Famine compelled the people to sell their lands to the king and his minister, and a Hyksos Pharaoh and his Hebrew vizier thus succeeded in destroying the older aristocracy and despoiling the natives of their estates.

It was probably at this period also that the public granaries, of which we hear so much in the age of the Eighteenth dynasty, were first established in Egypt, in imitation of those of Babylonia, where they had long been an institution, and a superintendent was appointed over them who, as in Babylonia, virtually held the power of life and death in his hands.
One of the main results, then, of recent discovery in the East has been to teach us the solidarity of ancient Oriental history, and the impossibility of forming a correct judgment in regard to any one part of it without reference to the rest.

Hebrew history is unintelligible as long as it stands alone, and the attempt to interpret it apart and by itself has led to little else than false and one-sided conclusions; it is only when read in the light of the history of the great empires which flourished beside it that it can be properly understood.

Israel and the nations around it formed a whole, so far as the historian is concerned, which, like the elements of a picture, cannot be torn asunder.

If we would know the history of the one, we must know the history of the other also.