Against the identification of Meneptah with the Pharaoh of the Exodus it has, however, been urged that he seems on the whole to have been a successful prince. His kingdom passed safely through the shock of the Libyan and northern invasions, and notices which have survived to us show that, at all events in the earlier part of his reign, Gaza and the neighbouring towns still acknowledged his authority. At Zaru, on the Asiatic frontier of Egypt, a young scribe, Pa-ebpasa by name, was stationed, whose duty it was to keep a record of all those who entered or left the country by “the way of the Philistines.” Some of his notes, made in the third year of Meneptah, are entered on the back of his school copybook, which is now in the British Museum. One of them tells us that on the fifteenth of Pakhons Baal— ... the son of Zippor of Gaza, passed through with a letter to Baal-marom(?)-ga[b]u, the prince of Tyre; another that Thoth, the son of Zakarumu, and the policeman Duthau, the son of Shem-baal, as well as Sutekh-mes, the son of Epher-dagal, had come from Gaza with a message to the king. A curious despatch, dated in Meneptah’s eighth year, goes to show that at that time the kinsfolk of the Israelites still had liberty to pass from the desert into the land of Goshen and there find pasturage for their flocks. One of his officials informs him that certain Shasu or Bedouin from Edom had been allowed to pass the Khetam or fortress of Meneptah Hotep-hima in the district of Succoth, and make their way to the lakes of the city of Pithom, in the district of Succoth, “in order to feed themselves and their herds on the possessions of Pharaoh, who is there a beneficent sun for all peoples.” The document may be interpreted in two ways. It may be taken as a proof that the Israelites had not yet fled from Egypt, and that there was consequently as yet no restraint placed by the Egyptians upon the entrance of the Asiatic nomads into their country, or it may be regarded as implying that the land of Goshen was already deserted, so that there was abundance of room for both shepherds and flocks. On behalf of this view a passage may be quoted from the great inscription of Meneptah at Karnak, in which we read that “the country around Pa-Bailos (the modern Belbeis) was not cultivated, but left as pasture for cattle because of the strangers. It was abandoned since the time of the ancestors.” More probably, however, this means that the land in question was not inhabited by Egyptian _fellahin_, but given over to the Hebrew shepherds and the “mixed multitude” of their Bedouin kinsmen.