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290 land. The shrunken lake still waters Egypt's most fertile area, called Elfayum; the canal linking the lake to the Nile is still called The Waterway of Joseph). When the famine became too harsh to bear, Jacob sent his other sons (except Benjamin) to Egypt to obtain food—only to discover, after several dramatic encounters with the Over- seer, that he was none other than their younger brother Jo- seph. Telling them that the famine would last another five years, Joseph told them to go back and bring over to Egypt their father and remaining brother and all the rest of Jacob's household. The year, by our calculations, was 1833 B.c. and the reigning Pharaoh was Amenemhet III of the twelfth dynasty. (A depiction found in a royal tomb from that time shows a group of men, women, and children with some of their livestock arriving in Egypt. The immigrants are depicted as, and identified in the accompanying inscription, as "Asiatics" (Fig. 100); their colorful robes, vividly painted in the tomb mural, are exactly of the kind of multicolored striped robe that Joseph had worn while in Canaan. While the Asiatics here depicted are not necessarily the caravan of Jacob and his family, the painting does show how they had certainly looked.) The presence of Jacob in Egypt is directly attested, ac- cording to A. Mallon in Les Hebreux en Egypte, also by various inscriptions on scarabs that spell out the name Ya'a- qob (the Hebrew name that in English is rendered "Jacob"). Written sometimes within a royal cartouche (Fig. 101), it is spelled hieroglyphically Yy-A-Q-B with the suffix H-R, giv- DIVINE ENCOUNTERS Figure 100