Who, for instance, could have supposed that the name of the Israelites would ever be found on an Egyptian monument?
They were but a small and despised body of public slaves, settled in Goshen, on the extreme skirts of the Egyptian territory.

And yet in 1886 a granite stela was found by Professor Flinders Petrie containing a hymn of victory in honour of Meneptah the son of Ramses II., and declaring how, among other triumphs, "the Israelites" had been left "without seed." The names of all the other vanquished or subject peoples mentioned in the hymn have attached to them the determinative of place; the Israelites alone are without it; they alone have no fixed habitation, no definite locality of their own, so far at least as the writer knew.

It would seem that they had already escaped into the desert, and been lost to sight in its recesses.

Who could ever have imagined that in such a case an Egyptian poet would have judged it worth his while even to allude to the vanished serfs?
Still more recently the tomb of Menes, the founder of the united Egyptian monarchy, and the leader of the first historical dynasty, has been discovered by M.de Morgan at Negada, north of Thebes.

It was only a few months previously that the voice of historical criticism had authoritatively declared him to be "fabulous" and "mythical." The "fabulous" Menes, nevertheless, has now proved to be a very historical personage indeed; some of his bones are in the museum of Cairo, and the objects disinterred in his tomb show that he belonged to an age of culture and intercourse with distant lands.