The richest and the most precious of the ornaments showed the
shields of the Pharaph Aahmes. He bears on them the surname
of Nakht, that is, * the brave or victorious.* Without doubt, then,
Queen Aah-hotep was buried in Thebes during the reign of her
son Aahmes. Mention has already been made of the tomb of her
royal hasband at Thebes. Aah-hotep is therefore the proper an-
cestress of the eighteenth dynasty. It was her son Aahmes who
was destined to rise up as the avenger of his native country for
the shame and oppression which it had so long endured. If there-
fore Apopi was the pharaoh that honored Joseph, Aahmes was the
king that succeeded him.
THE EXODUS OF ISRAEL. 123

And yet a strange enigma covers this age of
shame, the veil of which we are not yet able to lift.
For on a minute examination of the monuments of
the times of the seventeenth and eighteenth dynas-
ties, many well-founded reflections force themselves
upon us involuntarily ; since, in fact, it would seem
as if the hatred of the Egyptians against the Hyksos
kings had not been so intense as the ^tory handed
down by Manetho appears to represent it. We of
course except, when we speak of the Egyptians, the
legitimate but oppressed kings of ' the region of the.
south,' in the Upper country, to whom the foreign
tyrants in the Lowlands must have appeared in no
agreeable light.
