But he attempted too much for the compass of a single reign, however long.

Much of his work is pretentious but poor, and indicative of the feverish haste with which it was executed.
Among the cities he built in the Delta were Ramses and Pithom.

Pithom, or Pa-Tum, is now marked by the mounds of Tel el-Maskhuta, on the line of railway between Ismailia and Zagazig; it lay at the eastern extremity of Qoshem or Goshen, in the district of Succoth.

Like Ramses, it had been built by Israelitish labour, for the free-born Israelites of Goshen had been turned into royal serfs.

None had suffered more from the revolution which overthrew the Asiatised court of the Eighteenth dynasty and brought in a "new king which knew not Joseph." They had been settled in the strip of pasture-land which borders the Freshwater Canal of to-day, and is still a place of resort for the Bedawin from the east.