However this may be, the question of the date of the Exodus is reduced to narrow limits. The three successors of Ramses II. reigned altogether but a short time. Manetho gives seven years only to Si-Ptah, five years to Amon-messu, and we know from the monuments that Meneptah and Seti II. can have reigned but a very few years. Thirty or forty years at most will have covered the period that elapsed between the death of the great Ramses and the downfall of his dynasty. Then came a few years of confusion and anarchy, followed by the reign of Setnekht. If we place the accession of Ramses III. in B.C. 1230, we cannot be far wrong. When that happened, the Israelites were hidden out of the sight of the great nations of the world among the solitudes of the desert. They were pitching their tents on the frontiers of Mount Seir, in the near neighbourhood of their kinsmen in Edom and Midian. There, at Sinai and Kadesh-barnea, they were receiving a code of laws, and being fitted to become a nation and the conquerors of Canaan. Were they included among the Shasu of Mount Seir whose overthrow is commemorated by Ramses III.? For an answer we must turn to the twenty-first chapter of the Book of Numbers. There we read how it is said in the book of the wars of the Lord: “Waheb in Suphah and the brooks of Arnon, and the stream of the brook that goeth down to the dwelling of Ar, and lieth upon the border of Moab.” Of the war against the Amorites on the banks of the Arnon we know something, but the Old Testament has preserved no record of the other war, which had its scene in Suphah. Where Suphah was we know from the opening of the Book of Deuteronomy, which tells us that the words of Moses were addressed to the people “in the plain over against Suph.” Suph, in fact, was the district which gave its name to the _yâm Sûph_ or “Sea of Suph,” the Red Sea of the authorised version, the modern Gulf of Akabah. Here were the Edomite ports of Eloth and Ezion-geber, where Solomon built his fleet of merchantmen (1 Kings ix. 26), and here too was the region which faced “the plain” on the southern side of Moab. The barren ranges of Mount Seir run down southward to Ezion-geber and Eloth, at the head of the Gulf of Akabah. And it was just in the ranges of Mount Seir that Ramses III. tells us he smote the Shasu and plundered their tents. When he made this expedition, the Israelites were probably still encamped on the borders of Edom. They had not as yet entered Canaan when he marched through the later Judæa, and crossed the Jordan into Moab, and his campaign against the Shasu of the desert did not take place many years later. At Medînet Habu, the “chief of the Shasu” figures among his prisoners by the side of the kings of the Hittites and the Amorites.