Pollard, Joseph: The land of the monuments: notes of Egyptian travel (London, 1896)

ioo THE LAND OF THE MONUMENTS

on the 3rd of July, 1886, the mummy of Rameses the
Great was opened, and its record fully established in
the presence of the late Khedive, the ambassadors of
his Court, and distinguished men of science. The
mummy of Seti I., the father of Rameses the Great,
was examined, and a third, which proved to. be
Rameses III., the founder of the XXth Dynasty,
whose invasions of Southern Palestine and the
country of the Amorites during the last years of
the wanderings of the Israelites in the Wilderness
weakened the power of the formidable nations then
in possession of the land, and enabled the Hebrews
under Joshua to make the conquest of Canaan more
easily. These wars of Rameses III., when con-
sidered in connection with a note by the late Dr.
Birch, assume an important and interesting significa-
cation : " The bee is not represented upon the
monuments ; the insect, the emblem for king, so
often repeated, is the hornet, or wasp." *

Moses predicted that God would prepare the way
for His people by sending "the hornet to drive out
the Hivite, &c, from before them." t When Joshua
had assembled the tribes at Shechem after the
conquest of the country, he says, " God sent the
hornet before you, which drave them out from
before you, even the two kings of the Amorites." \
\nd in the Book of Wisdom we read, "And did
send wasps forerunners of thine host." § The hornet
was seen by us on several occasions ; it is larger
than the English insect, very handsome, and of a
deeper colour than the ordinary was]). It was used
as the emblem of the king of Lower Egypt, from the

• Wilkinson, " Andenl Egyptians," lasl edition, vul. ii. p. 416.
t Exod. xxiii. jS ; Dent. vii. 20. ', Josh. xxiv. 12. *> Wisdom, xii. S.