Publisher's Note: More than twenty years of dedicated research and study have gone into the making of this book. In writing it, the author's chief concern initially was to assemble a mass of complex evidence designed to convince biblical experts and qualified Egyptologists that some of the accepted beliefs about the ancient links between the tribe of Israel and the Egypt of the Pharaohs were ill-founded. We felt, however, that his theories were not only bound to prove controversial, but deserved, and would be appreciated by, a far wider audience. The book is therefore published in two sections. The first, largely uninterrupted by references to sources and footnotes, is a straightforward account of the author's attempt to establish that an intuition, which came to him one winter's night as he sat reading the Old Testament by the fire, was more than fanciful imagining: the second contains most of the source material and notes as well as some of the scholarship that, while absorbing to experts, seemed likely to prove somewhat abstruse for the general reader.