Was “the war of the Lord” in Suphah waged against the Pharaoh of Egypt? Chronology is in favour of it, and if the enemies of the Israelites were not the Egyptian army, it is hard to say who else they could have been. We know from the Pentateuch that they were not the people of Edom; “meddle not with them,” the Israelites were enjoined; the children of Esau were their “brethren,” and God had “given Mount Seir unto Esau for a possession.” But whether or not Ramses III. and the tribes of Israel ever came into actual conflict, it must have been during his reign that the first Israelitish conquests in Canaan were made. The settlement of the twelve tribes in Palestine was coeval with the final decay of the Egyptian monarchy. CHAPTER IV. THE AGE OF THE ISRAELITISH MONARCHIES. Ramses III. was the last of the great Pharaohs in whose veins ran native Egyptian blood. His successors all bore the same name as himself, but they possessed neither his energy nor his power to rule. He had saved Egypt from further attack from without, and it was well he had done so, for the feeble monarchs of the twentieth dynasty would have been unable to resist the foe. They ceased even to build or to erect the monuments which testified to the prosperity of the country and the progress of its art. The high-priests of Amon gradually usurped their authority, and a time came at length when the last of the Ramses fled into exile in Ethiopia, and a new dynasty governed in his stead. But the rule of the new monarchs was hardly acknowledged beyond the Delta; Thebes was practically independent under its priest-kings, and though they acknowledged the authority of the Tanite Pharaohs in name, they acted, in real fact, as if they were independent sovereigns. One of them, Ra-men-kheper, built fortresses not only at Gebelên in the south, but also at El-Hîbeh in the north, and thus blocked the river against the subjects of the Tanite princes, as well as against invaders from the south. At times, indeed, the Tanite Pharaohs of the twenty-first dynasty exercised an actual sovereignty over Upper Egypt, and Smendes, the first of them, quarried stone at Dababîyeh, opposite Gebelên, with which to repair the canal of Luxor; but, as a general rule, so far as the south was concerned, they were Pharaohs only in name. The rival dynasty of Theban high-priests was at once more powerful and more king-like. They it was who, in some moment of danger, concealed the mummies of the great monarchs of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties in the pit at Dêr el-Bahâri, and whose own mummies were entombed by the side of those of a Thothmes and a Ramses.