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292 Ah emanated" (Ah being a name of the Moon god). This new dynasty started the New Kingdom that, we have sug- gested, had forgotten all about Joseph after the passage of some three centuries. Accordingly, a successor of Ahmose called Tehuti-Ms-S (Fig 102b) (Thothmose or Tutmosis I)— "From the god Thoth emanated"—was, we have concluded, the ruler in whose time the story of Moses and the events of the Exodus began. It was this Pharaoh who, using the might of a unified and invigorated Egypt, sent his armies northward as far as the Upper Euphrates—the region where the relatives of Abraham had stayed and flourished. He reigned from 1525 to 1512 B.c. and it was he, we have suggested in The Wars of Gods and Men, who feared that the Children of Israel would join the warfare in support of their Euphratean relatives. So he im- posed harsh work on the Israelites, and ordered that any new born Israelite male should be killed at birth. It was in 1513 B.C. that a Levite Hebrew and his Levite wife had a son born to them. And fearing that he would be killed, the mother put him in a waterproofed box of bulrushes of the Nile and placed the box in the river. And it so hap- pened that the stream carried the box to where the Pharaoh's Daughter was bathing; she ended up adopting the boy as a son, "and she called him Moses"—Moshe in Hebrew. The Bible explains that she called him so for he was "from the waters extracted." But, we have no doubt, what the Pharaoh's Daughter did was to give the boy the epithet common in her dynasty with the component Mss (Mose, Mosis), prefixed, we believe, by a deity's name that the Bible preferred to omit. The chronology suggested by us, placing the birth of Moses in 1513 B.C., meshes the biblical tale with Egyptian chronol- ogy and a web of intrigues and power struggles in the Egyp- tian court. Having been born to Thothmes I by his half sister wife, their only daughter, called Hatshepsut, indeed bore the exclu- sive title The Pharaoh's Daughter. When Thothmes I died in 1512, the only male heir was a son born by a harem girl. Ascending the throne as Thothmes II, he married his half sister Hatshepsut to gain legitimacy for himself and for his children. But this couple had only daughters, and the only DIVINE ENCOUNTERS