian monarch was building in their neighbourhood, and the land in which they lived was surrounded by Egyptian garrisons and controlled by Egyptian officers. The slaves, however, succeeded in escaping from their “house of bondage.” Under the leadership of Moses they made their way into the eastern desert, and received, at Sinai and Kadesh-Barnea, the laws which were henceforth to govern them. The army sent to pursue them was swallowed up in the waters of the sea, and the district they had occupied was left desolate. A variety of reasons had led Egyptologists to the belief that in the Pharaoh of the Oppression we were probably to see Ramses II. Ramses II., the Sesostris and Osymandyas of Greek story, was the third king of the nineteenth dynasty, and one of the most striking figures of Egyptian history. His long reign of sixty-seven years was the evening of Egyptian greatness. With his death the age of Egyptian conquests passed away, and the period of decay set in. Like Louis XIV. of France, the _grand monarque_ of ancient Egypt exhausted in his wars the resources and fighting population of his country. But it was as a builder rather than as a conqueror that Ramses II. was famous. Go where we will in Egypt or Nubia, we find traces of his architectural activity. There is hardly a place where he has not left his name. His whole reign must have been occupied with the construction of cities and temples, or the restoration and enlargement of previously existing ones, and, in spite of its length, it is difficult to understand how so vast an amount of work could have been accomplished in the time. Much of the work, however, is poor and scamped; it bears, in fact, marks of the feverish haste with which it was carried through. Much of it, on the other hand, is grandiose and striking in its colossal proportions and boldness of design. The shattered granite colossus at the Ramesseum, once nearly sixty feet in height, the fragment of a standing figure of granite found by Professor Flinders Petrie at Sân, which must originally have been over a hundred feet high, the great hall of columns at Karnak, the temple of Abu-Simbel in Nubia, are all so many witnesses of vast conceptions successfully realised. Abu-Simbel, indeed, where a mountain has been hollowed into a temple, and a cliff carved into the likeness of four sitting figures, each with an unrivalled expression of divine calm upon its countenance, justly claims to be one of the wonders of the world.