The successor of Rameses, Meneptah II., is hardly the son which one would expect to follow such a father. According to Brugsch, he does not rank with those Pharaohs who transmitted their remembrance to posterity by grand buildings and the construction of new temples. And the monolith found by Petrie in 1896 seems to imply that his lists of conquests were not always so trustworthy as could be wished. Nevertheless, the reign of Meneptah is one of the greatest importance, for it was he, to all appearance, who was the Pharaoh of the Exodus, as seems also to be proved by the same document. As this is a text of the very first importance, a translation of the concluding lines is given here— “Kheta (the land of the Hittites) is in peace, captive is Canaan and full of misery, Askelon is carried away, Gezer is taken, Yennuamma is non-existent, Israel is lost, his seed is not,(75) Syria is like the widows of Egypt. The totality of all the lands is at peace, for whoever rebelled was chastised by king Meneptah.” Now the statement concerning Israel has given rise to a considerable amount of discussion. Naville regards the reference to the condition in which the Israelites were as indicating that they had left Egypt, and were wandering, “lost” in the desert. There is also some probability that the expression, “his seed is not,” may be a reference to the decree of the king, who commanded the destruction of the male children of the Hebrews, which command, he may have imagined, had been finally carried out. The question also naturally arises, whether the last phrase, “whoever rebelled was chastised by king Meneptah,” may not have a reference to the Israelites, who, from their own showing, were sufficiently peremptory in their demands to be allowed to proceed into the wilderness to sacrifice to their god, to bring down upon themselves any amount of resentment. Exceedingly noteworthy, and in many respects startling, however, are the researches and statements of Dr. Edouard Mahler. Following Spiegelberg as to the meaning of the phrase containing the name of the Israelites, “Jenoam has been brought to naught; Israel, the horde, destroyed his crops”—a statement which hardly seems worthy of the honour of being inscribed on the memorial stele of a king of Egypt—is the rendering he suggests. The translation of the word _feket_ (which is rendered by other Egyptologists as “annihilated, lost,” or in some similar way) by “horde,” allows the learned chronologist to suggest, that the ideographs accompanying the word Israelites indicate that they had already entered the Holy Land, and were trying to obtain a foothold there.