Strong, too, as my veneration is for Josephus, I cannot conceal either from myself or from the reader, that his testimony in _this instance_ is rather of a dubious character. The idea of interpolation I altogether waive--it is, at _all times_, a contemptible subterfuge. I will take for granted that the text is genuine; and, on the very face of it, it bears the impress--in the first place, of inaccuracy, confounding the period of his countrymen’s _servitude_ with that of their actual _sojourn_ in Egypt; and, in the second place, of _indistinctness_, attaching a term of obloquy to those edifices, without condescending to offer therefor any cause. Here are his own words: “When time had obliterated the benefits of Joseph, and the kingdom of Egypt had passed into another family, they inhumanely treated the Israelites, and wore them down in various labours: for they ordered them to divert the course of the river (Nile) into many ditches, and to build walls, and raise mounds by which to confine the inundations of the river (Nile); and, moreover, vexed our nation in constructing FOOLISH PYRAMIDS, forced them to learn various arts, and inured them to undergo great labours; and after this manner did they, for _four hundred years_, endure bondage; the Egyptians doing that to destroy the Israelites by overmuch labour, whilst we ourselves endeavoured to struggle against all our difficulties.” Now, it is not a little remarkable, as connecting the erection of the pyramids with the “royal shepherd race,” the former occupants of the above fertile territory, that those immense edifices happen to be situated in the very vicinity of Goshen. Geeza, where the three _great ones_ stand, is universally allowed to have been the site whereon Memphis once stood; and as a west wind took away the locusts, and cast them into the Red Sea (Ex. x. 19), Goshen, which we find by Gen. xlv. 10, cannot have been far from Joseph’s own residence, will be more aptly fixed in the vicinity of this spot within the Heliopolitan nome, than within any other nome or præfecture, particularly the Tanitic, “where the same wind,” as has been justly remarked by Dr. Shaw, “would not have blown those insects into the Red Sea, but into the Mediterranean, or else into the land of the Philistines.” Goshen, then, was that part of “the land of Rameses,” “the best of the land” (Gen. xlvii. 6-11) which lay in the neighbourhood of Cairo, but on the opposite side of the Nile, where, as already observed, the pyramids are first met with, and whence they proceed in a continued line along the banks of the river, in a southerly direction for many miles together.