Kitobni o'qish: «Patriarchal Palestine»

THE CHIEF PLACES MENTIONED IN THE BOOKS OF GENESIS AND EXODUS

PREFACE

A few years ago the subject-matter of the present volume might have been condensed into a few pages. Beyond what we would gather from the Old Testament, we knew but little about the history and geography of Canaan before the age of its conquest by the Israelites. Thanks, however, to the discovery and decipherment of the ancient monuments of Babylonia and Assyria, of Egypt and of Palestine, all this is now changed. A flood of light has been poured upon the earlier history of the country and its inhabitants, and though we are still only at the beginning of our discoveries we can already sketch the outlines of Canaanitish history, and even fill them in here and there.

Throughout I have assumed that in the narrative of the Pentateuch we have history and not fiction. Indeed the archaeologist cannot do otherwise. Monumental research is making it clearer every day that the scepticism of the so-called "higher criticism" is not justified in fact. Those who would examine the proofs of this must turn to my book on The Higher Criticism and the Verdict of the Monuments. There I have written purely as an archaeologist, who belongs to no theological school, and consequently readers of the work must see in it merely the irreducible minimum of confidence in the historical trustworthiness of the Old Testament, with which oriental archaeology can be satisfied. But it is obvious that this irreducible minimum is a good deal less than what a fair-minded historian will admit. The archaeological facts support the traditional rather than the so-called "critical" view of the age and authority of the Pentateuch, and tend to show that we have in it not only a historical monument whose statements can be trusted, but also what is substantially a work of the great Hebrew legislator himself.

For those who "profess and call themselves Christians," however, there is another side to the question besides the archaeological. The modern "critical" views in regard to the Pentateuch are in violent contradiction to the teaching and belief of the Jewish Church in the time of our Lord, and this teaching and belief has been accepted by Christ and His Apostles, and inherited by the Christian Church. It is a teaching and belief which lies at the root of many of the dogmas of the Church, and if we are to reject or revise it, we must at the same time reject and revise historical Christianity. It is difficult to see how we can call ourselves Christians in the sense which the term has borne for the last eighteen hundred years, and at the same time repudiate or modify, in accordance with our individual fancies, the articles of faith which historical Christianity has maintained everywhere and at all periods. For those who look beyond the covers of grammars and lexicons, the great practical fact of historical Christianity must outweigh all the speculations of individual scholars, however ingenious and elaborate they may be. It is for the individual to harmonize his conclusions with the immemorial doctrine of the Church, not for the Church to reconcile its teaching with the theories of the individual. Christ promised that the Spirit of God should guide His Apostles and their followers into "all truth," and those who believe the promise cannot also believe that the "Spirit of Truth" has been at any time a Spirit of illusion.

Oriental archaeology, at all events, is on the side of those who see in the Hebrew patriarchs real men of flesh and blood, and who hold that in the narratives of the Pentateuch we have historical records many of which go back to the age of the events they describe. Each fresh discovery made by the archaeologist yields fresh testimony to the truth of the Old Testament stories. Since the manuscript of the present work was ready for the press, two such discoveries have been made by Mr. Pinches, to whom oriental archaeology and Biblical research are already under such deep obligations, and it has been possible only to glance at them in the text.

He has found a broken cuneiform tablet which once gave an account of the reign of Khammurabi, the contemporary of Chedor-laomer and Arioch, of the wars that he carried on, and of the steps by which he rose to the supreme power in Babylonia, driving the Elamites out of it, overthrowing his rival Arioch, and making Babylon for the first time the capital of a united kingdom. Unfortunately the tablet is much broken, but what is left alludes to his campaigns against Elam and Rabbatu—perhaps a city of Palestine, of his reduction of Babylon, and of his successes against Eri-Aku or Arioch of Larsa, Tudghulla or Tidal, the son of Gazza … and Kudur-Lagamar or Chedor-laomer himself. The Hebrew text of Genesis has thus been verified even to the spelling of the proper names. The other discovery of Mr. Pinches is still more interesting. The name of Ab-ramu or Abram had already been found in Babylonian contracts of the age of Khammurabi; Mr. Pinches has now found in them the specifically Hebrew names of Ya'qub-ilu or Jacob-el and Yasup-ilu or Joseph-el. It will be remembered that the names of Jacob-el and Joseph-el had already been detected among the places in Palestine conquered by the Egyptian monarch Thothmes III., and it had been accordingly inferred that the full names of the Hebrew patriarchs must have been Jacob-el and Joseph-el. Jacob and Joseph are abbreviations analogous to Jephthah by the side of Jiphthah-el (Josh. xix. 14), of Jeshurun by the side of Isra-el, or of the Egyptian Yurahma by the side of the Biblical Jerahme-el. As is mentioned in a later page, a discovery recently made by Prof. Flinders Petrie has shown that the name of Jacob-el was actually borne not only in Babylonia, but also in the West. Scarabs exist, which he assigns to the period when Egypt was ruled by invaders from Asia, and on which is written the name of a Pharaoh Ya'aqub-hal or Jacob-el.

Besides the names of Jacob-el and Joseph-el, Mr. Pinches has met with other distinctively Hebrew names, like Abdiel, in deeds drawn up in the time of the dynasty to which Khammurabi belonged. There were therefore Hebrews—or at least a Hebrew-speaking population—living in Babylonia at the period to which the Old Testament assigns the lifetime of Abraham. But this is not all. As I pointed out five years ago, the name of Khammurabi himself, like those of the rest of the dynasty of which he was a member, are not Babylonian but South Arabian. The words with which they are compounded, and the divine names which they contain, do not belong to the Assyrian and Babylonian language, and there is a cuneiform tablet in which they are given with their Assyrian translations. The dynasty must have had close relations with South Arabia. This, however, is not the most interesting part of the matter. The names are not South Arabian only, they are Hebrew as well. That of Khammu-rabi, for instance, is compounded with the name of the god 'Am, which is written 'Ammi in the name of his descendant Ammi-zaduqa, and 'Am or 'Ammi characterizes not only South Arabia, but the Hebrew-speaking lands as well. We need only mention names like Ammi-nadab or Ben-Ammi in illustration of the fact. Equally Hebrew and South Arabian is zaduqa or zadoq; but it was a word unknown to the Assyrian language of Babylonia.

When Abraham therefore was born in Ur of the Chaldees, a dynasty was ruling there which was not of Babylonian origin, but belonged to a race which was at once Hebrew and South Arabian. The contract tablets prove that a population with similar characteristics was living under them in the country. Could there be a more remarkable confirmation of the statements which we find in the tenth chapter of Genesis? There we read that "unto Eber were born two sons: the name of the one was Peleg," the ancestor of the Hebrews, while the name of the other was Joktan, the ancestor of the tribes of South Arabia. The parallelism between the Biblical account and the latest discovery of archaeological science is thus complete, and makes it impossible to believe that the Biblical narrative would have been compiled in Palestine at the late date to which our modern "critics" would assign it. All recollection of the facts embodied in it would then have long passed away.

Even while I write Prof. Hommel is announcing fresh discoveries which bear on the early history of the Book of Genesis. Cuneiform tablets have turned up from which we gather that centuries before the age of Abraham, a king of Ur, Ine-Sin by name, had not only overrun Elam, but had also conquered Simurru, the Zemar of Gen. x. 18, in the land of Phoenicia. A daughter of the same king or of one of his immediate successors, was high-priestess both of Elam and of Markhas or Mer'ash in Northern Syria, while Kimas or Northern Arabia was overrun by the Babylonian arms. Proofs consequently are multiplying of the intimate relations that existed between Babylonia and Western Asia long before the era of the Patriarchs, and we need no longer feel any surprise that Abraham should have experienced so little difficulty in migrating into Canaan, or that he should have found there the same culture as that which he had left behind in Ur. The language and script of Babylonia must have been almost as well known to the educated Canaanite as to himself, and the records of the Patriarchal Age would have been preserved in the libraries of Canaan down to the time of its conquest by the Israelites.

Perhaps a word or two is needed in explanation of the repetitions which will be found here and there in the following pages. They have been necessitated by the form into which I have been obliged to cast the book. A consecutive history of Patriarchal Palestine cannot be written at present, if indeed it ever can be, and the subject therefore has to be treated under a series of separate heads. This has sometimes made repetitions unavoidable without a sacrifice of clearness.

In conclusion it will be noted, that the name of the people who were associated with the Philistines in their wars against Egypt and occupation of Palestine has been changed from Zakkur to Zakkal. This has been in consequence of a keen-sighted observation of Prof. Hommel. He has pointed out that in a Babylonian text of the Kassite period, the people in question are mentioned under the name of Zaqqalu, which settles the reading of the hieroglyphic word. (See the Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology for May 1895.)

A.H. SAYCE.

September 30, 1895.

THE KINGS OF EGYPT AND BABYLONIA DURING THE PATRIARCHAL AGE

EGYPT

Dynasties XV., XVI., and XVII.—Hyksos or Shepherd-kings (from Manetho)

Dynasty XV.—

Of the Sixteenth Dynasty nothing is known. Of the Seventeenth the monuments have given us the names of Apôphis II. (Aa-user-Ra) and Apôphis III. (Aa-ab-tani-Ra), in whose reign the war of independence began under the native prince of Thebes, and lasted for four generations.

Dynasty XVIII.—

Dynasty XIX.—

Dynasty XX.—

Dynasty I. of Babylon—

1. Sumu-abi, 15 years, B.C. 2458.

2. Sumu-la-ilu, his son, 35 years.

3. Zabû, his son, 14 years.

4. Abil-Sin, his son, 18 years.

5. Sin-muballidh, his son, 30 years.

6. Khammu-rabi, his son, 55 years (at first under the sovereignty of Chedor-laomer, the Elamite; by the conquest of Eri-Aku and the Elamites he unites Babylonia, B.C. 2320).

7. Samsu-iluna, his son, 35 years.

8. Ebisum, or Abi-esukh, his son, 25 years.

9. Ammi-satana, his son, 25 years.

10. Ammi-zaduga, his son, 21 years.

11. Samsu-satana, his son, 31 years.

Dynasty II. of Uru-azagga, B.C. 2154—

1. Anman, 51 (or 60) years.

2. Ki-nigas, 55 years.

3. Damki-ili-su, 46 years.

4. Iskipal, 15 years.

5. Sussi, his brother, 27 years.

6. Gul-kisar, 55 years.

7. Kirgal-daramas, his son, 50 years.

8. A-dara-kalama, his son, 28 years.

9. A-kur-du-ana, 26 years.

10. Melamma-kurkura, 6 years.

11. Bel-ga[mil?], 9 years.

Dynasty III., of the Kassites, B.C. 1786—

1. Gandis, or Gaddas, 16 years.

2. Agum-Sipak, his son, 22 years.

3. Guya-Sipak, his son, 22 years.

4. Ussi, his son, 8 years.

5. Adu-medas, … years.

6. Tazzi-gurumas, … years.

7. Agum-kak-rimi, his son, … years.

(The following order of succession is taken from Dr. Hilprecht.)

14. Kallimma-Sin.

15. Kudur-Bel.

16. Sagarakti-buryas, his son.

17. Kuri-galzu I.

18. Kara-indas,

19. Burna-buryas, his nephew, B.C. 1400.

20. Kara-Khardas, son of Kara-indas.

21. Nazi-bugas, or Su-zigas, an usurper.

22. Kuri-galzu II., son of Burna-buryas, 2. years.

23. Nazi-Maruttas, his son, 26 years.

24. Kadasman-Turgu, his son, 17 years.

25. Kadasman-Burias, his son, 2 years.

26. Gis-amme ti, 6 years.

27. Saga-rakti-suryas 13 years.

28. Kasbat, or Bibe-yasu, his son, 8 years.

29. Bel-nadin-sumi, 1 year 6 months.

30. Kadasman-Kharbe, 1 year 6 months.

31. Rimmon-nadin-sumi, 6 years.

32. Rimmon-sum-utsur, 30 years (including 7 years of occupation of Babylon by the Assyrian king, Tiglath-Ninip).

33. Mile-Sipak, 15 years.

34. Merodach-baladan I., his son, 13 years.

35. Zamania-nadin-sunii I., 1 year.

36. Bel-sum-iddin, 3 years.

CHAPTER I
THE LAND

Patriarchal Palestine! There are some who would tell us that the very name is a misnomer. Have we not been assured by the German critics and their English disciples that there were no patriarchs and no Patriarchal Age? And yet, the critics notwithstanding, the Patriarchal Age has actually existed. While criticism, so-called, has been busy in demolishing the records of the Pentateuch, archaeology, by the spade of the excavator and the patient skill of the decipherer, has been equally busy in restoring their credit. And the monuments of the past are a more solid argument than the guesses and prepossessions of the modern theorist. The clay tablet and inscribed stone are better witnesses to the truth than literary tact or critical scepticism. That Moses and his contemporaries could neither read nor write may have been proved to demonstration by the critic; yet nevertheless we now know, thanks to archaeological discovery, that it would have been a miracle if the critic were right. The Pentateuch is, after all, what it professes to be, and the records it contains are history and not romance.

The question of its authenticity involves issues more serious and important than those which have to do merely with history or archaeology. We are sometimes told indeed, in all honesty of purpose, that it is a question of purely literary interest, without influence on our theological faith. But the whole fabric of the Jewish Church in the time of our Lord was based upon the belief that the Law of Moses came from God, and that this God "is not a man that He should lie." And the belief of the Jewish Church was handed on to the Christian Church along with all its consequences. To revise that belief is to revise the dogmas of the Christian Church as they have been held for the last eighteen centuries; to reject it utterly is to reject the primary document of the faith into which we have been baptized.

It is not, however, with theological matters that we are now concerned. Patriarchal Palestine is for us the Palestine of the Patriarchal Age, as it has been disclosed by archaeological research, not the Palestine in which the revelation of God's will to man was to be made. It is sufficient for us that the Patriarchal Age has been shown by modern discovery to be a fact, and that in the narratives of the Book of Genesis we have authentic records of the past. There was indeed a Patriarchal Palestine, and the glimpses of it that we get in the Old Testament have been illustrated and supplemented by the ancient monuments of the Oriental world.

Whether the name of Palestine can be applied to the country with strict accuracy at this early period is a different question. Palestine is Philistia, the land of the Philistines, and the introduction of the name was subsequent to the settlement of the Philistines in Canaan and the era of their victories over Israel. As we shall see later on, it is probable that they did not reach the Canaanitish coast until the Patriarchal Age was almost, if not entirely, past Their name does not occur in the cuneiform correspondence which was carried on between Canaan and Egypt in the century before the Exodus, and they are first heard of as forming part of that great confederacy of northern tribes which attacked Egypt and Canaan in the days of Moses. But, though the term Canaan would doubtless be more correct than Palestine, the latter has become so purely geographical in meaning that we can employ it without reference to history or date. Its signification is too familiar to cause mistakes, and it can therefore be used proleptically, just as the name of the Philistines themselves is used proleptically in the twenty-first chapter of Genesis. Abimelech was king of a people who inhabited the same part of the country as the Philistines in later times, and were thus their earlier representatives.

The term "Palestine" then is used geographically without any reference to its historical origin. It denotes the country which is known as Canaan in the Old Testament, which was promised to Abraham and conquered by his descendants. It is the land in which David ruled and in which Christ was born, where the prophets prepared the way for the Gospel and the Christian Church was founded.

Shut in between the Desert of Arabia and the Mediterranean Sea on the east and west, it is a narrow strip of territory, for the most part mountainous, rugged, and barren. Northward the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon come to meet it from Syria, the Anti-Lebanon culminating in the lofty peaks and precipitous ravines of Mount Hermon (9383 feet above the level of the sea), while Lebanon runs southward till it juts out into the sea in its sacred headland of Carmel. The fertile plain of Esdraelon or Megiddo separates the mountains of the north from those of the south. These last form a broken plateau between the Jordan and the Dead Sea on the one side and the Plain of Sharon and the sea-coast of the Philistines on the other, until they finally slope away into the arid desert of the south. Here, on the borders of the wilderness, was Beersheba the southern limit of the land in the days of the monarchy, Dan, its northern limit, lying far away to the north at the foot of Hermon, and not far from the sources of the Jordan.

Granite and gneiss, overlaid with hard dark sandstone and masses of secondary limestone, form as it were the skeleton of the country. Here and there, at Carmel and Gerizim, patches of the tertiary nummulite of Egypt make their appearance, and in the plains of Megiddo and the coast, as well as in the "Ghor" or valley of the Jordan, there is rich alluvial soil. But elsewhere all is barren or nearly so, cultivation being possible only by terracing the cliffs, and bringing the soil up to them from the plains below with slow and painful labour. It has often been said that Palestine was more widely cultivated in ancient times than it is to-day. But if so, this was only because a larger area of the cultivable ground was tilled. The plains of the coast, which are now given over to malaria and Beduin thieves, were doubtless thickly populated and well sown. But of ground actually fit for cultivation there could not have been a larger amount than there is at present.

It was not in any way a well-wooded land. On the slopes of the Lebanon and of Carmel, it is true, there were forests of cedar-trees, a few of which still survive, and the Assyrian kings more than once speak of cutting them down or using them in their buildings at Nineveh. But south of the Lebanon forest trees were scarce; the terebinth was so unfamiliar a sight in the landscape as to become an object of worship or a road-side mark. Even the palm grew only on the sea-coast or in the valley of the Jordan, and the tamarisk and sycamore were hardly more than shrubs.

Nevertheless when the Israelites first entered Canaan, it was in truth a land "flowing with milk and honey." Goats abounded on the hills, and the bee of Palestine, though fierce, is still famous for its honey-producing powers. The Perizzites or "fellahin" industriously tilled the fields, and high-walled cities stood on the mountain as well as on the plain.

The highlands, however, were deficient in water. A few streams fall into the sea south of Carmel, but except in the spring, when they have been swollen by the rains, there is but little water in them. The Kishon, which irrigates the plain of Megiddo, is a more important river, but it too is little more than a mountain stream. In fact, the Jordan is the only river in the true sense of the word which Palestine possesses. Rising to the north of the waters of Merom, now called Lake Hûleh, it flows first into the Lake of Tiberias, and then through a long deep valley into the Dead Sea. Here at a depth of 1293 feet below the level of the sea it is swallowed up and lost; the sea has no outlet, and parts with its stagnant waters through evaporation alone. The evaporation has made it intensely salt, and its shores are consequently for the most part the picture of death.

In the valley of the Jordan, on the other hand, vegetation is as luxuriant and tropical as in the forests of Brazil. Through a dense undergrowth of canes and shrubs the river forces its way, rushing forward towards its final gulf of extinction with a fall of 670 feet since it left the Lake of Tiberias. But the distance thus travelled by it is long in comparison with its earlier fall of 625 feet between Lake Hûleh and the Sea of Galilee. Here it has cut its way through a deep gorge, the cliffs of which rise up almost sheer on either side.

The Jordan has taken its name from its rapid fall. The word comes from a root which signifies "to descend," and the name itself means "the down-flowing." We can trace it back to the Egyptian monuments of the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties. Ramses II., the Pharaoh of the Oppression, has inscribed it on the walls of Karnak, and Ramses III., who must have reigned while the Israelites were still in the wilderness, enumerates the "Yordan" at Medînet Habu among his conquests in Palestine. In both cases it is associated with "the Lake of Rethpana," which must accordingly be the Egyptian name of the Dead Sea. Rethpana might correspond with a Hebrew Reshphôn, a derivative from Resheph, the god of fire. Canaanite mythology makes the sparks his "children" (Job v. 7) and it may be, therefore, that in this old name of the Dead Sea we have a reference to the overthrow of the cities of the plain.

Eastward of the Dead Sea and the Jordan the country is again mountainous and bare. Here were the territories of Reuben and Gad, and the half-tribe of Manasseh; here also were the kingdoms of Moab and Ammon, of Bashan and the Amorites. Here too was the land of Gilead, south of the Lake of Tiberias and north of the Dead Sea.

We can read the name of Muab or Moab on the base of the second of the six colossal statues which Ramses II. erected in front of the northern pylon of the temple of Luxor. It is there included among his conquests. The statue is the only Egyptian monument on which the name has hitherto been found. But this single mention is sufficient to guarantee its antiquity, and to prove that in the days before the Exodus it was already well known in Egypt.

To the north of Moab came the kingdom of Ammon, or the children of Ammi. The name of Ammon was a derivative from that of the god Ammi or Ammo, who seems to have been regarded as the ancestor of the nation, and "the father of the children of Ammon" was accordingly called Ben-Ammi, "the son of Ammi" (Gen. xix. 38). Far away in the north, close to the junction of the rivers Euphrates and Sajur, and but a few miles to the south of the Hittite stronghold of Carchemish, the worship of the same god seems to have been known to the Aramaean tribes. It was here that Pethor stood, according to the Assyrian inscriptions, and it was from Pethor that the seer Balaam came to Moab to curse the children of Israel. Pethor, we are told, was "by the river (Euphrates) of the land of the children of Ammo," where the word represents a proper name (Num. xxii. 5). To translate it "his people," as is done by the Authorized Version, makes no sense. On the Assyrian monuments Ammon is sometimes spoken of as Beth-Ammon, "the house of Ammon," as if Ammon had been a living man.

Like Moab, Ammon was a region of limestone mountains and barren cliffs. But there were fertile fields on the banks of the Jabbok, the sources of which rose not far from the capital Rabbath.

North of Gilead and the Yarmuk was the volcanic plateau of Bashan, Ziri-Basana, or "the Plain of Bashan," as it is termed in the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna. Its western slope towards the Lakes of Merom and Tiberias was known as Golan (now Jolân); its eastern plateau of metallic lava was Argob, "the stony" (now El Lejja). Bashan was included in the Haurân, the name of which we first meet with on the monuments of the Assyrian king Assur-bani-pal. To the north it was bounded by Ituraea, so named from Jetur, the son of Ishmael (Gen. xxv. 15), the road through Ituraea (the modern Jedur) leading to Damascus and its well-watered plain.

The gardens of Damascus lie 2260 feet above the sea. In the summer the air is cooled by the mountain breezes; in the winter the snow sometimes lies upon the surface of the land. Westward the view is closed by the white peaks of Anti-Lebanon and Hermon; eastward the eye wanders over a green plain covered with the mounds of old towns and villages, and intersected by the clear and rapid streams of the Abana and Pharphar. But the Abana has now become the Barada, or "cold one," while the Pharphar is the Nahr el-Awaj.

The Damascus of to-day stands on the site of the city from which St. Paul escaped, and "the street which is called Straight" can still be traced by its line of Roman columns. But it is doubtful whether the Damascus of the New Testament and of to-day is the same as the Damascus of the Old Testament. Where the walls of the city have been exposed to view, we see that their Greek foundations rest on the virgin soil; no remains of an earlier period lie beneath them. It may be, therefore, that the Damascus of Ben-Hadad and Hazael is marked rather by one of the mounds in the plain than by the modern town. In one of these the stone statue of a man, in the Assyrian style, was discovered a few years ago.

An ancient road leads from the peach-orchards of Damascus, along the banks of the Abana and over Anti-Lebanon, to the ruins of the temple of the Sun-god at Baalbek. The temple as we see it is of the age of the Antonines, but it occupies the place of one which stood in Heliopolis, the city of the Sun-god, from immemorial antiquity. Relics of an older epoch still exist in the blocks of stone of colossal size which serve as the foundation of the western wall. Their bevelling reminds us of Phoenician work.

Baalbek was the sacred city of the Bek'a, or "cleft" formed between Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon by the gorge through which the river Litâny rushes down to the sea. Once and once only is it referred to in the Old Testament. Amos (i. 5) declares that the Lord "will break the bar of Damascus and cut off the inhabitant from Bikath-On"—the Bek'a of On. The name of On reminds us that the Heliopolis of Egypt, the city of the Egyptian Sun-god, was also called On, and the question arises whether the name and worship of the On of Syria were not derived from the On of Egypt. For nearly two centuries Syria was an Egyptian province, and the priests of On in Egypt may well have established themselves in the "cleft" valley of Coele-Syria.

From Baalbek, the city of "Baal of the Bek'a," the traveller makes his way across Lebanon, and under the snows of Jebel Sannîn—nearly 9000 feet in height—to the old Phoenician city of Beyrout. Beyrout is already mentioned in the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna under the name of Beruta or Beruna, "the cisterns." It was already a seaport of Phoenicia, and a halting-place on the high road that ran along the coast.

The coastland was known to the Greeks and Romans as Phoenicia, "the land of the palm." But its own inhabitants called it Canaan, "the lowlands." It included not only the fringe of cultivated land by the sea-shore, but the western slopes of the Lebanon as well. Phoenician colonies and outposts had been planted inland, far away from the coast, as at Laish, the future Dan, where "the people dwelt careless," though "they were far away from the Sidonians," or at Zemar (the modern Sumra) and Arka (still called by the same name). The territory of the Phoenicians stretched southward as far as Dor (now Tanturah), where it met the advance guard of the Philistines.

Such was Palestine, the promised home of Israel. It was a land of rugged and picturesque mountains, interspersed with a few tracts of fertile country, shut in between the sea and the ravine of the Jordan, and falling away into the waterless desert of the south. It was, too, a land of small extent, hardly more than one hundred and sixty miles in length and sixty miles in width. And even this amount of territory was possessed by the Israelites only during the reigns of David and Solomon. The sea-coast with its harbours was in the hands of the Phoenicians and the Philistines, and though the Philistines at one time owned an unwilling allegiance to the Jewish king, the Phoenicians preserved their independence, and even Solomon had to find harbours for his merchantmen, not on the coast of his own native kingdom, but in the distant Edomite ports of Eloth and Ezion-geber, in the Gulf of Aqabah. With the loss of Edom Judah ceased to have a foreign trade.

The Negeb, or desert of the south, was then, what it still is, the haunt of robbers and marauders. The Beduin of to-day are the Amalekites of Old Testament history; and then, as now, they infested the southern frontier of Judah, wasting and robbing the fields of the husbandman, and allying themselves with every invader who came from the south, Saul, indeed, punished them, as Romans and Turks have punished them since; but the lesson is remembered only for a short while: when the strong hand is removed, the "sons of the desert" return again like the locusts to their prey.

It is true that the Beduin now range over the loamy plains and encamp among the marshes of Lake Hûleh, where in happier times their presence was unknown. But this is the result of a weak and corrupt government, added to the depopulation of the lowlands. There are traces even in the Old Testament that in periods of anarchy and confusion the Amalekites penetrated far into the country in a similar fashion. In the Song of Deborah and Barak Ephraim is said to have contended against them, and accordingly "Pirathon in the land of Ephraim" is described as being "in the mount of the Amalekites" (Judges xii. 15). In the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna, too, there is frequent mention of the "Plunderers" by whom the Beduin, the Shasu of the Egyptian texts, must be meant, and who seem to have been generally ready at hand to assist a rebellious vassal or take part in a civil feud.

Lebanon, the "white" mountain, took its name from its cliffs of glistening limestone. In the early days of Canaan it was believed to be the habitation of the gods, and Phoenician inscriptions exist dedicated to Baal-Lebanon, "the Baal of Lebanon." He was the special form of the Sun-god whose seat was in the mountain-ranges that shut in Phoenicia on the east, and whose spirit was supposed to dwell in some mysterious way in the mountains themselves. But there were certain peaks which lifted themselves up prominently to heaven, and in which consequently the sanctity of the whole range was as it were concentrated. It was upon their summits that the worshipper felt himself peculiarly near the God of heaven, and where therefore the altar was built and the sacrifice performed. One of these peaks was Hermon, "the consecrated," whose name the Greeks changed into Harmonia, the wife of Agenor the Phoenician. From its top we can see Palestine spread as it were before us, and stretching southwards to the mountains of Judah. The walls of the temple, which in Greek times took the place of the primitive altar, can still be traced there, and on its slopes, or perched above its ravines, are the ruins of other temples of Baal—at Dêr el-'Ashair, at Rakleh, at Ain Hersha, at Rashêyat el-Fukhâr—all pointing towards the central sanctuary on the summit of the mountain.

The name of Hermon, "the consecrated," was but an epithet, and the mountain had other and more special names of its own. The Sidonians, we are told (Deut. iii. 9), called it Sirion, and another of its titles was Sion (Deut. iv. 48), unless indeed this is a corrupt reading for Sirion. Its Amorite name was Shenir (Deut. iii. 9), which appears as Saniru in an Assyrian inscription, and goes back to the earliest dawn of history. When the Babylonians first began to make expeditions against the West, long before the birth of Abraham, the name of Sanir was already known. It was then used to denote the whole of Syria, so that its restriction to Mount Hermon alone must have been of later date.

Another holy peak was Carmel, "the fruitful field," or perhaps originally "the domain of the god." It was in Mount Carmel that the mountain ranges of the north ended finally, and the altar on its summit could be seen from afar by the Phoenician sailors. Here the priests of Baal called in vain upon their god that he might send them rain, and here was "the altar of the Lord" which Elijah repaired.

The mountains of the south present no striking peak or headland like Hermon and Carmel. Even Tabor belongs to the north. Ebal and Gerizim alone, above Shechem, stand out among their fellows, and were venerated as the abodes of deity from the earliest times. The temple-hill at Jerusalem owed its sanctity rather to the city within the boundaries of which it stood than to its own character. In fact, the neighbouring height of Zion towered above it. The mountains of the south were rather highlands than lofty chains and isolated peaks.

But on this very account they played an important part in the history of the world. They were not too high to be habitable; they were high enough to protect their inhabitants against invasion and war. "Mount Ephraim," the block of mountainous land of which Shechem and Samaria formed the centre, and at the southern extremity of which the sacred city of Shiloh stood, was the natural nucleus of a kingdom, like the southern block of which Hebron and Jerusalem were similarly the capitals. Here there were valleys and uplands in which sufficient food could be grown for the needs of the population, while the cities with their thick and lofty walls were strongholds difficult to approach and still more difficult to capture. The climate was bracing, though the winters were cold, and it reared a race of hardy warriors and industrious agriculturists. The want of water was the only difficulty; in most cases the people were dependent on rain-water, which they preserved in cisterns cut out of the rock.

This block of southern mountains was the first and latest stronghold of Israel. It constituted, in fact, the kingdoms of Samaria and Judah. Out of it, at Shechem, came the first attempt to found a monarchy in Israel, and thus unite the Israelitish tribes; out of it also came the second and more successful attempt under Saul the Benjamite and David the Jew. The Israelites never succeeded in establishing themselves on the sea-coast, and their possession of the plain of Megiddo and the southern slopes of the Lebanon was a source of weakness and not of strength. It led eventually to the overthrow of the kingdom of Samaria. The northern tribes in Galilee were absorbed by the older population, and their country became "Galilee of the Gentiles," rather than an integral part of Israel. The plain of Megiddo was long held by the Canaanites, and up to the last was exposed to invasion from the sea-coast. It was, in fact, the battle-field of Palestine. The army of the invader or the conqueror marched along the edge of the sea, not through the rugged paths and dangerous defiles of the mountainous interior, and the plain of Megiddo was the pass which led them into its midst. The possession of the plain cut off the mountaineers of the north from their brethren in the south, and opened the way into the heart of the mountains themselves.

But to possess the plain was also to possess chariots and horsemen, and a large and disciplined force. The guerilla warfare of the mountaineer was here of no avail. Success lay on the side of the more numerous legions and the wealthier state, on the side of the assailant and not of the assailed.

Herein lay the advantage of the kingdom of Judah. It was a compact state, with no level plain to defend, no outlying territories to protect. Its capital stood high upon the mountains, strongly fortified by nature and difficult of access. While Samaria fell hopelessly and easily before the armies of Assyria, Jerusalem witnessed the fall of Nineveh itself.

What was true of the later days of Israelitish history was equally true of the age of the patriarchs. The strength of Palestine lay in its southern highlands; whoever gained possession of these was master of the whole country, and the road lay open before him to Sinai and Egypt. But to gain possession of them was the difficulty, and campaign after campaign was needed before they could be reduced to quiet submission. In the time of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty Jerusalem was already the key to Southern Palestine.

Geographically, Palestine was thus a country of twofold character, and its population was necessarily twofold as well. It was a land of mountain and plain, of broken highlands and rocky sea-coast. Its people were partly mountaineers, active, patriotic, and poor, with a tendency to asceticism; partly a nation of sailors and merchants, industrious, wealthy, and luxurious, with no sense of country or unity, and accounting riches the supreme end of life. On the one hand, it gave the world its first lessons in maritime exploration and trade; on the other it has been the religious teacher of mankind.

In both respects its geographical position has aided the work of its people. Situated midway between the two great empires of the ancient Oriental world, it was at once the high road and the meeting-place of the civilizations of Egypt and Babylonia. Long before Abraham migrated to Canaan it had been deeply interpenetrated by Babylonian culture and religious ideas, and long before the Exodus it had become an Egyptian province. It barred the way to Egypt for the invader from Asia; it protected Asia from Egyptian assault. The trade of the world passed through it and met in it; the merchants of Egypt and Ethiopia could traffic in Palestine with the traders of Babylonia and the far East. It was destined by nature to be a land of commerce and trade.

And yet while thus forming a highway from the civilization of the Euphrates to that of the Nile, Palestine was too narrow a strip of country to become itself a formidable kingdom. The empire of David scarcely lasted for more than a single generation, and was due to the weakness at the same time of both Egypt and Assyria. With the Arabian desert on the one side and the Mediterranean on the other, it was impossible for Canaan to develop into a great state. Its rocks and mountains might produce a race of hardy warriors and energetic thinkers, but they could not create a rich and populous community. The Phoenicians on the coast were driven towards the sea, and had to seek in maritime enterprise the food and wealth which their own land refused to grant. Palestine was essentially formed to be the appropriator and carrier of the ideas and culture of others, not to be itself their origin and creator.

But when the ideas had once been brought to it they were modified and combined, improved and generalized in a way that made them capable of universal acceptance. Phoenician art is in no way original; its elements have been drawn partly from Babylonia, partly from Egypt; but their combination was the work of the Phoenicians, and it was just this combination which became the heritage of civilized man. The religion of Israel came from the wilderness, from the heights of Sinai, and the palm-grove of Kadesh, but it was in Palestine that it took shape and developed, until in the fullness of time the Messiah was born. Out of Canaan have come the Prophets and the Gospel, but the Law which lay behind them was brought from elsewhere.

CHAPTER II
THE PEOPLE

In the days of Abraham, Chedor-laomer, king of Elam and lord over the kings of Babylonia, marched westward with his Babylonian allies, in order to punish his rebellious subjects in Canaan. The invading army entered Palestine from the eastern side of the Jordan. Instead of marching along the sea-coast, it took the line of the valley of the Jordan. It first attacked the plateau of Bashan, and then smote "the Rephaim in Ashteroth Karnaim, and the Zuzim in Ham, and the Emim in the plain of Kiriathaim." Then it passed into Mount Seir, and subjugated the Horites as far as El-Paran "by the wilderness." Thence it turned northward again through the oasis of En-mishpat or Kadesh-barnea, and after smiting the Amalekite Beduin, as well as the Amorites in Hazezon-tamar, made its way into the vale of Siddim. There the battle took place which ended in the defeat of the king of Sodom and his allies, who were carried away captive to the north. But at Hobah, "on the left hand of Damascus," the invaders were overtaken by "Abram the Hebrew," who dwelt with his Amorite confederates in the plain of Mamre, and the spoil they had seized was recovered from them.

The narrative gives us a picture of the geography and ethnology of Palestine as it was at the beginning of the Patriarchal Age. Before that age was over it had altered very materially; the old cities for the most part still remained, but new races had taken the place of the older ones, new kingdoms had arisen, and the earlier landmarks had been displaced. The Amalekite alone continued what he had always been, the untamable nomad of the southern desert.

Rephaim or "Giants" was a general epithet applied to the prehistoric population of the country. Og, king of Bashan in the time of the Exodus, was "of the remnant of the Rephaim" (Deut. iii. 11); but so also were the Anakim in Hebron, the Emim in Moab, and the Zamzummim in Ammon (Deut. ii. 11, 20). Doubtless they represented a tall race in comparison with the Hebrews and Arabs of the desert; and the Israelitish spies described themselves as grasshoppers by the side of them (Numb. xiii. 33). It is possible, however, that the name was really an ethnic one, which had only an accidental similarity in sound to the Hebrew word for "giants." At all events, in the list of conquered Canaanitish towns which the Pharaoh Thothmes III. of Egypt caused to be engraved on the walls of Karnak, the name of Astartu or Ashteroth Karnaim is followed by that of Anaurepâ, in which Mr. Tomkins proposes to see On-Repha, "On of the Giant(s)." In the close neighbourhood in classical days stood Raphôn or Raphana, Arpha of the Dekapolis, now called Er-Râfeh, and in Raphôn it is difficult not to discern a reminiscence of the Rephaim of Genesis.

Did these Rephaim belong to the same race as the Emim and the Anakim, or were the latter called Rephaim or "Giants" merely because they represented the tall prehistoric population of Canaan? The question can be more easily asked than answered. We know from the Book of Genesis that Amorites as well as Hittites lived at Hebron, or in its immediate vicinity. Abram dwelt in the plain of Mamre along with three Amorite chieftains, and Hoham, king of Hebron, who fought against Joshua, is accounted among the Amorites (Josh. x. 1). The Anakim may therefore have been an Amorite tribe. They held themselves to be the descendants of Anak, an ancient Canaanite god, whose female counterpart was the Phoenician goddess Onka. But, on the other hand, the Amorites at Hebron may have been intruders; we know that Hebron was peculiarly a Hittite city, and it is at Mamre rather than at Hebron that the Amorite confederates of Abram had their home. It is equally possible that the Anakim themselves may have been the stranger element; we hear nothing about them in the days of the patriarchs, and it is only when the Israelites prepare to enter Canaan that they first make their appearance upon the stage.

Og, king of Bashan, however, was an Amorite; of this we are assured in the Book of Deuteronomy (iii. 8), and it is further said of him that he only "remained of the remnant of the Rephaim." The expression is a noticeable one, as it implies that the older population had been for the most part driven out. And such, in fact, was the case. At Rabbath, the capital of Ammon, the basalt sarcophagus of the last king of Bashan was preserved; but the king and his people had alike perished. Ammonites and Israelites had taken their place.

The children of Ammon had taken possession of the land once owned by the Zamzummim (Deut. ii. 20). The latter are called Zuzim in the narrative of Genesis, and they are said to have dwelt in Ham. But Zuzim and Ham are merely faulty transcriptions from a cuneiform text of the Hebrew Zamzummim and Ammon, and the same people are meant both in Genesis and in Deuteronomy. In Deuteronomy also the Emim are mentioned, and their geographical position defined. They were the predecessors of the Moabites, and like the Zamzummim, "a people great and many and tall," whom the Moabites expelled doubtless at the same time as that at which the Ammonites conquered the Zamzummim. The "plain of Kiriathaim," or "the two cities," must have lain south of the Arnon, where Ar and Kir Haraseth were built.

South of the Emim, in the rose-red mountains of Seir, afterwards occupied by the Edomites, came the Horites, whose name is generally supposed to be derived from a Hebrew word signifying "a cave." They have therefore been regarded as Troglodytes, or cave-dwellers, a savage race of men who possessed neither houses nor settled home. But it is quite possible to connect the name with another word which means "white," and to see in them the representatives of a white race. The name of Hor is associated with Beth-lehem, and Caleb, of the Edomite tribe of Kenaz, is called "the son of Hur" (1 Chron. ii. 50, iv. 4). There is no reason for believing that cave-dwellers ever existed in that part of Palestine.

The discovery of the site of Kadesh-barnea is due in the first instance to Dr. Rowlands, secondly to the archaeological skill of Dr. Clay Trumbull. It is still known as 'Ain Qadîs, "the spring of Qadis," and lies hidden within the block of mountains which rise in the southern desert about midway between Mount Seir and the Mediterranean Sea. The water still gushes out of the rock, fresh and clear, and nourishes the oasis that surrounds it. It has been marked out by nature to be a meeting-place and "sanctuary" of the desert tribes. Its central position, its security from sudden attack, and its abundant supply of water all combined to make it the En-Mishpat or "Spring of Judgment," where cases were tried and laws enacted. It was here that the Israelites lingered year after year during their wanderings in the wilderness, and it was from hence that the spies were sent out to explore the Promised Land. In those days the mountains which encircled it were known as "the mountains of the Amorites" (Deut. i. 19, 20). In the age of the Babylonian invasion, however, the Amorites had not advanced so far to the south. They were as yet only at Hazezon-tamar, the "palm-grove" on the western shore of the Dead Sea, which a later generation called En-gedi (2 Chron. xx. 2). En-Mishpat was still in the hands of the Amalekites, the lords of "all the country" round about.

The Amalekites had not as yet intermingled with the Ishmaelites, and their Beduin blood was still pure. They were the Shasu or "Plunderers" of the Egyptian inscriptions, sometimes also termed the Sitti, the Sute of the cuneiform texts. Like their modern descendants, they lived by the plunder of their more peaceful neighbours. As was prophesied of Ishmael, so could it have been prophesied of the Amalekites, that their "hand should be against every man, and every man's hand against" them. They were the wild offspring of the wilderness, and accounted the first-born of mankind (Numb. xxiv. 20).

From En-Mishpat the Babylonian forces marched northward along the western edge of the Dead Sea. Leaving Jerusalem on their left, they descended into the vale of Siddim, where they found themselves in the valley of the Jordan, and consequently in the land of the Canaanites. As we are told in the Book of Numbers (xiii. 29), while "the Amalekites dwell in the land of the south, and the Hittites and the Jebusites and Amorites dwell in the mountains, the Canaanites dwell by the sea and by the coast of Jordan."

The word Canaan, as we have seen, meant "the lowlands," and appears sometimes in a longer, sometimes in a shorter form. The shorter form is written Khna by the Greeks: in the Tel el-Amarna tablets it is Kinakhkhi, while Canaan, the longer form, is Kinakhna. It is this longer form which alone appears in the hieroglyphic texts. Here we read how Seti I. destroyed the Shasu or Amalekites from the eastern frontier of Egypt to "the land of Kana'an," and captured their fortress of the same name which Major Conder has identified with Khurbet Kan'an near Hebron. It was also the longer form which was preserved among the Israelites as well as among the Phoenicians, the original inhabitants of the sea-coast. Coins of Laodicea, on the Orontes, bear the inscription, "Laodicea a metropolis in Canaan," and St. Augustine states that in his time the Carthaginian peasantry of Northern Africa, if questioned as to their descent, still answered that they were "Canaanites." (Exp. Epist. ad Rom. 13.)

In course of time the geographical signification of the name came to be widely extended beyond its original limits. Just as Philistia, the district of the Philistines, became the comprehensive Palestine, so Canaan, the land of the Canaanites of the coast and the valley, came to denote the whole of the country between the Jordan and the sea. It is already used in this sense in the cuneiform correspondence of Tel el-Amarna. Already in the century before the Exodus Kinakhna or Canaan represented pretty nearly all that we now mean by "Palestine." It was in fact the country to the south of "the land of the Amorites," and "the land of the Amorites" lay immediately to the north of the Waters of Merom.

In the geographical table in the tenth chapter of Genesis Canaan is stated to be the son of Ham and the brother of Mizraim or Egypt. The statement indicates the age to which the account must go back. There was only one period of history in which Canaan could be geographically described as a brother of Egypt, and that was the period of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, when for a while it was a province of the Pharaohs. At no other time was it closely connected with the sons of Ham. At an earlier epoch its relations had been with Babylonia rather than with the valley of the Nile, and with the fall of the nineteenth dynasty the Asiatic empire of Egypt came finally to an end.

The city of Sidon, we are further told, was the first-born of Canaan. It claimed to be the oldest of the Phoenician cities in the "lowlands" of the coast. It had grown out of an assemblage of "fishermen's" huts, and Said the god of the fishermen continued to preside over it to the last. The fishermen became in time sailors and merchant-princes, and the fish for which they sought was the murex with its precious purple dye. Tyre, the city of the "rock," which in later days disputed the supremacy over Phoenicia with Sidon, was of younger foundation. Herodotus was told that the great temple of Baal Melkarth, "the city's king," which he saw there, had been built twenty-three centuries before his visit. But Sidon was still older, older even than Gebal, the sacred city of the goddess Baaltis.

The wider extension of the name of Canaan brought with it other geographical relationships besides those of the sea-coast. Hittites and Amorites, Jebusites and Girgashites, Hivites and the peoples of the southern Lebanon, were all settled within the limits of the larger Canaan, and were therefore accounted his sons. Even Hamath claimed the right to be included in the brotherhood. It is said with truth that "afterwards were the families of the Canaanites spread abroad."

Hittites and Amorites were interlocked both in the north and in the south. Kadesh, on the Orontes, the southern stronghold of the Hittite kingdom of the north, was, as the Egyptian records tell us, in the land of the Amorites; while in the south Hittites and Amorites were mingled together at Hebron, and Ezekiel (xvi. 3) declares that Jerusalem had a double parentage: its birth was in the land of Canaan, but its father was an Amorite and its mother a Hittite. Modern research, however, has shown that Hittites and Amorites were races widely separated in character and origin. About the Hittites we hear a good deal both in the hieroglyphic and in the cuneiform inscriptions. The Khata of the Egyptian texts were the most formidable power of Western Asia with whom the Egyptians of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties had to deal. They were tribes of mountaineers from the ranges of the Taurus who had descended on the plains of Syria and established themselves there in the midst of an Aramaic population. Carchemish on the Euphrates became one of their Syrian capitals, commanding the high-road of commerce and war from east to west. Thothmes III., the conqueror of Western Asia, boasts of the gifts he received from "the land of Khata the greater," so called, it would seem, to distinguish it from another and lesser land of Khata—that of the Hittites of the south.

The cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna, in the closing days of the eighteenth dynasty, represent the Hittites as advancing steadily southward and menacing the Syrian possessions of the Pharaoh. Disaffected Amorites and Canaanites looked to them for help, and eventually "the land of the Amorites" to the north of Palestine fell into their possession. When the first Pharaohs of the nineteenth dynasty attempted to recover the Egyptian empire in Asia, they found themselves confronted by the most formidable of antagonists. Against Kadesh and "the great king of the Hittites" the Egyptian forces were driven in vain, and after twenty years of warfare Ramses II., the Pharaoh of the Oppression, was fain to consent to peace. A treaty of alliance, offensive and defensive, was drawn up between the two rivals, and Egypt was henceforth compelled to treat with the Hittites on equal terms. The Khattâ or Khatâ of the Assyrian inscriptions are already a decaying power. They are broken into a number of separate states or kingdoms, of which Carchemish is the richest and most important. They are in fact in retreat towards those mountains of Asia Minor from which they had originally issued forth. But they still hold their ground in Syria for a long while. There were Hittites at Kadesh in the reign of David. Hittite kings could lend their services to Israel in the age of Elisha (2 Kings vii. 6), and it was not till B.C. 717 that Carchemish was captured by Sargon of Assyria, and the trade which passed through it diverted to Nineveh. But when the Assyrians first became acquainted with the coastland of the Mediterranean, the Hittites were to such an extent the ruling race there that they gave their name to the whole district. Like "Palestine," or "Canaan," the term "land of the Hittites" came to denote among the Assyrians, not only Northern Syria and the Lebanon, but Southern Syria as well. Even Ahab of Israel and Baasha the Ammonite are included by Shalmaneser II. among its kings.

This extended use of the name among the Assyrians is illustrated by the existence of a Hittite tribe at Hebron in the extreme south of Palestine. Various attempts have been made to get rid of the latter by unbelieving critics, but the statements of Genesis are corroborated by Ezekiel's account of the foundation of Jerusalem. They are, moreover, in full harmony with the monumental records. As we have seen, Thothmes III. implies that already in his day there was a second and smaller land of the Hittites, and the great Babylonian work on astronomy contains references to the Hittites which appear to go back to early days.

Assyrian and Babylonian texts are not the only cuneiform records which make mention of the "Khata" or Hittites. Their name is found also on the monuments of the kings of Ararat or Armenia who reigned in the ninth and eighth centuries before our era, and who had borrowed from Nineveh the cuneiform system of writing. But the Khata of these Vannic or Armenian texts lived considerably to the north of the Hittites of the Bible and of the Egyptian and Assyrian monuments. The country they inhabited lay in eastern Asia Minor in the neighbourhood of the modern Malatiyeh. Here, in fact, was their original home.

Thanks to the Egyptian artists, we are well acquainted with the Hittite physical type. It was not handsome. The nose was unduly protrusive, while the chin and the forehead retreated. The cheeks were square with prominent bones, and the face was beardless. In colour the Hittites were yellow-skinned with black hair and eyes. They seem to have worn their hair in three long plaits which fell over the back like the pigtail of a Chinaman, and they were distinguished by the use of boots with upturned toes.

We might perhaps imagine that the Egyptian artists have caricatured their adversaries. But this is not the case. Precisely the same profile of face, sometimes even exaggerated in its ugliness, is represented on the Hittite monuments by the native sculptors themselves. It is one of the surest proofs we possess that these monuments, with their still undeciphered inscriptions, are of Hittite origin. They belong to the people whom Israelites, Egyptians, Assyrians, and Armenians united in calling Hittites.

In marked contrast to the Hittites stood the Amorites. They too are depicted on the walls of the Egyptian temples and tombs. While the Hittite type of features is Mongoloid, that of the Amorite is European. His nose is straight and somewhat pointed, his lips and nostrils thin, his cheek-bones high, his mouth firm and regular, his forehead expressive of intelligence. He has a fair amount of whisker, ending in a pointed beard. At Abu-Simbel the skin is painted a pale yellow—the Egyptian equivalent for white—his eyes blue, and his beard and eyebrows red. At Medînet Habu, his skin, as Prof. Petrie expresses it, is "rather pinker than flesh-colour," while in a tomb of the eighteenth dynasty at Thebes it is painted white, the eyes and hair being a light red-brown.

The Amorite, it is clear, must be classed with the fair-skinned, blue-eyed Libyans of the Egyptian monuments, whose modern descendants are the Kabyles and other Berber tribes of Northern Africa. The latter are not only European in type, they claim special affinities to the blond, "golden-haired" Kelt. And their tall stature agrees well with what the Old Testament has to tell us about the Amorites. They too were classed among the Rephaim or "giants," by the side of whom the Israelite invaders were but as "grasshoppers."

While the Canaanites inhabited the lowlands, the highlands were the seat of the Amorites (Num. xiii. 29). This, again, is in accordance with their European affinities. They flourished best in the colder and more bracing climate of the mountains, as do the Berber tribes of Northern Africa to-day. The blond, blue-eyed race is better adapted to endure the cold than the heat.

Amorite tribes and kingdoms were to be found in all parts of Palestine. Southward, as we have seen, Kadesh-barnea was in "the mountain of the Amorites," while Chedor-laomer found them on the western shores of the Dead Sea. When Abraham pitched his tent in the plain above Hebron, it was in the possession of three Amorite chieftains, and at the time of the Israelitish conquest, Hebron and Jerusalem, Jarmuth, Lachish and Eglon were all Amorite (Josh. x. 5). Jacob assured Joseph the inheritance of his tribe should be in that district of Shechem which the patriarch had taken "out of the hand of the Amorite" (Gen. xlviii. 22), and on the eastern side of the Jordan were the Amorite kingdoms of Og and Sihon. But we learn from the Egyptian inscriptions, and more especially from the Tel el-Amarna tablets, that the chief seat of Amorite power lay immediately to the north of Palestine. Here was "the land of the Amorites," to which frequent reference is made by the monuments, among the ranges of Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon, from Hamath southward to Hermon. On the east it was bounded by the desert, on the west by the cities of Phoenicia.

In early days, long before the age of Abraham, the Amorites must already have been the predominant population in this part of Syria. When the Babylonian king, Sargon of Akkad, carried his victorious arms to the shores of the Mediterranean, it was against "the land of the Amorites" that his campaigns were directed. From that time forward this was the name under which Syria, and more particularly Canaan, was known to the Babylonians. The geographical extension of the term was parallel to that of "Hittites" among the Assyrians, of "Canaan" among the Israelites, and of "Palestine" among ourselves. But it bears witness to the important part which was played by the Amorites in what we must still call the prehistoric age of Syria, as well as to the extent of the area which they must have occupied.

Of course it does not follow that the whole of this area was occupied at one and the same time. Indeed we know that the conquest of the northern portion of Moab by the Amorite king Sihon took place only a short time before the Israelitish invasion, and part of the Amorite song of triumph on the occasion has been preserved in the Book of Numbers. "There is a fire gone out of Heshbon," it said, "a flame from the city of Sihon: it hath consumed Ar of Moab, and the lords of the high places of Arnon. Woe to thee, Moab! thou art undone, O people of Chemosh: he hath given his sons that escaped, and his daughters, into captivity unto Sihon king of the Amorites." (Num. xxi. 28, 29.) In the south, again, the Amorites do not seem to have made their way beyond Hazezon-Tamar, while the Tel el-Amarna tablets make it probable that neither Bashan nor Jerusalem were as yet Amorite at the time they were written. It may be that the Amorite conquests in the south were one of the results of the fall of the Egyptian empire and the Hittite irruption.

Between the Hittite and the Amorite the geographical table of Genesis interposes the Jebusite, and the Book of Numbers similarly states that "the Hittites and the Jebusites and the Amorites dwell in the mountains." The Jebusites, however, were merely the local tribe which in the early days of the Israelitish occupation of Canaan were in possession of Jerusalem, and they were probably either Hittite or Amorite in race. At any rate there is no trace of them in the cuneiform letters of Tel el-Amarna. On the contrary, in these Jerusalem is still known only by its old name of Uru-salim; of the name Jebus there is not a hint. But the letters show us that Ebed-Tob, the native king of Jerusalem and humble vassal of the Pharaoh, was being hard pressed by his enemies, and that, in spite of his urgent appeals for help, the Egyptians were unable to send any. His enemy were the Khabiri or "Confederates," about whose identification there has been much discussion, but who were assisted by the Beduin chief Labai and his sons. One by one the towns belonging to the territory of Jerusalem fell into the hands of his adversaries, and at last, as we learn from another letter, Ebed-Tob himself along with his capital was captured by the foe. It was this event, perhaps, which made Jerusalem a Jebusite city. If so, we must see in the enemies of Ebed-Tob the Jebusites of the Old Testament.

The Girgashite is named after the Amorite, but who he may have been it is hard to say. In the Egyptian epic composed by the court-poet Pentaur, to commemorate the heroic deeds of Ramses II. in his struggle with the Hittites, mention is twice made of "the country of Qarqish." It was one of those which had sent contingents to the Hittite army. But it seems to have been situated in Northern Syria, if not in Asia Minor, so that unless we can suppose that some of its inhabitants had followed in the wake of the Hittites and settled in Palestine, it is not easy to see how they could be included among the sons of Canaan. The Hivites, whose name follows that of the Girgashites, are simply the "villagers" or fellahin as opposed to the townsfolk. They are thus synonymous with the Perizzites, who take their place in Gen. xv. 20, and whose name has the same signification. But whereas the Perizzites were especially the country population of Southern Palestine, the Hivites were those of the north. In two passages, indeed, the name appears to be used in an ethnic sense, once in Gen. xxxvi. 2, where we read that Esau married the granddaughter of "Zibeon the Hivite," and once in Josh. xi. 3, where reference is made to "the Hivite under Hermon in the land of Mizpeh." But a comparison of the first passage with a later part of the chapter (vv. 20, 24, 25) proves that "Hivite" is a corrupt reading for "Horite," while it is probable that in the second passage "Hittite" ought to be read for "Hivite."

The four last sons of Canaan represent cities, and not tribes. Arka, called Irqat in the Tel el-Amarna tablets, and now known as Tel 'Arqa, was one of the inland cities of Phoenicia, in the mountains between the Orontes and the sea. Sin, which is mentioned by Tiglath-pileser III., was in the same neighbourhood, as well as Zemar (now Sumra), which, like Arvad (the modern Ruâd), is named repeatedly in the Tel el-Amarna correspondence. It was at the time an important Phoenician fortress,—"perched like a bird upon the rock,"—and was under the control of the governor of Gebal. Arvad was equally important as a sea-port, and its ships were used for war as well as for commerce. As for Hamath (now Hamah), the Khamat and Amat of the Assyrian texts, it was already a leading city in the days of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty. Thothmes III. includes it among his Syrian conquests under the name of Amatu, as also does Ramses III. The Hittite inscriptions discovered there go to show that, like Kadesh on the Orontes, it fell at one time into Hittite hands.

Such then was the ethnographical map of Palestine in the Patriarchal Age. Canaanites in the lowlands, Amorites and Hittites in the highlands contended for the mastery. In the desert of the south were the Amalekite Beduin, ever ready to raid and murder their settled neighbours. The mountains of Seir were occupied by the Horites, while prehistoric tribes, who probably belonged to the Amorite race, inhabited the plateau east of the Jordan.

This was the Palestine to which Abraham migrated, but it was a Palestine which his migration was destined eventually to change. Before many generations had passed Moab and Ammon, the children of his nephew, took the place of the older population of the eastern table-land, while Edom settled in Mount Seir. A few generations more, and Israel too entered into its inheritance in Canaan itself. The Amorites were extirpated or became tributary, and the valleys of the Jordan and Kishon were seized by the invading tribes. The cities of the extreme south had already become Philistine, and the strangers from Caphtor had supplanted in them the Avim of an earlier epoch.

Meanwhile the waves of foreign conquest had spread more than once across the country. Canaan had been made subject to Babylonia, and had received in exchange for its independence the gift of Babylonian culture. Next it was Egypt which entered upon its career of Asiatic conquest, and Canaan for a while was an Egyptian province. But the Egyptian dominion in its turn passed away, and Palestine was left the prey of other assailants, of the Hittites and the Beduin, of the people of Aram Naharaim and the northern hordes. Egyptians and Babylonians, Hittites and Mesopotamians mingled with the earlier races of the country and obliterated the older landmarks. Before the Patriarchal Age came to an end, the ethnographical map of Canaan had undergone a profound change.

CHAPTER III
THE BABYLONIANS IN CANAAN AND THE EGYPTIAN CONQUEST

It is in the cuneiform records of Babylonia that we catch the first glimpse of the early history of Canaan. Babylonia was not yet united under a single head. From time to time some prince arose whose conquests allowed him to claim the imperial title of "king of Sumer and Akkad," of Southern and Northern Babylonia, but the claim was never of long duration, and often it signified no more than a supremacy over the other rulers of the country.

It was while Babylonia was thus divided into more than one kingdom, that the first Chaldæan empire of which we know was formed by the military skill of Sargon of Akkad. Sargon was of Semitic origin, but his birth seems to have been obscure. His father, Itti-Bel, is not given the title of king, and the later legends which gathered around his name declared that his mother was of low degree, that his father he knew not, and that his father's brother lived in the mountain-land. Born in secrecy in the city of Azu-pirani, "whence the elephants issue forth," he was launched by his mother on the waters of the Euphrates in an ark of bulrushes daubed with pitch. The river carried the child to Akki the irrigator, who had compassion upon it, and brought it up as his own son. So Sargon became an agriculturist and gardener like his adopted father, till the goddess Istar beheld and loved him, and eventually gave him his kingdom and crown.

Whatever may have been the real history of Sargon's rise to power, certain it is that he showed himself worthy of it. He built himself a capital, which perhaps was Akkad near Sippara, and there founded a library stocked with books on clay and well provided with scribes. The standard works on astronomy and terrestrial omens were compiled for it, the first of which was translated into Greek by Berossos in days long subsequent. But it was as a conqueror and the founder of the first Semitic empire in Western Asia that posterity chiefly remembered him. He overthrew his rivals at home, and made himself master of Northern Babylonia. Then he marched into Elam on the east, and devastated its fields. Next he turned his attention to the west. Four times did he make his way to "the land of the Amorites," until at last it was thoroughly subdued. His final campaign occupied three years. The countries "of the sea of the setting sun" acknowledged his dominion, and he united them with his former conquests into "a single" empire. On the shores of the Mediterranean he erected images of himself in token of his victories, and caused the spoil of Cyprus "to pass over into the countries of the sea." Towards the end of his reign a revolt broke out against him in Babylonia, and he was besieged in the city of Akkad, but he "issued forth and smote" his enemies and utterly destroyed them. Then came his last campaign against Northern Mesopotamia, from which he returned with abundant prisoners and spoil.

Sargon's son and successor was Naram-Sin, "the beloved of the Moon-god," who continued the conquests of his father. His second campaign was against the land of Magan, the name under which Midian and the Sinaitic peninsula were known to the Babylonians. The result of it was the addition of Magan to his empire and the captivity of its king.

The copper mines of Magan, which are noticed in an early Babylonian geographical list, made its acquisition coveted alike by Babylonians and Egyptians. We find the Pharaohs of the third dynasty already establishing their garrisons and colonies of miners in the province of Mafkat, as they called it, and slaughtering the Beduin who interfered with them. The history of Naram-Sin shows that its conquest was equally an object of the Babylonian monarchs at the very outset of their history. But whereas the road from Egypt to Sinai was short and easy, that from Babylonia was long and difficult. Before a Babylonian army could march into the peninsula it was needful that Syria should be secure in the rear. The conquest of Palestine, in fact, was necessary before the copper mines of Sinai could fall into Babylonian hands.

The consolidation of Sargon's empire in the west, therefore, was needful before the invasion of the country of Magan could take place, and the invasion accordingly was reserved for Naram-Sin to make. The father had prepared the way; the son obtained the great prize—the source of the copper that was used in the ancient world.

The fact that the whole of Syria is described in the annals of Sargon as "the land of the Amorites," implies, not only that the Amorites were the ruling population in the country, but also that they must have extended far to the south. The "land of the Amorites" formed the basis and starting-point for the expedition of Naram-Sin into Magan; it must, therefore, have reached to the southern border of Palestine, if not even farther. The road trodden by his forces would have been the same as that which was afterwards traversed by Chedor-laomer, and would have led him through Kadesh-barnea. Is it possible that the Amorites were already in possession of the mountain-block within which Kadesh stood, and that this was their extreme limit to the south?

There were other names by which Palestine and Syria were known to the early Babylonians, besides the general title of "the land of the Amorites." One of these was Tidanum or Tidnum; another was Sanir or Shenir. There was yet another, the reading of which is uncertain, though it may be Khidhi or Titi.

Mr. Boscawen has pointed out a coincidence that is at least worthy of attention. The first Babylonian monarch who penetrated into the peninsula of Sinai bore a name compounded with that of the Moon-god, which thus bears witness to a special veneration for that deity. Now the name of Mount Sinai is similarly derived from that of the Babylonian Moon-god Sin. It was the high place where the god must have been adored from early times under his Babylonian name. It thus points to Babylonian influence, if not to the presence of Babylonians on the spot. Can it have been that the mountain whereon the God of Israel afterwards revealed Himself to Moses was dedicated to the Moon-god of Babylon by Naram-Sin the Chaldæn conqueror?

If such indeed were the case, it would have been more than two thousand years before the Israelitish exodus. Nabonidos, the last king of the later Babylonian empire, who had a fancy for antiquarian exploration, tells us that Naram-Sin reigned 3200 years before his own time, and therefore about 3750 B.C. The date, startlingly early as it seems to be, is indirectly confirmed by other evidence, and Assyriologists consequently have come to accept it as approximately correct.

How long Syria remained a part of the empire of Sargon of Akkad we do not know. But it must have been long enough for the elements of Babylonian culture to be introduced into it. The small stone cylinders used by the Babylonians for sealing their clay documents thus became known to the peoples of the West. More than one has been found in Syria and Cyprus which go back to the age of Sargon and Naram-Sin, while there are numerous others which are more or less barbarous attempts on the part of the natives to imitate the Babylonian originals. But the imitations prove that with the fall of Sargon's empire the use of seal-cylinders in Syria, and consequently of documents for sealing, did not disappear. That knowledge of writing, which was a characteristic of Babylonian civilization, must have been carried with it to the shores of the Mediterranean.

The seal-cylinders were engraved, sometimes with figures of men and gods, sometimes with symbols only. Very frequently lines of cuneiform writing were added, and a common formula gave the name of the owner of the seal, along with those of his father and of the deity whom he worshipped. One of the seal-cylinders found in Cyprus describes the owner as an adorer of "the god Naram-Sin." It is true that its workmanship shows it to belong to a much later date than the age of Naram-Sin himself, but the legend equally shows that the name of the conqueror of Magan was still remembered in the West. Another cylinder discovered in the Lebanon mentions "the gods of the Amorite," while a third from the same locality bears the inscription: "Multal-ili, the son of Ili-isme-anni, the worshipper of the god Nin-si-zida." The name of the god signified in the old pre-Semitic language of Chaldæa "the lord of the upright horn," while it is worth notice that the names of the owner and his father are compounded simply with the word ili or el, "god," not with the name of any special divinity. Multal-ili means "Provident is God," Ili-isme-anni, "O my God, hear me!"

Many centuries have to elapse before the monuments of Babylonia again throw light on the history of Canaan. Somewhere about B.C. 2700, a high-priest was ruling in a city of Southern Babylonia, under the suzerainty of Dungi, the king of Ur. The high-priest's name was Gudea, and his city (now called Tel-loh by the Arabs) was known as Lagas. The excavations made here by M. de Sarzec have brought to light temples and palaces, collections of clay books and carved stone statues, which go back to the early days of Babylonian history. The larger and better part of the monuments belong to Gudea, who seems to have spent most of his life in building and restoring the sanctuaries of the gods. Diorite statues of the prince are now in the Louvre, and inscriptions upon them state that the stone out of which they were made was brought from the land of Magan. On the lap of one of them is a plan of the royal palace, with the scale of measurement marked on the edge of a sort of drawing-board. Prof. Petrie has shown that the unit of measurement represented in it is the cubit of the pyramid-builders of Egypt.

The diorite of Sinai was not the only material which was imported into Babylonia for the buildings of Gudea. Beams of cedar and box were brought from Mount Amanus at the head of the Gulf of Antioch, blocks of stone were floated down the Euphrates from Barsip near Carchemish, gold-dust came from Melukhkha, the "salt" desert to the east of Egypt which the Old Testament calls Havilah; copper was conveyed from the north of Arabia, limestone from the Lebanon ("the mountains of Tidanum"), and another kind of stone from Subsalla in the mountains of the Amorite land. Before beams of wood and blocks of stone could thus be brought from the distant West, it was necessary that trade between Babylonia and the countries of the Mediterranean should have long been organized, that the roads throughout Western Asia should have been good and numerous, and that Babylonian influence should have been extended far and wide. The conquests of Sargon and Naram-Sin had borne fruit in the commerce that had followed upon them.

Once more the curtain falls, and Canaan is hidden for a while out of our sight. Babylonia has become a united kingdom with its capital and centre at Babylon. Khammurabi (B.C. 2356-2301) has succeeded in shaking off the suzerainty of Elam, in overthrowing his rival Eri-Aku, king of Larsa, with his Elamite allies, and in constituting himself sole monarch of Babylonia. His family seems to have been in part, if not wholly, of South Arabian extraction. Their names are Arabian rather than Babylonian, and the Babylonian scribes found a difficulty in transcribing them correctly. But once in the possession of the Babylonian throne, they became thoroughly national, and under Khammurabi the literary glories of the court of Sargon of Akkad revived once more.

Ammi-satana, the great-grandson of Khammurabi, calls himself king of "the land of the Amorites." Babylonia, therefore, still claimed to be paramount in Palestine. Even the name of the king is an indication of his connection with the West. Neither of the elements of which it is composed belonged to the Babylonian language. The first of them, Ammi, was explained by the Babylonian philologists as meaning "a family," but it is more probable that it represents the name of a god. We find it in the proper names both of Southern and of Northwestern Arabia. The early Minsaean inscriptions of Southern Arabia contain names like Ammi-karib, Ammi-zadiqa, and Ammi-zaduq, the last of which is identical with that of Ammi-zaduq, the son and successor of Ammi-satana. The Egyptian Sinuhit, who in the time of the twelfth dynasty fled, like Moses, for his life from the court of the Pharaoh to the Kadmonites east of the Jordan, found protection among them at the hands of their chieftain Ammu-ânshi. The Ammonites themselves were the "sons of Ammi," and in numerous Hebrew names we find that of the god. Ammi-el, Ammi-nadab, and Ammi-shaddai are mentioned in the Old Testament, the Assyrian inscriptions tell us of Ammi-nadab the king of Ammon, and it is possible that even the name of Balaam, the Aramaean seer, may be compounded with that of the god. At all events, the city of Pethor from which he came was "by the river (Euphrates) of the land of the children of Ammo," for such is the literal rendering of the Hebrew words.

Ammi-satana was not the first of his line whose authority had been acknowledged in Palestine. The inscription in which he records the fact is but a confirmation of what had been long known to us from the Book of Genesis. There we read how Chedor-laomer, the king of Elam, with the three vassal princes, Arioch of Ellasar, Amraphel of Shinar, and Tidal of Goyyim invaded Canaan, and how the kings of the vale of Siddim with its pits of asphalt became their tributaries. For thirteen years they remained submissive and then rebelled. Thereupon the Babylonian army again marched to the west. Bashan and the eastern bank of the Jordan were subjugated, the Horites in Mount Seir were smitten, and the invaders then turned back through Kadesh-barnea, overthrowing the Amalekites and the Amorites on their way. Then came the battle in the vale of Siddim, which ended in the defeat of the Canaanites, the death of the kings of Sodom and Gomorrha, and the capture of abundant booty. Among the prisoners was Lot, the nephew of Abram, and it was to effect his rescue that the patriarch armed his followers and started in pursuit of the conquerors. Near Damascus he overtook them, and falling upon them by night, recovered the spoil of Sodom as well as his "brother's son."

Arioch is the Eri-Aku of the cuneiform texts. In the old language of Chaldea the name signified "servant of the Moon-god." The king is well known to us from contemporaneous inscriptions. Besides the inscribed bricks which have come from the temple of the Moon-god which he enlarged in the city of Ur, there are numerous contract tablets that are dated in his reign. He tells us that he was the son of an Elamite, Kudur-Mabug, son of Simti-silkhak, and prince (or "father") of Yamut-bal on the borders of Elam and Babylonia. But this is not all. He further gives Kudur-Mabug the title of "father of the Amorite land." What this title exactly means it is difficult to say; one thing, however, is certain, Kudur-Mabug must have exercised some kind of power and authority in the distant West.

His name, too, is remarkable. Names compounded with Kudur, "a servant," were common in the Elamite language, the second element of the name being that of a deity, to whose worship the owner of it was dedicated. Thus we have Kudur-Lagamar, "the servant of the god Lagamar," Kudur-Nakhkhunte, "the servant of Nakhkhunte." But Mabug was not an Elamite divinity. It was, on the contrary, a Mesopotamian deity from whom the town of Mabug near Carchemish, called Bambykê by the Greeks, and assimilated by the Arabs to their Membij, "a source," derived its name. Can it be from this Syrian deity that the father of Arioch received his name?

The capital of Arioch or Eri-Aku was Larsa, the city of the Sun-god, now called Senkereh. With the help of his Elamite kindred, he extended his power from thence over the greater part of Southern Babylonia. The old city of Ur, once the seat of the dominant dynasty of Chaldæan kings, formed part of his dominions; Nipur, now Niffer, fell into his hands like the seaport Eridu on the shores of the Persian Gulf, and in one of his inscriptions he celebrates his conquest of "the ancient city of Erech." On the day of its capture he erected in gratitude a temple to his god Ingirisa, "for the preservation of his life."

But the god did not protect him for ever. A time came when Khammurabi, king of Babylon, rose in revolt against the Elamite supremacy, and drove the Elamite forces out of the land. Eri-Aku was attacked and defeated, and his cities fell into the hands of the conqueror. Khammurabi became sole king of Babylonia, which from henceforth obeyed but a single sceptre.

Are we to see in the Amraphel of Genesis the Khammurabi of the cuneiform inscriptions? The difference in the names seems to make it impossible. Moreover, Amraphel, we are told, was king of Shinar, and it is not certain that the Shinar of the fourteenth chapter of Genesis was that part of Babylonia of which Babylon was the capital. This, in fact, was the northern division of the country, and if we are to identify the Shinar of scripture with the Sumer of the monuments, as Assyriologists have agreed to do, Shinar would have been its southern half. It is true that in the later days of Hebrew history Shinar denoted the whole plain of Chaldæa, including the city of Babylon, but this may have been an extension of the meaning of the name similar to that of which Canaan is an instance.

Unless Sumer and Shinar are the same words, outside the Old Testament there is only one Shinar known to ancient geography. That was in Mesopotamia. The Greek geographers called it Singara (now Sinjar), an oasis in the midst of deserts, and formed by an isolated mountain tract abounding in springs. It is already mentioned in the annals of the Egyptian conqueror Thothmes III. In his thirty-third year (B.C. 1470), the king of Sangar sent him tribute consisting of lapis-lazuli "of Babylon," and of various objects carved out of it. From Sangar also horses were exported into Egypt, and in one of the Tel el-Amarna letters, the king of Alasiya in Northern Syria writes to the Pharaoh,—"Do not set me with the king of the Hittites and the king of Sankhar; whatever gifts they have sent to me I will restore to thee twofold." In hieroglyphic and cuneiform spelling, Sangar and Sankhar are the exact equivalents of the Hebrew Shinar.

How the name of Shinar came to be transferred from Mesopotamia to Babylonia is a puzzle. The Mesopotamian Shinar is nowhere near the Babylonian frontier. It lies in a straight line westward of Mosul and the ancient Nineveh, and not far from the banks of the Khabur. Can its application to Babylonia be due to a confusion between Sumer and Sangar?

Whatever the explanation may be, it is clear that the position of the kingdom of Amraphel is by no means so easily determined as has hitherto been supposed. It may be Sumer or Southern Babylonia; it may be Northern Babylonia with its capital Babylon; or again, it may be the Mesopotamian oasis of Sinjar. Until we find the name of Amraphel in the cuneiform texts it is impossible to attain certainty.

There is one fact, however, which seems to indicate that it really is either Sumer or Northern Babylonia that is meant. The narrative of Chedor-laomer's campaign begins with the words that it took place "in the time of Amraphel, king of Shinar." Chedor-laomer the Elamite was the leader of the expedition; he too was the suzerain lord of his allies; and nevertheless the campaign is dated, not in his reign, but in that of one of the subject kings. That the narrative has been taken from the Babylonian annals there is little room for doubt, and consequently it would follow from the dating that Amraphel was a Babylonian prince, perhaps that he was the ruler of the city which, from the days of Khammurabi onward, became the capital of the country. In that case we should have to find some way of explaining the difference between the Hebrew and the Babylonian forms of the royal name.

Lagamar or Lagamer, written Laomer in Hebrew, was one of the principal deities of Elam, and the Babylonians made him a son of their own water-god Ea. The Elamite king Chedor-laomer, or Kudur-Lagamar, as his name was written in his own language, must have been related to the Elamite prince Kudur-Mabug, whose son Arioch was a subject-ally of the Elamite monarch. Possibly they were brothers, the younger brother receiving as his share of power the title of "father"—not "king"—of Yamutbal and the land of the Amorites. At any rate it is a son of Kudur-Mabug and not of the Elamite sovereign who receives a principality in Babylonia.

In the Book of Genesis Arioch is called "king of Ellasar." But Ellasar is clearly the Larsa of the cuneiform inscriptions, perhaps with the word al, "city," prefixed. Larsa, the modern Senkereh, was in Southern Babylonia, on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, not far from Erech, and to the north of Ur. Its king was virtually lord of Sumer, but he claimed to be lord also of the north. In his inscriptions Eri-Aku assumes the imperial title of "king of Sumer and Akkad," of both divisions of Babylonia, and it may be that at one time the rival king of Babylon acknowledged his supremacy.

Who "Tidal king of Goyyim" may have been we cannot tell. Sir Henry Rawlinson has proposed to see in Goyyim a transformation of Gutium, the name by which Kurdistan was called in early Babylonia. Mr. Pinches has recently discovered a cuneiform tablet in which mention is made, not only of Eri-Aku and Kudur-Lagamar, but also of Tudkhul, and Tudkhul would be an exact transcription in Babylonian of the Hebrew Tidal. But the tablet is mutilated, and its relation to the narrative of Genesis is not yet clear. For the present, therefore, we must leave Tidal unexplained.

The name even of one of the Canaanite kings who were subdued by the Babylonian army has found its confirmation in a cuneiform inscription. This is the name of "Shinab, king of Admah." We hear from Tiglath-pileser III. of Sanibu, king of Ammon, and Sanibu and Shinab are one and the same. The old name of the king of Admah was thus perpetuated on the eastern side of the Jordan.

It may be that the asphalt of Siddim was coveted by the Babylonian kings. Bitumen, it is true, was found in Babylonia itself near Hit, but if Amiaud is right, one of the objects imported from abroad for Gudea of Lagas was asphalt. It came from Madga, which is described as being "in the mountains of the river Gur(?)ruda." But no reference to the place is to be met with anywhere else in cuneiform literature.

There are three letters in the Tel el-Amarna collection from Sutatna, or Zid-atna ("the god Zid has given") as he writes his name, in one of which he compares Akku or Acre with "the city of Migdol in Egypt." Doubtless satisfaction was given to the Babylonian king for the wrong that had been done to his subjects, though whether the actual culprits were punished may be questioned. There is another letter from Burna-buryas, in which reference is again made to the Canaanites. He there asserts that in the time of his father, Kurigalzu, they had sent to the Babylonian sovereign, saying: "Go down against Qannisat and let us rebel." Kuri-galzu, however, had refused to listen to them, telling them that if they wanted to break away from the Egyptian king and ally themselves "with another," they must find some one else to assist them. Burna-buryas goes on to declare that he was like-minded with his father, and had accordingly despatched an Assyrian vassal to assure the Pharaoh that he would carry on no intrigues with disaffected Canaanites. As the first part of his letter is filled with requests for gold for the adornment of a temple he was building at Babylon, such an assurance was very necessary. The despatches of Rib-Hadad and Ebed-Tob, however, go to show that in spite of his professions of friendship, the Babylonian monarch was ready to afford secret help to the insurgents in Palestine. The Babylonians were not likely to forget that they had once been masters of the country, or to regard the Egyptian empire in Asia with other than jealous eyes.

The Tel el-Amarna correspondence breaks off suddenly in the midst of a falling empire, with its governors in Canaan fighting and intriguing one against the other, and appealing to the Pharaoh for help that never came. The Egyptian commissioners are vainly endeavouring to restore peace and order, like General Gordon in the Soudan, while Babylonians and Mitannians, Hittites and Beduin are assailing the distracted province. The Asiatic empire of the eighteenth dynasty, however, did not wholly perish with the death of Khu-n-Aten. A picture in the tomb of prince Hui at Thebes shows that under the reign of his successor, Tut-ankh-Amon, the Egyptian supremacy was still acknowledged in some parts of Syria. The chiefs of the Lotan or Syrians are represented in their robes of many colours, some with white and others with brown skins, and coming before the Egyptian monarch with the rich tribute of their country. Golden trays full of precious stones, vases of gold and silver, the covers of which are in the form of the heads of gazelles and other animals, golden rings richly enamelled, horses, lions, and a leopard's skin—such are the gifts which they offer to the Pharaoh. It was the last embassy of the kind which was destined to come from Syria for many a day.

With the rise of the nineteenth dynasty and the restoration of a strong government at home, the Egyptians once more began to turn their eyes towards Palestine. Seti I. drove the Beduin before him from the frontiers of Egypt to those of "Canaan," and established a line of fortresses and wells along "the way of the Philistines," which ran by the shore of the Mediterranean to Gaza. The road was now open for him to the north along the sea-coast. We hear accordingly of his capture of Acre, Tyre, and Usu or Palætyros, from whence he marched into the Lebanon and took Kumidi and Inu'am. One of his campaigns must have led him into the interior of Palestine, since in his list of conquered cities we find the names of Carmel and Beth-anoth, of Beth-el and Pahil or Pella, as well as of Qamham or Chimham (see Jer. xli. 17). Kadesh, "in the land of the Amorites," was captured by a sudden assault, and Seti claims to have defeated or received the submission of Alasiya and Naharaim, the Hittites and the Assyrians, Cyprus and Sangar. It would seem, however, that north of Kadesh he really made his way only along the coast as far as the Gulf of Antioch and Cilicia, overrunning towns and districts of which we know little more than the names.

Seti was succeeded by his son Ramses II., the Pharaoh of the Oppression, and the builder of Pithom and Ramses. His long reign of sixty-seven years lasted from 1348 B.C. to 1281 B.C. The first twenty-one years of it were occupied in the re-conquest of Palestine, and sanguinary wars with the Hittites. But these mountaineers of the north had established themselves too firmly in the old Egyptian province of Northern Syria to be dislodged. All the Pharaoh could effect was to stop their further progress towards the south, and to save Canaan from their grasp. The war between the two great powers of Western Asia ended at last through the sheer exhaustion of the rival combatants. A treaty of alliance, offensive and defensive, was drawn up between Ramses II. and Khata-sil, "the great king of the Hittites," and it was cemented by the marriage of the Pharaoh to the daughter of the Hittite prince. Syria was divided between the Hittites and Egyptians, and it was agreed that neither should under any pretext invade the territories of the other. It was also agreed that if either country was attacked by foreign foes or rebellious subjects, the other should come to its help. Political refugees, moreover, were to be delivered up to the sovereign from whom they had escaped, but it was stipulated that in this case they should receive a full pardon for the offences they had committed. The Hittite copy of the treaty was engraved on a silver plate, and the gods of Egypt and the Hittites were called upon to witness the execution of it.

The legendary exploits of Sesostris, that creation of Greek fancy and ignorance, were fastened upon Ramses II., whose long reign, inordinate vanity, and ceaseless activity as a builder made him one of the most prominent of the old Pharaohs. It was natural, therefore, at the beginning of hieroglyphic decipherment that the Greek accounts should be accepted in full, and that Ramses II. should have been regarded as the greatest of Egyptian conquerors. But further study soon showed that, in this respect at least, his reputation had little to support it. Like his monuments, too many of which are really stolen from his predecessors, or else sacrifice honesty of work to haste and pretentiousness, a large part of the conquests and victories that have been claimed for him was due to the imagination of the scribes. In the reaction which followed on this discovery, the modern historians of ancient Egypt were disposed to dispute his claim to be a conqueror at all. But we now know that such a scepticism was exaggerated, and though Ramses II. was not a conqueror like Thothmes III., he nevertheless maintained and extended the Asiatic empire which his father had recovered, and the lists of vanquished cities which he engraved on the walls of his temples were not mere repetitions of older catalogues, or the empty fictions of flattering chroniclers. Egyptian armies really marched once more into Northern Syria and the confines of Cilicia, and probably made their way to the banks of the Euphrates. We have no reason for denying that Assyrian troops may have been defeated by his arms, or that the king of Mitanni may have sent an embassy to his court. And we now have a good deal more than the indirect evidence of the treaty with the Hittites to show that Canaan was again a province of the Egyptian empire. The names of some of its cities which were captured in the early part of the Pharaoh's reign may still be read on the walls of the Ramesseum at Thebes. Among them are Ashkelon, Shalam or Jerusalem, Merom, and Beth-Anath, which were taken by storm in his eighth year. Dapul, "in the land of the Amorites," was captured at the same time, proving that the Egyptian forces penetrated as far as the Hittite frontiers. At Luxor other Canaanite names figure in the catalogue of vanquished states. Thus we have Carmel of Judah, Ir-shemesh and Hadashah (Josh. xv. 37), Gaza, Sela and Jacob-el, Socho, Yurza, and Korkha in Moab. The name of Moab itself appears for the first time among the subject nations, while we gather from a list of mining settlements, that Cyprus as well as the Sinaitic peninsula was under Egyptian authority.

A sarcastic account of the misadventures of a military officer in Palestine, which was written in the time of Ramses, is an evidence of the complete occupation of that country by the Egyptians. All parts of Canaan are alluded to in it, and as Dr. Max Müller has lately pointed out, we find in it for the first time the names of Shechem and Kirjath-Sepher. Similar testimony is borne by a hieroglyphic inscription recently discovered by Dr. Schumacher on the so-called "Stone of Job" in the Haurân. The stone (Sakhrat 'Ayyub) is a monolith westward of the Sea of Galilee, and not far from Tel 'Ashtereh, the ancient Ashtaroth-Karnaim, which was a seat of Egyptian government in the time of Khu-n-Aten. The monolith is adorned with Egyptian sculptures and hieroglyphs. One of the sculptures represents a Pharaoh above whose likeness is the cartouche of Ramses II., while opposite the king, to the left, is the figure of a god who wears the crown of Osiris, but has a full face. Over the god is his name in hieroglyphics. The name, however, is not Egyptian, but seems to be intended for the Canaanite Yakin-Zephon or "Yakin of the North." It is plain, therefore, that we have here a monument testifying to the rule of Ramses II., but a monument which was erected by natives of the country to a native divinity. For a while the hieroglyphic writing of Egypt had taken the place formerly occupied by the cuneiform syllabary of Babylonia, and Egyptian culture had succeeded in supplanting that which had come from the East.

The nineteenth dynasty ended even more disastrously than the eighteenth. It is true that the great confederacy of northern and Libyan tribes which attacked Egypt by sea and land in the reign of Meneptah, the son and successor of Ramses II., was successfully repulsed, but the energy of the Egyptian power seemed to exhaust itself in the effort. The throne fell into the hands of usurpers, and the house of Ramses was swept away by civil war and anarchy. The government was seized by a Syrian, Arisu by name, and for a time Egypt was compelled to submit to a foreign yoke. The overthrow of the foreigner and the restoration of the native monarchy was due to the valour of Set-nekht, the founder of the twentieth dynasty and the father of Ramses III.

It was under one of the immediate successors of Ramses II. that the exodus of the Israelites out of Egypt must have taken place. Egyptian tradition pointed to Meneptah; modern scholars incline rather to his successors Seti II. and Si-Ptah. With this event the patriarchal history of Canaan ought properly to come to an end. But the Egyptian monuments still cast light upon it, and enable us to carry it on almost to the moment when Joshua and his followers entered the Promised Land.

Palestine still formed part of the kingdom of Meneptah, at all events in the earlier years of his reign. A scribe has left us a record of the officials who passed to and from Canaan through the frontier fortress of Zaru during the middle of the month Pakhons in the third year of the king. One of these was Baal- … the son of Zippor of Gaza, who carried a letter for the Egyptian overseer of the Syrian peasantry (or Perizzites), as well as another for Baal-[sa]lil-ga[b]u, the vassal-prince of Tyre. Another messenger was Sutekh-mes, the son of 'Aper-dagar, who also carried a despatch to the overseer of the peasantry, while a third envoy came in the reverse direction, from the city of Meneptah, "in the land of the Amorites."

In the troubles which preceded the accession of the twentieth dynasty the Asiatic possessions of Egypt were naturally lost, and were never again recovered. Ramses III., however, the last of the conquering Pharaohs, made at least one campaign in Palestine and Syria. Like Meneptah, he had to bear the brunt of an attack upon Egypt by the confederated hordes of the north which threatened to extinguish its civilization altogether. The nations of Asia Minor and the Ægean Sea had poured into Syria as the northern barbarians in later days poured into the provinces of the Roman Empire. Partly by land, partly by sea, they made their way through Phoenicia and the land of the Hittites, destroying everything as they went, and carrying in their train the subjugated princes of Naharaim and Kadesh. For a time they encamped in the "land of the Amorites," and then pursued their southward march. Ramses III. met them on the north-eastern frontier of his kingdom, and in a fiercely-contested battle utterly overthrew them. The ships of the invaders were captured or sunk, and their forces on land were decimated. Immense quantities of booty and prisoners were taken, and the shattered forces of the enemy retreated into Syria. There the Philistines and Zakkal possessed themselves of the sea-coast, and garrisoned the cities of the extreme south. Gaza ceased to be an Egyptian fortress, and became instead an effectual barrier to the Egyptian occupation of Canaan.

When Ramses III. followed the retreating invaders of his country into Syria, it is doubtful whether the Philistines had as yet settled themselves in their future home. At all events Gaza fell into his hands, and he found no difficulty in marching along the Mediterranean coast like the conquering Pharaohs who had preceded him. In his temple palace at Medînet Habu he has left a record of the conquests that he made in Syria. The great cities of the coast were untouched. No attempt was made to besiege or capture Tyre and Sidon, Beyrout and Gebal, and the Egyptian army marched past them, encamping on the way only at such places as "the headland of Carmel," "the source of the Magoras," or river of Beyrout, and the Bor or "Cistern." Otherwise its resting-places were at unknown villages like Inzath and Lui-el. North of Beyrout it struck eastward through the gorge of the Nahr el-Kelb, and took the city of Kumidi. Then it made its way by Shenir or Hermon to Hamath, which surrendered, and from thence still northward to "the plain" of Aleppo.

In the south of Palestine, in what was afterwards the territory of Judah, Ramses made yet another campaign. Here he claims to have taken Lebanoth and Beth-Anath, Carmel of Judah and Shebtin, Jacob-el and Hebron, Libnah and Aphek, Migdal-gad and Ir-Shemesh, Hadashah and the district of Salem or Jerusalem. From thence the Egyptian forces proceeded to the Lake of Reshpon or the Dead Sea, and then crossing the Jordan seized Korkha in Moab. But the campaign was little more than a raid; it left no permanent results behind it, and all traces of Egyptian authority disappeared with the departure of the Pharaoh's army. Canaan remained the prey of the first resolute invader who had strength and courage at his back.

CHAPTER IV
THE PATRIARCHS

Abraham had been born in "Ur of the Chaldees." Ur lay on the western side of the Euphrates in Southern Babylonia, where the mounds of Muqayyar or Mugheir mark the site of the great temple that had been reared to the worship of the Moon-god long before the days of the Hebrew patriarch. Here Abraham had married, and from hence he had gone forth with his father to seek a new home in the west. Their first resting-place had been Harran in Mesopotamia, on the high-road to Syria and the Mediterranean. The name of Harran, in fact, signified "road" in the old language of Chaldæa, and for many ages the armies and merchants of Babylonia had halted there when making their way towards the Mediterranean. Like Ur, it was dedicated to the worship of Sin, the Moon-god, and its temple rivalled in fame and antiquity that of the Babylonian city, and had probably been founded by a Babylonian king.

At Harran, therefore, Abraham would still have been within the limits of Babylonian influence and culture, if not of Babylonian government as well. He would have found there the same religion as that which he had left behind him in his native city; the same deity was adored there, under the same name and with the same rites. He was indeed on the road to Canaan, and among an Aramaean rather than a Babylonian population, but Babylonia with its beliefs and civilization had not as yet been forsaken. Even the language of Babylonia was known in his new home, as is indicated by the name of the city itself.

Harran and Mesopotamia were not the goal of the future father of the Israelitish people. He was bidden to seek elsewhere another country and another kindred. Canaan was the land which God promised to "show" to him, and it was in Canaan that his descendants were to become "a great nation." He went forth, accordingly, "to go into the land of Canaan, and into the land of Canaan he came."

But even in Canaan Abraham was not beyond the reach of Babylonian influence. As we have seen in the last chapter, Babylonian armies had already penetrated to the shores of the Mediterranean, Palestine had been included within the bounds of a Babylonian empire, and Babylonian culture and religion had spread widely among the Canaanitish tribes. The cuneiform system of writing had made its way to Syria, and Babylonian literature had followed in its wake. Centuries had already passed since Sargon of Akkad had made himself master of the Mediterranean coast and his son Naram-Sin had led his forces to the Peninsula of Sinai. Istar of Babylonia had become Ashtoreth of the Canaanites, and Babylonian trade had long moved briskly along the very road that Abraham traversed. In the days of the patriarch himself the rulers of Babylonia claimed to be also rulers of Canaan; for thirteen years did the Canaanite princes "serve" Chedor-laomer and his allies, the father of Arioch is also "the father of the land of the Amorites" in his son's inscriptions, and at a little later date the King of Babylon still claimed sovereignty over the West.

It was not, therefore, to a strange and unexplored country that Abraham had migrated. The laws and manners to which he had been accustomed, the writing and literature which he had learned in the schools of Ur, the religious beliefs among which he had lived in Chaldæa and Harran, he found again in Canaan. The land of his adoption was full of Babylonian traders, soldiers, and probably officials as well, and from time to time he must have heard around him the language of his birthplace. The introduction into the West of the Babylonian literature and script brought with it a knowledge of the Babylonian language, and the knowledge is reflected in some of the local names of Palestine. The patriarch had not escaped beyond the control even of the Babylonian government. At times, at all events, the princes of Canaan were compelled to acknowledge the suzerainty of Chaldæa and obey the laws, as the Babylonians would have said, of "Anu and Dagon."

The fact needs dwelling upon, partly because of its importance, partly because it is but recently that we have begun to realize it. It might indeed have been gathered from the narratives of Genesis, more especially from the account of Chedor-laomer's campaign, but it ran counter to the preconceived ideas of the modern historian, and never therefore took definite shape in his mind. It is one of the many gains that the decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions has brought to the student of the Old Testament, and it makes us understand the story of Abraham's migration in a way that was never possible before. He was no wild nomad wandering in unknown regions, among a people of alien habits and foreign civilization. We know now why he took the road which we are told he followed; why he was able to make allies among the inhabitants of Canaan; why he understood their language and could take part in their social life. Like the Englishman who migrates to a British colony, Abraham was in contact with the same culture in Canaan and Chaldæa alike.

But when he reached Canaan he was not yet Abraham. He was still "Abram the Hebrew," and it was as "Abram the Hebrew" that he made alliance with the Amorites of Mamre and overthrew the retreating forces of the Babylonian kings. Abram—Abu-ramu, "the exalted father,"—is a Babylonian name, and is found in contracts of the age of Chedor-laomer. When the name was changed to Abraham, it was a sign that the Babylonian emigrant had become a native of the West.

It was under the terebinth of Moreh before Shechem that Abraham first pitched his tent and erected his first altar to the Lord. Above him towered Ebal and Gerizim, where the curses and blessings of the Law were afterwards to be pronounced. From thence he moved southward to one of the hills westward of Beth-el, the modern Beitin, and there his second altar was built. While the first had been reared in the plain, the second was raised on the mountain-slope.

But here too he did not remain long. Again he "journeyed, going on still towards the south." Then came a famine which obliged him to cross the frontier of Egypt, and visit the court of the Pharaoh. The Hyksos kinsmen of the race to which he belonged were ruling in the Delta, and a ready welcome was given to the Asiatic stranger. He was "very rich in cattle, in silver and in gold," and like a wealthy Arab sheikh to-day was received with due honour in the Egyptian capital. The court of the Pharaoh was doubtless at Zoan.

Among the possessions of the patriarch we are told were camels. The camel is not included among the Egyptian hieroglyphs, nor has it been found depicted on the walls of the Egyptian temples and tombs. The name is first met with in a papyrus of the time of the nineteenth dynasty, and is one of the many words which the Egyptians of that age borrowed from their Canaanitish neighbours. The animal, in fact, was not used by the Egyptians, and its domestication in the valley of the Nile seems to be as recent as the Arab conquest. But though it was not used by the Egyptians, it had been a beast of burden among the Semites of Arabia from an early period. In the primitive Sumerian language of Chaldæa it was called "the animal from the Persian Gulf," and its Semitic name, from which our own word camel is derived, goes back to the very beginnings of Semitic history. We cannot, therefore, imagine a Semitic nomad arriving in Egypt without the camel; travellers, indeed, from the cities of Canaan might do so, but not those who led a purely nomadic life. And, in fact, though we look in vain for a picture of the camel among the sculptures and paintings of Egypt, the bones of the animal have been discovered deep in the alluvial soil of the valley of the Nile.

Abraham had to quit Egypt, and once more he traversed the desert of the "South" and pitched his tent near Beth-el. Here his nephew Lot left him, and, dissatisfied with the life of a wandering Bedawi, took up his abode in the city of Sodom at the northern end of the Dead Sea. While Abraham kept himself separate from the natives of Canaan, Lot thus became one of them, and narrowly escaped the doom which afterwards fell upon the cities of the plain. In forsaking the tent, he forsook not only the free life of the immigrant from Chaldæa, but the God of Abraham as well. The inhabitant of a Canaanitish city passed under the influence of its faith and worship, its morals and manners, as well as its laws and government. He ceased to be an alien and stranger, of a different race and fatherland, and with a religion and customs of his own. He could intermarry with the natives of his adopted country and participate in their sacred rites. Little by little his family became merged in the population that surrounded him; its gods became their gods, its morality—or, it may be, its immorality—became theirs also. Lot, indeed, had eventually to fly from Sodom, leaving behind him all his wealth; but the mischief had already been done, and his children had become Canaanites in thought and deed. The nations which sprang from him, though separate in race from the older people of Canaan, were yet like them in other respects. They formed no "peculiar people," to whom the Lord might reveal Himself through the law and the prophets.

It was not until Lot had separated himself from Abraham that the land of Canaan was promised to the descendants of the patriarch. "Lift up now thine eyes," God said to him, "and look from the place where thou art, northward and southward, and eastward and westward: for all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever." Once more, therefore, Abraham departed southward from Shechem; not this time to go into the land of Egypt, but to dwell beside the terebinth-oak of Mamre hard by Hebron, where the founder of the Davidic monarchy was hereafter to be crowned king. It is probable that the sanctuary which in days to come was to make Hebron famous had not as yet been established there; at all events the name of Hebron, "the confederacy," was not as yet known, and the city was called Kirjath-Arba. Whether it was also called Mamre is doubtful; Mamre would rather seem to have been the name of the plateau which stretched beyond the valley of Hebron and was occupied by the Amorite confederates of the Hebrew patriarch.

It was while he "dwelt under the terebinth of Mamre the Amorite" that the campaign of Chedor-laomer and his Babylonian allies took place, and that Lot was carried away among the Canaanitish captives. But the triumph of the conquerors was short-lived. "Abram the Hebrew" pursued them with his armed followers, three hundred and eighteen in number, as well as with his Amorite allies, and suddenly falling upon their rear-guard near Damascus by night, rescued the captives and the spoil. There was rejoicing in the Canaanitish cities when the patriarch returned with his booty. The new king of Sodom met him in the valley of Shaveh, "the king's dale" of later times, just outside the walls of Jerusalem, and the king of Jerusalem himself, Melchizedek, "the priest of the most High God," welcomed the return of the victor with bread and wine. Then it was that Abram gave tithes of the spoil to the God of Salem, while Melchizedek blessed him in the name of "the most High God."

Outside the pages of the Old Testament the special form assumed by the blessing has been found only in the Aramaic inscriptions of Egypt. Here too we find travellers from Palestine writing of themselves "Blessed be Augah of Isis," or "Blessed be Abed-Nebo of Khnum"! It would seem, therefore, to have been a formula peculiar to Canaan; at all events, it has not been traced to other parts of the Semitic world. The temple of the Most High God—El Elyôn—probably stood on Mount Moriah where the temple of the God of Israel was afterwards to be erected. It will be remembered that among the letters sent by Ebed-Tob, the king of Jerusalem, to the Egyptian Pharaoh is one in which he speaks of "the city of the Mountain of Jerusalem, whose name is the city of the temple of the god Nin-ip." In this "Mountain of Jerusalem" it is difficult not to see the "temple-Mount" of later days.

In the cuneiform texts of Ebed-Tob and the later Assyrian kings the name of Jerusalem is written Uru-Salim, "the city of Salim." Salim or "Peace" is almost certainly the native name of the god who was identified with the Babylonian Nin-ip, and perhaps Isaiah—that student of the older history of his country—is alluding to the fact when he declares that one of the titles of the Messiah shall be "the Prince of Peace." At any rate, if the Most High God of Jerusalem were really Salim, the God of Peace, we should have an explanation of the blessing pronounced by Melchizedek upon the patriarch. Abram's victory had restored peace to Canaan; he had brought back the captives, and had himself returned in peace. It was fitting, therefore, that he should be welcomed by the priest of the God of Peace, and that he should offer tithes of the booty he had recovered to the god of "the City of Peace."

This offering of tithes was no new thing. In his Babylonian home Abraham must have been familiar with the practice. The cuneiform inscriptions of Babylonia contain frequent references to it. It went back to the pre-Semitic age of Chaldæa, and the great temples of Babylonia were largely supported by the esra or tithe which was levied upon prince and peasant alike. That the god should receive a tenth of the good things which, it was believed, he had bestowed upon mankind, was not considered to be asking too much. There are many tablets in the British Museum which are receipts for the payment of the tithe to the great temple of the Sun-god at Sippara in the time of Nebuchadrezzar and his successors. From one of them we learn that Belshazzar, even at the very moment when the Babylonian empire was falling from his father's hands, nevertheless found an opportunity for paying the tithe due from his sister; while others show us that Cyrus and Cambyses did not regard their foreign origin as affording any pretext for refusing to pay tithe to the gods of the kingdom they had overthrown.

The Babylonian army had been defeated near Damascus, and immediately after this we are told that the steward of Abraham's house was "Eli-ezer of Damascus." Whether there is any connection between the two facts we cannot say; but it may be that Eli-ezer had attached himself to the Hebrew conqueror when he was returning "from the slaughter of Chedor-laomer." The name of Eli-ezer, "God is a help," is characteristic of Damascus. More often in place of El, "God," we have Hadad, the supreme deity of Syria; but just as among the Israelites Eli-akim and Jeho-iakim are equivalent, so among the Aramaeans of Syria were Eli-ezer and Hadad-ezer. Hadad-ezer, it will be remembered, was the king of Zobah who was overthrown by David.

Sarai, the wife of Abraham, was still childless, but the patriarch had a son by his Egyptian handmaid, the ancestor of the Ishmaelite tribes who spread from the frontier of Egypt to Mecca in Central Arabia. It was when Ishmael was thirteen years of age that the covenant was made between God and Abraham which was sealed with the institution of circumcision. Circumcision had been practised in Egypt from the earliest days of its history; henceforth it also distinguished all those who claimed Abraham as their forefather. With circumcision Abraham received the name by which he was henceforth to be known; he ceased to be Abram, the Hebrew from Babylonia, and became Abraham the father of Ishmael and Israel. The new rite and the new name were alike the seal and token of the covenant established between the patriarch and his God: God promised that his seed should multiply, and that the land of Canaan should be given as an everlasting possession, while Abraham and his offspring were called upon to keep God's covenant for ever.

At Beth-lehem Jacob was but a few miles distant from Hebron, where Isaac still lived, and where at his death he was buried by his sons Jacob and Esau in the family tomb of Machpelah. It was the last time, seemingly, that the two brothers found themselves together. Esau, partly by marriage, partly by conquest, dispossessed the Horites of Mount Seir, and founded the kingdom of Edom, while the sons and flocks of Jacob scattered themselves from Hebron in the south of Canaan to Shechem in its centre. The two hallowed sanctuaries of the future kingdoms of Judah and Israel, where the first throne was set up in Israel and the monarchy of David was first established, thus became the boundaries of the herdsmen's domain. In both the Hebrew patriarch held ground that was rightfully his own. It was a sign that the house of Israel should hereafter occupy the land which the family of Israel thus roamed over with their flocks. The nomad was already passing into the settler, with fields and burial-places of his own.

But before the transformation could be fully accomplished, a long season of growth and preparation was needful. Egypt, and not Canaan, was to be the land in which the Chosen People should be trained for their future work. Canaan itself was to pass under Egyptian domination, and to replace the influence of Babylonian culture by that of Egypt. It was a new world and a new civilization into which the descendants of Jacob were destined to emerge when finally they escaped from the fiery furnace of Egyptian bondage. The Egypt known to Jacob was an Egypt over which Asiatic princes ruled, and whose vizier was himself a Hebrew. It was the Egypt of the Hyksos conquerors, whose capital was Zoan, on the frontiers of Asia, and whose people were the slaves of an Asiatic stranger. The Egypt quitted by his descendants was one which had subjected Asia to itself, and had carried the spoils of Syria to its splendid capital in the far south. The Asiatic wave had been rolled back from the banks of the Nile, and Egyptian conquest and culture had overflooded Asia as far as the Euphrates.

But it was not Egypt alone which had undergone a change. The Canaan of Abraham and Jacob looked to Babylonia for its civilization, its literature, and its laws. Its princes recognized at times the supremacy of the Babylonian sovereigns, and the deities of Babylonia were worshipped in its midst. The Canaan of Moses had long been a province of the Egyptian Empire; Egyptian rule had been substituted for that of Babylon, and the manners and customs of Egypt had penetrated deeply into the minds of its inhabitants. The Hittite invasion from the north had blocked the high-road to Babylonia, and diverted the trade of Palestine towards the west and the south. While Abraham, the native of Ur, and the emigrant from Harran, had found himself in Canaan, and even at Zoan, still within the sphere of the influences among which he had grown up, the fugitives from Egypt entered on the invasion of a country which had but just been delivered from the yoke of the Pharaohs. It was an Egyptian Canaan that the Israelites were called upon to subdue, and it was fitting therefore that they should have been made ready for the task by their long sojourn in the land of Goshen.

How that sojourn came about, it is not for us to recount. The story of Joseph is too familiar to be repeated, though we are but just beginning to learn how true it is, in all its details, to the facts which Egyptian research is bringing more and more fully to light. We see the Midianite and Ishmaelite caravan passing Dothan—still known by its ancient name—with their bales of spicery from Gilead for the dwellers in the Delta, and carrying away with them the young Hebrew slave. We watch his rise in the house of his Egyptian master, his wrongful imprisonment and sudden exaltation when he sits by the side of Pharaoh and governs Egypt in the name of the king. We read the pathetic story of the old father sending his sons to buy corn from the royal granaries or larits of Egypt, and withholding to the last his youngest and dearest one; of the Beduin shepherds bowing all unconsciously before the brother whom they had sold into slavery, and who now holds in his hands the power of life and death; of Joseph's disclosure of himself to the conscious-stricken suppliants; of Jacob's cry when convinced at last that "the governor over all the land of Egypt" was his long-mourned son. "It is enough; Joseph my son is yet alive: I will go and see him before I die."

Jacob and his family travelled in wagons along the high-road which connected the south of Palestine with the Delta. It led past Beer-sheba and El-Arîsh to the Shur, or line of fortifications which protected the eastern frontier of Egypt. The modern caravan road follows its course most of the way. It was thus distinct from "the way of the Philistines," which led along the coast of the Mediterranean, on the northern edge of the Sirbonian Lake. In Egypt the Israelitish emigrants settled not far from the Hyksos capital in the land of Goshen, which the excavations of Dr. Naville have shown to be the Wâdi Tumilât of to-day. Here they multiplied and grew wealthy, until the evil days came when the Egyptians rose up against Semitic influence and control, and Ramses II. transformed the free-born Beduin into public serfs.

But the age of Ramses II. was still far distant when Jacob died full of years, and his mummy was carried to the burial-place of his fathers "in the land of Canaan." Local tradition connected the name of Abel-mizraim, "the meadow of Egypt," on the eastern side of the Jordan, with the long funeral procession which wended its way from Zoan to Hebron. We cannot believe, however, that the mourners would have so far gone out of their road, even if the etymology assigned by tradition to the name could be supported. The tradition bears witness to the fact of the procession, but to nothing more.

With the funeral of Jacob a veil falls upon the Biblical history of Canaan, until the days when the spies were sent out to search the land. Joseph was buried in Egypt, not at Hebron, though he had made the Israelites swear before his death that his mummy should be eventually taken to Palestine. The road to Hebron, it is clear, was no longer open, and the power of the Hyksos princes must have been fast waning. The war of independence had broken out, and the native kings of Upper Egypt were driving the foreigner back into Asia. The rulers of Zoan had no longer troops to spare for a funeral procession through the eastern desert.

The Chronicler, however, has preserved a notice which seems to show that a connection was still kept up between Southern Canaan and the Hebrew settlers in Goshen, even after Jacob's death, perhaps while he was yet living. We are told that certain of the sons of Ephraim were slain by the men of Gath, whose cattle they had attempted to steal, and that their father, after mourning many days, comforted himself with the birth of other sons (1 Chron. vii. 21-26). The notice, moreover, does not stand alone. Thothmes III., the great conqueror of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, states that two of the places captured by him in Palestine were Jacob-el and Joseph-el. It is tempting to see in the two names reminiscences of the Hebrew patriarch and his son. If so, the name of Joseph would have been impressed upon a locality in Canaan more than two centuries before the Exodus. The geographical lists of Thothmes III. and the fragments of early history preserved by the Chronicler would thus support and complete one another. The Egyptian cavalry who accompanied the mummy of Jacob to its resting-place at Machpelah, would not be the only evidence of the authority claimed by Joseph and his master in the land of Canaan; Joseph himself would have left his name there, and his grand-children would have fought against "the men of Gath."

But these are speculations which may, or may not, be confirmed by archaeological discovery. For the Book of Genesis Canaan disappears from sight with the death of Jacob. Henceforward it is upon Egypt and the nomad settlers in Goshen that the attention of the Pentateuch is fixed, until the time comes when the age of the patriarchs is superseded by that of the legislator, and Moses, the adopted son of the Egyptian princess, leads his people back to Canaan. Joseph had been carried by Midianitish hands out of Palestine into Egypt, there to become the representative of the Pharaoh, and son-in-law of the high-priest of Heliopolis; for Moses, the adopted grandson of the Pharaoh, "learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians," it was reserved, after years of trial and preparation in Midian, to bring the descendants of Jacob out of their Egyptian prison-house to the borders of the Promised Land.

CHAPTER V
EGYPTIAN TRAVELLERS IN CANAAN

Palestine has been a land of pilgrims and tourists from the very beginning of its history. It was the goal of the migration of Abraham and his family, and it was equally the object of the oldest book of travels with which we are acquainted. Allusion has already been made more than once to the Egyptian papyrus, usually known as The Travels of a Mohar, and in which a satirical account is given of a tour in Palestine and Syria. The writer was a professor, apparently of literature, in the court of Ramses II., and he published a series of letters to his friend, Nekht-sotep, which were long admired as models of style. Nekht-sotep was one of the secretaries attached to the military staff, and among the letters is a sort of parody of an account given by Nekht-sotep of his adventures in Canaan, which was intended partly to show how an account of the kind ought to have been written by an accomplished penman, partly to prove the superiority of the scribe's life to that of the soldier, partly also, it may be, for the sake of teasing the writer's correspondent. Nekht-sotep had evidently assumed airs of superiority on the strength of his foreign travels, and his stay-at-home friend undertook to demonstrate that he had himself enjoyed the more comfortable life of the two. Nekht-sotep is playfully dubbed with the foreign title of Mohar—or more correctly Muhir—a word borrowed from Assyrian, where it primarily signified a military commander and then the governor of a province.

Long before the days of the nineteenth dynasty, however, there had been Egyptian travellers in Palestine, or at least in the adjoining countries. One of the Egyptian books which have come down to us contains the story of a certain Sinuhit who had to fly from Egypt in consequence of some political troubles in which he was involved after the death of Amon-m-hat I. of the twelfth dynasty. Crossing the Nile near Kher-ahu, the Old Cairo of to-day, he gained the eastern bank of the river and made his way to the line of forts which protected Egypt from its Asiatic enemies. Here he crouched among the desert bushes till night-fall, lest "the watchmen of the tower" should see him, and then pursued his journey under the cover of darkness. At daybreak he reached the land of Peten and the wadi of Qem-uer on the line of the modern Suez Canal. There thirst seized upon him; his throat rattled, and he said to himself—"This is the taste of death." A Bedawi, however, perceived him and had compassion on the fugitive: he gave him water and boiled milk, and Sinuhit for a while joined the nomad tribe. Then he passed on to the country of Qedem, the Kadmonites of the Old Testament (Gen. xv. 19; Judges vi. 3), whence came the wise men of the East (1 Kings iv. 30). After spending a year and a half there, 'Ammu-anshi, the prince of the Upper land of Tenu, asked the Egyptian stranger to come to him, telling him that he would hear the language of Egypt. He added that he had already heard about Sinuhit from "the Egyptians who were in the country." It is clear from this that there had been intercourse for some time between Egypt and "the Upper Tenu."

It is probable that Dr. W. Max Müller is right in seeing in Tenu an abbreviated form of Lutennu (or Rutenu), the name by which Syria was known to the Egyptians. There was an Upper Lutennu and a Lower Lutennu, the Upper Lutennu corresponding with Palestine and the adjoining country, and thus including the Edomite district of which 'Ammu-anshi or Ammi-anshi was king. In the name of 'Ammu-anshi, it may be observed, we have the name of the deity who appears as Ammi or Ammon in the kingdom of the Ammonites, and perhaps forms the second element in the name of Balaam. The same divine name enters into the composition of those of early kings of Ma'in in Southern Arabia, as well as of Babylonia in the far East. (See above, p. 64.)

'Ammu-anshi married Sinuhit to his eldest daughter, and bestowed upon him the government of a district called Aia which lay on the frontier of a neighbouring country. Aia is described as rich in vines, figs, and olives, in wheat and barley, in milk and cattle. "Its wine was more plentiful than water," and Sinuhit had "daily rations of bread and wine, cooked meat and roast fowl," as well as abundance of game. He lived there for many years. The children born to him by his Asiatic wife grew up and became heads of tribes. "I gave water to the thirsty," he says; "I set on his journey the traveller who had been hindered from passing by; I chastised the brigand. I commanded the Beduin who departed afar to strike and repel the princes of foreign lands, and they marched (under me), for the prince of Tenu allowed that I should be during long years the general of his soldiers."

Sinuhit, in fact, had given proof of his personal prowess at an early period in his career. The champion of Tenu had come to him in his tent and challenged him to single combat. The Egyptian was armed with bow, arrows, and dagger; his adversary with battle-axe, javelins, and buckler. The contest was short, and ended in the decisive victory of Sinuhit, who wounded his rival and despoiled him of his goods.

A time came, however, when Sinuhit grew old, and began to long to see once more the land of his fathers before he died. Accordingly he sent a petition to the Pharaoh praying him to forgive the offences of his youth and allow him to return again to Egypt. The petition was granted, and a letter was despatched to the refugee, permitting him to return. Sinuhit accordingly quitted the land where he had lived so long. First of all he held a festival, and handed over his property to his children, making his eldest son the chief of the tribe. Then he travelled southward to Egypt, and was graciously received at court. The coarse garments of the Beduin were exchanged for fine linen; his body was bathed with water and scented essences; he lay once more on a couch and enjoyed the luxurious cookery of the Egyptians. A house and pyramid were built for him; a garden was laid out for him with a lake and a kiosk, and a golden statue with a robe of electrum was set up in it. Sinuhit ceased to be an Asiatic "barbarian," and became once more a civilized Egyptian.

The travels of Sinuhit were involuntary, but a time came when a tour in Palestine was almost as much the fashion as it is to-day. The conquests of Thothmes III. had made Syria an Egyptian province, and had introduced Syrians into the Egyptian bureaucracy. Good roads were made throughout the newly-acquired territory, furnished with post-houses where food and lodging could be procured, and communication between Egypt and Canaan thus became easy and frequent. The fall of the eighteenth dynasty caused only a momentary break in the intercourse between the two countries; with the establishment of the nineteenth dynasty it was again resumed. Messengers passed backward and forward between Syria and the court of the Pharaoh; Asiatics once more thronged into the valley of the Nile, and the Egyptian civil servant and traveller followed in the wake of the victorious armies of Seti and Ramses. The Travels of a Mohar is the result of this renewed acquaintance with the cities and roads of Palestine.

The writer is anxious to display his knowledge of Syrian geography. Though he had not himself ventured to brave the discomforts of foreign travel, he wished to show that he knew as much about Canaan as those who had actually been there. A tour there was after all not much to boast of; it had become so common that the geography of Canaan was as well known as that of Egypt itself, and the stay-at-home scribe had consequently no difficulty in compiling a guide-book to it.

The following is the translation given by Dr. Brugsch of the papyrus, with such alterations as have been necessitated by further study and research. "I will portray for thee the likeness of a Mohar, I will let thee know what he does. Hast thou not gone to the land of the Hittites, and hast thou not seen the land of Aupa? Dost thou not know what Khaduma is like; the land of Igad'i also how it is formed? The Zar (or Plain) of king Sesetsu (Sesostris)—on which side of it lies the town of Aleppo, and how is its ford? Hast thou not taken thy road to Kadesh (on the Orontes) and Tubikhi? Hast thou not gone to the Shasu (Beduin) with numerous mercenaries, and hast thou not trodden the way to the Maghar[at] (the caves of the Magoras near Beyrout) where the heaven is dark in the daytime? The place is planted with maple-trees, oaks, and acacias, which reach up to heaven, full of beasts, bears (?), and lions, and surrounded by Shasu in all directions. Hast thou not ascended the mountain of Shaua, and hast thou not trodden it? There thy hands hold fast to the [rein] of thy chariot; a jerk has shaken thy horses in drawing it. I pray thee, let us go to the city of Beeroth (Beyrout). Hast thou not hastened to its ascent after passing over the ford in front of it?

"Do thou explain this relish for [the life of] a Mohar! Thy chariot lies there [before] thee; thy [feet] have fallen lame; thou treadest the backward path at eventide. All thy limbs are ground small. Thy [bones] are broken to pieces, and thou dost fall asleep. Thou awakest: it is the time of gloomy night, and thou art alone. Has not a thief come to rob thee? Some grooms have entered the stable; the horse kicks out; the thief has made off in the night, thy clothes are stolen. Thy groom wakes up in the night; he sees what has happened to him; he takes what is left, he goes off to bad company, he joins the Beduin. He transforms himself into an Asiatic. The police (?) come, they [feel about] for the robber; he is discovered, and is immovable from terror. Thou wakest, thou findest no trace of them, for they have carried off thy property.

"Become [again] a Mohar who is fully accoutred. Let thy ear be filled with that which I relate to thee besides.

"The town 'Hidden'—such is the meaning of its name Gebal—what is its condition? Its goddess [we will speak of] at another time. Hast thou not visited it? Be good enough to look out for Beyrout, Sidon, and Sarepta. Where are the fords of the land of Nazana? The country of Authu (Usu), what is its condition? They are situated above another city in the sea, Tyre the port is its name. Drinking-water is brought to it in boats. It is richer in fishes than in sand. I will tell thee of something else. It is dangerous to enter Zair'aun. Thou wilt say it is burning with a very painful sting (?). Come, Mohar. Go forward on the way to the land of Pa-'Aina. Where is the road to Achshaph (Ekdippa)? Towards which town? Pray look at the mountain of User. How is its crest? Where is the mountain of Sakama (Shechem)? Who can surmount it? Mohar, whither must you take a journey to the land of Hazor? How is its ford? Show me how one goes to Hamath, Dagara, [and] Dagar-el, to the place where all Mohars meet? Be good enough to spy out its road; cast a look on Yâ.... When one goes to the land of Adamim, to what is one opposite? Do not draw back, but instruct us. Guide us, that we may know, O leader!

"I will name to thee other cities besides these. Hast thou not gone to the land of Takhis, to Kafir-Marona, Tamnah, Kadesh, Dapul, Azai, Harnammata, and hast thou not seen Kirjath-Anab, near Beth-Sopher? and dost thou not know Adullam [and] Zidiputa? Or dost thou not know any better the name of Khalza in the land of Aupa, [like] a bull upon its frontiers? Here is the place where all the mighty warriors are seen. Be good enough to look and see the chapel of the land of Qina, and tell me about Rehob. Describe Beth-sha-el (Beth-el) along with Tarqa-el. The ford of the land of Jordan, how is it crossed? Teach me to know the passage that leads to the land of Megiddo, which lies in front of it. Verily thou art a Mohar, well skilled in the work of the strong hand. Pray, is there found a Mohar like thee, to place at the head of the army, or a seigneur who can beat thee in shooting?

"Beware of the gorge of the precipice, 2000 cubits deep, which is full of rocks and boulders. Thou turnest back in a zigzag, thou bearest thy bow, thou takest the iron in thy left hand. Thou lettest the old men see, if their eyes are good, how, worn out with fatigue, thou supportest thyself with thy hand. Ebed gamal Mohar n'amu ('A camel's slave is the Mohar! they say'); so they say, and thou gainest a name among the Mohars and the knights of the land of Egypt. Thy name becomes like that of Qazairnai, the lord of Asel, when the lions found him in the thicket, in the defile which is rendered dangerous by the Shasu who lie in ambush among the trees. They measured four cubits from the nose to the heel, they had a grim look, without softness; they cared not for caresses.

"Thou art alone, no strong one is with thee, no armée is behind thee, no Ariel who prepares the way for thee, and gives thee information of the road before thee. Thou knowest not the road. The hair on thy head stands on end; it bristles up. Thy soul is given into thy hands. Thy path is full of rocks and boulders, there is no outlet near, it is overgrown with creepers and wolf's-bane. The precipice is on one side of thee, the mountain and the wall of rock on the other. Thou drivest in against it. The chariot jumps on which thou art. Thou art troubled to hold up thy horses. If it falls down the precipice, the pole drags thee down too. Thy ceintures are pulled away. They fall down. Thou shacklest the horse, because the pole is broken on the path of the defile. Not knowing how to tie it up, thou understandest not how it is to be repaired. The essieu is left on the spot, as the load is too heavy for the horses. Thy courage has evaporated. Thou beginnest to run. The heaven is cloudless. Thou art thirsty; the enemy is behind thee; a trembling seizes thee; a twig of thorny acacia worries thee; thou thrustest it aside; the horse is scratched till at length thou findest rest.

"Explain to me thy liking for [the life of] a Mohar!

"Thou comest into Joppa; thou findest the date-palm in full bloom in its time. Thou openest wide thy mouth in order to eat. Thou findest that the maid who keeps the garden is fair. She does whatever thou wantest of her.... Thou art recognized, thou art brought to trial, and owest thy preservation to being a Mohar. Thy girdle of the finest stuff thou payest as the price of a worthless rag. Thou sleepest every evening with a rug of fur over thee. Thou sleepest a deep sleep, for thou art weary. A thief steals thy bow and thy sword from thy side; thy quiver and thy armour are cut to pieces in the darkness; thy pair of horses run away. The groom takes his course over a slippery path which rises before him. He breaks thy chariot in pieces; he follows thy foot-steps. [He finds] thy equipments which had fallen on the ground and had sunk into the sand, leaving only an empty space.

"Prayer does not avail thee, even when thy mouth says, 'Give food in addition to water, that I may reach my goal in safety,' they are deaf and will not hear. They say not yes to thy words. The iron-workers enter into the smithy; they rummage in the workshops of the carpenters; the handicraftsmen and saddlers are at hand; they do whatever thou requirest. They put together thy chariot; they put aside the parts of it that are made useless; thy spokes are façonné quite new; thy wheels are put on; they put the courroies on the axles and on the hinder part; they splice thy yoke, they put on the box of thy chariot; the [workmen] in iron forge the …; they put the ring that is wanting on thy whip, they replace the lanières upon it.

"Thou goest quickly onward to fight on the battle-field, to do the deeds of a strong hand and of firm courage.

"Before I wrote I sought me out a Mohar who knows his power and leads the jeunesse, a chief in the armée, [who travels] even to the end of the world.

"Answer me not 'This is good; this is bad;' repeat not to me your opinion. Come, I will tell thee all that lies before thee at the end of thy journey.

"I begin for thee with the palace of Sesetsu (Sesostris). Hast thou not set foot in it by force? Hast thou not eaten the fish in the brook …? Hast thou not washed thyself in it? With thy permission I will remind thee of Huzana; where is its fortress? Come, I pray thee, to the palace of the land of Uazit, even of Osymandyas (Ramses II.) in his victories, [to] Saez-el, together with Absaqbu. I will inform thee of the land of 'Ainin (the two Springs), the customs of which thou knowest not. The land of the lake of Nakhai, and the land of Rehoburta thou hast not seen since thou wast born, O Mohar. Rapih is widely extended. What is its wall like? It extends for a mile in the direction of Gaza."

The French words introduced from time to time by Dr. Brugsch into the translation represent the Semitic words which the Egyptian writer has employed. They illustrate the fashionable tendency of his day to fill the Egyptian vocabulary with the words and phrases of Canaan. It was the revenge taken by Palestine for its invasion and conquest by the armies of Seti and Ramses. Thus armée corresponds to the Semitic tsaba, "army," jeunesse to na'aruna, "young men." The Egyptian scribe, however, sometimes made mistakes similar to those which modern novelists are apt to commit in their French quotations. Instead of writing, as he intended, 'ebed gamal Mohar na'amu ("a camel's slave is the Mohar! they say"), he has assigned the Canaanite vowel ayin to the wrong word, and mis-spelt the name of the "camel," so that the phrase is transformed into abad kamal Mohar n'amu ("the camel of the Mohar has perished, they are pleasant"). (It is curious that a similar mistake in regard to the spelling of 'ebed, "slave" or "servant" has been made in an Aramaic inscription which I have discovered on the rocks near Silsileh in Upper Egypt, where the name of Ebed-Nebo is written Abed-Nebo.)

Most of the geographical names mentioned in the papyrus can be identified. Aupa, the Ubi of the Tel el-Amarna tablets, was on the borders of the land of the Hittites, and not far from Aleppo. The Zar or "Plain" of Sesostris makes its appearance in the lists of conquered towns and countries which were drawn up by Thothmes III., Seti I., Ramses II., and Ramses III., in order to commemorate their victories in Syria. The word probably migrated from Babylonia, where the zeru denoted the alluvial plain which lay between the Tigris and the Euphrates. Kadesh, the southern capital of the Hittites, "in the land of the Amorites," lay on the Orontes, close to the lake of Horns, and has been identified by Major Conder with the modern Tel em-Mindeh. Tubikhi, of which we have already heard in the Tel el-Amarna letters, is also mentioned in the geographical lists inscribed by Thothmes III. on the walls of his temple at Karnak (No. 6); it there precedes the name of Kamta or Qamdu, the Kumidi of Tel el-Amarna. It is the Tibhath of the Old Testament, out of which David took "very much brass" (1 Chron. xviii. 8). The Maghar(at) or "Caves" gave their name to the Magoras, the river of Beyrout, as well as to the Mearah of the Book of Joshua (xiii. 4). As for the mountain of Shaua, it is described by the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser III. as in the neighbourhood of the northern Lebanon, while the city of the Beeroth or "Cisterns" is probably Beyrout.

The Mohar is now carried to Phoenicia. Gebal, Beyrout, Sidon, and Sarepta, are named one after the other, as the traveller is supposed to be journeying from north to south. The "goddess" of Gebal was Baaltis, so often referred to in the letters of Rib-Hadad, who calls her "the mistress of Gebal." In saying, however, that the name of the city meant "Hidden," the writer has been misled by the Egyptian mispronunciation of it. It became Kapuna in the mouths of his countrymen, and since kapu in Egyptian signified "hidden mystery," he jumped to the conclusion that such was also the etymology of the Phoenician word. In the "fords of the land of Nazana" we must recognize the river Litâny, which flows into the sea between Sarepta and Tyre. At all events, Authu or Usu, the next city mentioned, is associated with Tyre both in the tablets of Tel el-Amarna and in the inscriptions of the Assyrian kings. It seems to have been the Palætyros or "Older Tyre" of classical tradition, which stood on the mainland opposite the more famous insular Tyre. Phoenician tradition ascribes its foundation to Usôos, the offspring of the mountains of Kasios and Lebanon, and brother of Memrumus, "the exalted," and Hypsouranios, "the lord of heaven," who was the first to invent a clothing of skins, and to sail upon the water in boats, and who had taught mankind to adore the fire and the winds, and to set up two pillars of stone in honour of the deity. From Usu the Mohar is naturally taken to the island rock of Tyre.

Next comes a name which it is difficult to identify. All that is clear is that between Zar or Tyre and Zair'aun there is some connection both of name and of locality. Perhaps Dr. Brugsch is right in thinking that in the next sentence there is a play upon the Hebrew word zir'âh, "hornet," which seems to have the same root as Zair'aun. It may be that Zair'aun is the ancient city south of Tyre whose ruins are now called Umm el-'Amûd, and whose older name is said to have been Turân. Unfortunately the name of the next place referred to in the Mohar's travels is doubtful; if it is Pa-'A(y)ina, "the Spring," we could identify it with the modern Râs el-'Ain, "the Head of the Spring." This is on the road to Zib, the ancient Achshaph or Ekdippa.

One point about this list is very noticeable. None of the great Phoenician cities of the coast are mentioned in it. Acre, Ekdippa, Tyre, Sidon, and Beyrout are all conspicuous by their absence. Even Joppa is unnamed. After Gaza we have only descriptive epithets like "the Spring" and "the Cistern," or the names of otherwise unknown villages. With Kamdu in Coele-Syria the catalogue of cities begins afresh.

It is plain that the northern campaign of the Pharaoh was little better than a raid. No attempt was made to capture the cities of the coast, and re-establish in them the Egyptian power. The Egyptian army passed them by without any effort to reduce them. Possibly the Philistines had already settled on the coast, and had shown themselves too strong to be meddled with; possibly the Egyptian fleet was acting in concert with the troops on land, and Ramses cared only to lead his forces to some spot on the north Syrian coast, from whence, if necessary, the ships could convey them home. Whatever may have been the reason, the fact remains that Gaza alone of the cities of the Canaanitish coast fell into the hands of the Pharaoh. It was only in the extreme south, in what was so soon afterwards to become the territory of Judah, that he overran the country and occupied the large towns.

With the lists of Ramses III. our knowledge of the geography of Patriarchal Palestine is brought to a close. Henceforward we have to do with the Canaan of Israelitish conquest and settlement. The records of the Old Testament contain a far richer store of geographical names than we can ever hope to glean from the monuments of Egypt. But the latter show how little change after all was effected by the Israelitish conquest in the local nomenclature of the country. A few cities disappeared like Kirjath-Sepher, but on the whole not only the cities, but even the villages of pre-Israelitish Canaan survived under their old names. When we compare the names of the towns and villages of Judah enumerated in the Book of Joshua with the geographical lists of a Thothmes or a Ramses, we cannot but be struck by the coincidences between them. The occurrence of a name like Hadashah, "the New (Land)," in both cannot be the result of chance. It adds one more to the many arguments in favour of the antiquity of the Book of Joshua, or at all events of the materials of which it consists. Geography, at all events, gives no countenance to the theory which sees in the book a fabrication of later date. Even the leading cities of the Israelitish period are for the most part already the leading cities of the earlier Palestine. The future capital of David, for example, was already called Jerusalem long before the birth of Moses, and already occupied a foremost place among the kingdoms of Canaan.

CHAPTER VI
CANAANITISH CULTURE AND RELIGION

We have already learned from the annals of Thothmes III. how high was the state of civilization and culture among the merchant princes of Canaan in the age of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty. Artistically finished vases of gold and silver, rich bronzes, furniture carved out of ebony and cedar, and inlaid with ivory and precious stones—such were some of the manufactures of the land of Palestine. Iron was excavated from its hills and wrought into armour, into chariots, and into weapons of war; while beautifully shaped vessels of variegated glass were manufactured on the coast. The amber beads found at Lachish point to a trade with the distant Baltic, and it is possible that there may be truth after all in the old belief, that the Phoenicians obtained their tin from the isles of Britain. The mines of Cyprus, indeed, yielded abundance of copper, but, so far as we know, there were only two parts of the world from which the nations of Western Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean could have procured the vast amount of tin needed in the Bronze Age—the Malayan Peninsula and Cornwall. The Malayan Peninsula is out of the question—there are no traces of any commercial intercourse so far to the East; and it would seem, therefore, that we must look to Cornwall for the source of the tin. If so the trade would probably have been overland, like the amber trade from the Baltic.

Canaan was marked out by Nature to be a land of merchants. Its long line of coast fronted the semi-barbarous populations of Asia Minor, of the Ægean, and of the northern shores of Africa, while the sea furnished it with the purple dye of the murex. The country itself formed the high-road and link between the great kingdoms of the Euphrates and the Nile. It was here that the two civilizations of Babylonia and Egypt met and coalesced, and it was inevitable that the Canaanites, who possessed all the energy and adaptive quickness of a commercial race, should absorb and combine the elements of both. There was little except this combination that was original in Canaanitish art, but when once the materials were given, the people of Palestine knew how to work them up into new and graceful forms, and adapt them practically to the needs of the foreign world.

If we would realize the change brought about by this contact of Canaan with the culture of the stranger, we must turn to the rude figures carved upon the rocks in some of the valleys of Phoenicia. Near Tyre, for example, in the Wadi el-Qana we may still see some of these primitive sculptures, in which it is difficult even to recognize the human form. Equally barbarous in style are the early seals and cylinders made in imitation of those of Babylonia. It seems at first sight impossible to believe that such grotesque and child-like beginnings should have ended in the exquisite art of the age of Thothmes III.

At that period, however, Canaan already had behind it a long civilized past. The country was filled with schools and libraries, with richly-furnished palaces, and the workshops of the artisans. The cities on the coast had their fleets partly of merchantmen, partly of warships, and an active trade was carried on with all parts of the known world. The result was that the wealth of Palestine was enormous; the amount carried away by Thothmes is alone sufficient to prove it. Apart from the natural productions of the country—corn, wine, and oil, or the slaves which it had to furnish—immense quantities of gold, silver, and precious stones, sometimes in their native state, sometimes manufactured into artistic forms, were transported into Egypt. And in spite of this drain upon its resources, the supply seems never to have failed.

The reciprocal influence of the civilizations of Canaan and Egypt one upon the other, in the days when Canaan was an Egyptian province, is reflected in the languages of the two countries. On the one hand the Canaanite borrowed from Egypt words like tebah "ark," hin "a measure," and ebyôn "poor," while Canaan in return copiously enriched the vocabulary of its conquerors. As the Travels of a Mohar have shown us, under the nineteenth dynasty there was a mania for using Canaanitish words and phrases, similar to that which has more than once visited English society in respect to French. But before the rise of the nineteenth dynasty the Egyptian lexicon was already full of Semitic words. Frequently they denoted objects which had been imported from Syria. Thus a "chariot" was called a merkabut, a "waggon" being agolta; hurpu, "a sword," was the Canaanitish khereb, just as aspata, "a quiver," was ashpâh. The Canaanitish kinnor, "a lyre," was similarly naturalized in Egypt, like the names of certain varieties of "Syrian bread." The Egyptian words for "incense" (qadaruta), "oxen" (abiri), and "sea" (yum) were taken from the same source, though it is possible that the last-mentioned word, like qamhu, "wheat," had been introduced from Syria in the earliest days of Egyptian history. As might have been expected, several kinds of sea-going vessels brought with them their native names from the Phoenician coast. Already in the time of the thirteenth dynasty the larger ships were termed Kabanitu, or "Gebalite"; we read also of "boats" called Za, the Canaanite Zi, while a transport was entitled qauil, the Phoenician gol. The same name was imported into Greek under the form of gaulos, and we are told that it signified "a Phoenician vessel of rounded shape."

The language of Canaan was practically that which we call Hebrew. Indeed Isaiah (xix. 18) speaks of the two dialects as identical, and the so-called Phoenician inscriptions that have been preserved to us show that the differences between them were hardly appreciable. There were differences, however; the Hebrew definite article, for instance, is not found in the Phoenician texts. But the differences are dialectal only, like the differences which the discovery of the Moabite Stone has shown to have existed between the languages of Moab and Israel.

How the Israelites came to adopt "the language of Canaan" is a question into which we cannot here enter. There have been other examples of conquerors who have abandoned the language of their forefathers and adopted that of the conquered people. And it must be remembered, on the one hand, that the ancestors of Israel had lived in Canaan, where they would have learnt the language of the country, and, on the other hand, that their original tongue was itself a Semitic form of speech, as closely related to Hebrew as French or Spanish is to Italian.

The Tel el-Amarna tablets have told us something about the language of Canaan as it was spoken before the days when the Israelites entered the land. Some of the letters that were sent from Palestine contain the Canaanite equivalents of certain Babylonian words that occur in them. Like the Babylonian words, they are written in cuneiform characters, and since these denote syllables and not mere letters we know exactly how the words were pronounced. It is an advantage which is denied us by the Phoenician alphabet, whether in the inscriptions of Phoenicia or in the pages of the Old Testament, and we can thus obtain a better idea of the pronunciation of the Canaanitish language in the century before the Exodus than we can of the Hebrew language in the age of Hezekiah.

Among the words which have been handed down to us by the correspondents of the Pharaoh are maqani "cattle," anay "a ship," súsi "a horse," of which the Hebrew equivalents, according to the Masoretic punctuation, are miqneh, oni, and sûs. The king of Jerusalem says anuki, "I," the Hebrew anochi, while badiu, the Hebrew b'yado, and akharunu, the Hebrew akharono, are stated to signify "in his hand," and "after him." "Dust" is ghaparu, where the guttural gh represents the Canaanitish ayyin ('); "stomach" is batnu, the Hebrew beten; while kilubi, "a cage," corresponds with the Hebrew chelûb, which is used in the same sense by the prophet Jeremiah. Elsewhere we find risu, the Hebrew rosh, "a head," har "a mountain," samama "heaven," and mima "water," in Hebrew shâmayim and mayim, which we gather from the cuneiform spelling have been wrongly punctuated by the Masoretes, as well as khaya "living," the Hebrew khai, and makhsû, "they have smitten him," the Hebrew makhatsu.

It was the use of the definite article ha(n) which mainly distinguished Hebrew and Phoenician or Canaanite one from the other. And we have a curious indication in the Tel el-Amarna tablets, that the same distinction prevailed between the language of the Canaanites and that of the Edomites, who, as we learn from the Old Testament, were so closely related to the Israelites. In the letter to the Pharaoh, in which mention is made of the hostilities carried on by Edom against the Egyptian territory, one of the Edomite towns referred to is called Khinianabi. Transcribed into Hebrew characters this would be 'En-han-nabi, "the Spring of the Prophet." Here, therefore, the Hebrew article makes its appearance, and that too in the very form which it has in the language of Israel. The fact is an interesting commentary on the brotherhood of Jacob and Esau.

If the language of Canaan was influenced by that of Egypt, still more was it influenced by that of Babylonia. Long before Palestine became an Egyptian province it had been a province of Babylonia. And even when it was not actually subject to Babylonian government it was under the dominion of Babylonian culture. War and trade alike forced the Chaldæan civilization upon "the land of the Amorites," and the Canaanites were not slow to take advantage of it. The cuneiform writing of Babylonia was adopted, and therewith the language of Babylonia was taught and learned in the schools and libraries which were established in imitation of those of the Babylonians. Babylonian literature was introduced into the West, and the Canaanite youth became acquainted with the history and legends, the theology and mythology of the dwellers on the Euphrates and Tigris.

Such literary contact naturally left its impress on the language of Canaan. Words which the Semites of Babylonia had borrowed from the older Sumerian population of the country were handed on to the peoples of Palestine. The "city" had been a Sumerian creation; until brought under the influence of Sumerian culture, the Semite had been contented to live in tents. Indeed in Babylonian or Assyrian—the language of the Semitic inhabitants of Babylonia and Assyria—the word which signified "tent" was adopted to express the idea of "city" when the tent had been exchanged for city-life. In Canaan, on the other hand, the Sumerian word itself was adopted in a Semitic form, 'Ir, 'ar, or uru, "city," was originally the Sumerian eri.

The Canaanitish hêkâl, "a palace," again, came from a Sumerian source. This was ê-gal, or "great house." But it had passed to the West through the Semitic Babylonians, who had first borrowed the compound word under the form of êkallu. Like the city, the palace also was unknown to the primitive Semitic nomads. It belonged to the civilization of which the Sumerians of Chaldæa, with their agglutinative language, were the pioneers.

The borrowing, however, was not altogether one-sided. Palestine enriched the literary language of Babylonia with certain words, though these do not seem to have made their way into the language of the people. Thus we find words like bin-bini, "grandson," and înu, "wine," recorded in the lexical tablets of Babylonia and Assyria. Doubtless there were writers on the banks of the Euphrates who were as anxious to exhibit their knowledge of the language of Canaan as were the Egyptian scribes of the nineteenth dynasty, though their literary works have not yet been discovered.

The adoption of the Babylonian system of writing must have worked powerfully on the side of tincturing the Canaanitish language with Babylonian words. In the age of the Tel el-Amarna tablets there is no sign that any other system was known in the West. It is true that the letters sent to the Pharaoh from Palestine were written in the Babylonian language as well as in the Babylonian script, but we have evidence that the cuneiform characters were also used for the native language of the country. M. de Clercq possesses two seal-cylinders of the same date as the Tel el-Amarna correspondence, on one of which is the cuneiform inscription—"Hadad-sum, the citizen of Sidon, the crown of the gods," while on the other is "Anniy, the son of Hadad-sum, the citizen of Sidon." On the first, Hadad-sum is represented standing with his hands uplifted before the Egyptian god Set, while behind him is the god Resheph with a helmet on his head, a shield in one hand and a battle-axe in the other. On the seal of Anniy, Set and Resheph again make their appearance, but instead of the owner of the cylinder it is the god Horus who stands between them.

When the cuneiform syllabary was superseded in Palestine by the so-called Phoenician alphabet we do not know. The introduction of the new script was due probably to the Hittite invasion, which separated the Semites of the West from the Semites of the East. The Hittite occupation of Carchemish blocked the high-road of Babylonian trade to the Mediterranean, and when the sacred city of Kadesh on the Orontes fell into Hittite hands it was inevitable that Hittite rather than Babylonian influence would henceforth prevail in Canaan. However this may be, it seems natural to suppose that the scribes of Zebulon referred to in the Song of Deborah and Barak (Judges v. 14) wrote in the letters of the Phoenician alphabet and not in the cuneiform characters of Babylonia. As long, indeed, as the old libraries remained open and accessible, with their stores of cuneiform literature, there must have been some who could read them, but they would have been rather the older inhabitants of the country than the alien conquerors from the desert. When the Moabite Stone was engraved, it is clear from the forms of the letters that the Phoenician alphabet had long been in use in the kingdom of Mesha. The resemblance of these letters to those found in the earliest of the Greek inscriptions makes it equally clear that the introduction of the alphabet into the islands of the Ægean must have taken place at no distant period from the age of the Moabite Stone. Such an introduction, however, implies that the new alphabet had already taken deep root among the merchants of Canaan, and driven out before it the cumbrous syllabary of Chaldæa. It was in this alphabet that Hiram and Solomon corresponded together, and it is probable that Moses made use of it. We may even conjecture that the Israelitish settlement in Palestine brought with it the gift of the "Phoenician" alphabet.

As we have already seen, the elements of Babylonian art were quickly absorbed by the Canaanites. The seal-cylinder was imitated, at first with but indifferent success, and such Babylonian ornamental designs as the rosette, the sacred tree, and the winged cherub were taken over and developed in a special way. At times the combination with them of designs borrowed from Egypt produced a new kind of artistic ornament.

But it was in the realm of religion that the influence of Babylonia was most powerful. Religion, especially in the ancient world, was inextricably bound up with its culture; it was impossible to adopt the one without adopting a good deal of the other at the same time. Moreover, the Semites of Babylonia and of Canaan belonged to the same race, and that meant a community of inherited religious ideas. With both the supreme object of worship was Baal or Bel, "the lord," who was but the Sun-god under a variety of names. Each locality had its own special Baal: there were, in fact, as many Baals, or Baalim, as there were names and attributes for the Sun-god, and to the worshippers in each locality the Baal adored there was the supreme god. But the god resembled his worshipper who had been made in his image; he was the father and head of a family with a wife and son. The wife, it is true, was but the colourless reflection of the god, often indeed but the feminine Baalah, whom the Semitic languages with their feminine gender required to exist by the side of the masculine Baal. But this was only in accordance with the Semitic conception of woman as the lesser man, his servant rather than his companion, his shadow rather than his helpmeet.

The existence of an independent goddess, unmarried and possessing all the attributes of the god, was contrary to the fundamental conceptions of the Semitic mind. Nevertheless we find in Canaan an Ashtoreth, whom the Greeks called Astarte, as well as a Baal. The cuneiform inscriptions have given us an explanation of the fact.

Ashtoreth came from Babylonia. There she was known as Istar, the evening star. She had been one of those Sumerian goddesses who, in accordance with the Sumerian system, which placed the mother at the head of the family, were on an equal footing with the gods. She lay outside the circle of Semitic theology with its divine family, over which the male Baal presided, and the position she occupied in later Babylonian religion was due to the fusion between the Sumerian and Semitic forms of faith, which took place when the Semites became the chief element in Babylonia. But Sumerian influence and memories were too strong to allow of any transformation either in the name or in the attributes of the goddess. She remained Istar, without any feminine suffix, and it was never forgotten that she was the evening-star.

It was otherwise in the West. There Istar became Ashtoreth with the feminine termination, and passed eventually into a Moon-goddess "with crescent horns." Ashtoreth-Karnaim, "Ashtoreth with the two horns," was already in existence in the age of Abraham. In Babylonia the Moon-god of ancient Sumerian belief had never been dethroned; but there was no Moon-god in Canaan, and accordingly the transformation of the Babylonian goddess into "the queen of the night" was a matter of little difficulty.

Once domesticated in Palestine, with her name so changed as to declare her feminine character, Ashtoreth soon tended to lose her independence. Just as there were Baalim or "Baals" by the side of Baal, so there were Astaroth or "Ashtoreths" by the side of Ashtoreth.

The Semites of Babylonia themselves had already begun the work of transformation. They too spoke of Istarât or "Istars," and used the word in the general sense of "goddesses." In Canaan, however, Ashtarôth had no such general meaning, but denoted simply the various Ashtoreths who were worshipped in different localities, and under different titles. The individual Ashtoreth of Gebal was separate from the individual Ashtoreth of Bashan, although they alike represented the same divine personality.

It is true that even in the West Istar did not always become the feminine complement of Baal. Here and there the old form of the name was preserved, without any feminine suffix. But when this was the case, the necessary result was that the female character of the deity was forgotten. Istar was conceived of as a god, and accordingly on the Moabite Stone Ashtar is identified with Chemosh, the patron-god of Mesha, just as in Southern Arabia also Atthar is a male divinity.

The worship of Ashtoreth absorbed that of the other goddesses of Canaan. Among them there was one who had once occupied a very prominent place. This was Ashêrah, the goddess of fertility, whose name is written Asirtu and Asratu in the tablets of Tel el-Amarna. Ashêrah was symbolized by a stem stripped of its branches, or an upright cone of stone, fixed in the ground, and the symbol and the goddess were at times confounded together. The symbol is mistranslated "grove" in the Authorized Version of the Old Testament, and it often stood by the side of the altar of Baal. We find it thus represented on early seals. In Palestine it was usually of wood; but in the great temple of Paphos in Cyprus there was an ancient and revered one of stone. This, however, came to be appropriated to Ashtoreth in the days when the older Ashêrah was supplanted by the younger Ashtoreth.

We hear of other Canaanitish divinities from the monuments of Egypt. The goddess Edom, the wife of Resheph, has already been referred to. Her name is found in that of the Gittite, Obed-Edom, "the servant of Edom," in whose house the ark was kept for three months (2 Sam. vi. 10). Resheph, too, has been mentioned in an earlier page. He was the god of fire and lightning, and on the Egyptian monuments he is represented as armed with spear and helmet, and bears the titles of "great god" and "lord of heaven." Along with him we find pictures of a goddess called Kedesh and Kesh. She stands on the back of a lion, with flowers in her left hand and a serpent in her right, while on her head is the lunar disk between the horns of a cow. She may be the goddess Edom, or perhaps the solar divinity who was entitled  in Babylonian, and whose name enters into that of an Edomite king A-rammu, who is mentioned by Sennacherib.

But, like Istar, a considerable number of the deities of Palestine were borrowed from Babylonia. In the Tel el-Amarna tablets the god of Jerusalem is identified with the warlike Sun-god of Babylonia, Nin-ip, and there was a sanctuary of the same divinity further north, in Phoenicia. Foremost among the deities whose first home was on the banks of the Euphrates were Arm and Anat, and Rimmon. Anu, whose name is written Anah in Hebrew, was the god of the sky, and he stood at the head of the Babylonian pantheon. His wife Anat was but a colourless reflection of himself, a grammatical creation of the Semitic languages. But she shared in the honours that were paid to her consort, and the divinity that resided in him was reflected upon her. Anat, like Ashtoreth, became multiplied under many forms, and the Anathoth or "Anat" signified little more than "goddesses." Between the Ashtaroth and the Anathoth the difference was but in name.

The numerous localities in Palestine which received their names from the god Rimmon are a proof of his popularity. The Babylonian Rimmon or Ramman was, strictly speaking, the god of the air, but in the West he was identified with the Sun-god Hadad, and a place near Megiddo bore the compound title of Hadad-Rimmon (Zech. xii. 11). His naturalization in Canaan seems to belong to a very early period; at all events, in Sumerian he was called Martu, "the Amorite," and seal-cylinders speak of "the Martu gods." One of these has been found in the Lebanon. The Assyrian tablets tell us that he was also known as Dadu in the West, and under this form we find him in names like El-Dad and Be-dad, or Ben-Dad.

Like Rimmon, Nebo also must have been transported to Palestine at an early epoch. Nebo "the prophet" was the interpreter of Bel-Merodach of Babylon, the patron of cuneiform literature, and the god to whom the great temple of Borsippa—the modern Birs-i-Nimrud—was dedicated. Doubtless he had migrated to the West along with that literary culture over which he presided. There his name and worship were attached to many localities. It was on the summit of Mount Nebo that Moses died; over Nebo, Isaiah prophesies, "Moab shall howl;" and we hear of a city called "the other Nebo" in Judah (Neh. vii. 33).

Another god who had been borrowed from Babylonia by the people of Canaan was Malik "the king," a title originally of the supreme Baal. Malik is familiarly known to us in the Old Testament as Moloch, to whom the first-born were burned in the fire. At Tyre the god was termed Melech-kirjath, or "king of the city," which was contracted into Melkarth, and in the mouths of the Greeks became Makar. There is a passage in the book of the prophet Amos (v. 25, 26), upon which the Assyrian texts have thrown light. We there read: "Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? Yet ye have borne Sikkuth your Malik and Chiun your Zelem, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves."

Sikkuth and Chiun are the Babylonian Sakkut and Kaivan, a name given to the planet Saturn. Sakkut was a title of the god Nin-ip, and we gather from Amos that it also represented Malik "the king." Zelem, "the image," was another Babylonian deity, and originally denoted "the image" or disk of the sun. His name and worship were carried into Northern Arabia, and a monument has been discovered at Teima, the Tema of Isaiah xxi. 14, which is dedicated to him. It would seem, from the language of Amos, that the Babylonian god had been adored in "the wilderness" as far back as the days when the Israelites were encamping in it. Nor, indeed, is this surprising: Babylonian influence in the West belonged to an age long anterior to that of the Exodus, and even the mountain whereon the oracles of God were revealed to the Hebrew lawgiver was Sinai, the mountain of Sin. The worship of Sin, the Babylonian Moon-god, must therefore have made its way thus far into the deserts of Arabia. Inscriptions from Southern Arabia have already shown us that there too Sin was known and adored.

Dagon, again, was another god who had his first home in Babylonia. The name is of Sumerian origin, and he was associated with Ami, the god of the sky. Like Sin, he appears to have been worshipped at Harran; at all events, Sargon states that he inscribed the laws of that city "according to the wish of Anu and Dagon." Along with Arm he would have been brought to Canaan, and though we first meet with his name in the Old Testament in connection with the Philistines, it is certain that he was already one of the deities of the country whom the Philistine invaders adopted. One of the Canaanitish governors in the Tel el-Amarna correspondence bears the Assyrian name of Dagon-takala, "we trust in Dagon." The Phoenicians made him the god of corn in consequence of the resemblance of his name to the word which signifies "corn"; primarily, however, he would have been a god of the earth. The idea that he was a fish-god is of post-Biblical date, and due to a false etymology, which derived his name from the Hebrew dag, "a fish." The fish-god of Babylonia, however, whose image is sometimes engraved on seals, was a form of Ea, the god of the deep, and had no connection with Dagon. Doubtless there were other divinities besides these whom the peoples of Canaan owed to the Babylonians. Mr. Tomkins is probably right in seeing in the name of Beth-lehem a reminiscence of the Babylonian god Lakhmu, who took part in the creation of the world, and whom a later philosophizing generation identified with Anu. But the theology of early Canaan is still but little known, and its pantheon is still in great measure a sealed book. Now and again we meet with a solitary passage in some papyrus or inscription on stone, which reveals to us for the first time the name of an otherwise unknown deity. Who, for instance, is the goddess 'Ashiti-Khaur, who is addressed, along with Kedesh, on an Egyptian monument now at Vienna, as "the mistress of heaven" and "ruler of all the gods"? The votive altars of Carthage make repeated mention of the goddess Tanit, the Peni or "Face" of Baal, whom the Greeks identified with Artemis. She must have been known in the mother-land of Phoenicia, and yet no trace of her worship there has as yet been found. There were "gods many and lords many" in primitive Palestine, and though a comprehensive faith summed them up as its Baalim and Ashtaroth they yet had individual names and titles, as well as altars and priests.

But though altars were numerous, temples were not plentiful. The chief seats of religious worship were "the high-places," level spots on the summits of hills or mountains, where altars were erected, and the worshipper was believed to be nearer the dwelling-place of the gods than he would have been in the plain below. The altar was frequently some natural boulder of rock, consecrated by holy oil, and regarded as the habitation of a god. These sacred stones were termed beth-els, bætyli as the Greeks wrote the word, and they form a distinguishing characteristic of Semitic faith. In later times many of them were imagined to have "come down from heaven." So deeply enrooted was this worship of stones in the Semitic nature, that even Mohammed, in spite of his iconoclastic zeal, was obliged to accommodate his creed to the worship of the Black Stone at Mekka, and the Kaaba is still one of the most venerated objects of the Mohammedan faith.

But the sacred stone was not only an object of worship or the consecrated altar of a deity, it might also take the place of a temple, and so be in very truth a beth-el, or "house of God." Thus at Medain Salih in North-western Arabia Mr. Doughty discovered three upright stones, which an inscription informed him were the mesged or "mosque" of the god Aera of Bozrah. In the great temple of Melkarth at Tyre Herodotus saw two columns, one of gold, the other of emerald, reminding us of the two pillars, Jachin and Boaz, which the Phoenician architect of Solomon erected in the porch of the temple at Jerusalem (1 Kings vii. 21). Similar columns of stone have been found in the Phoenician temple, called that of the Giants, in Gozo, one of which is still standing in its place.

While certain stones were thus regarded as the abode of deity, the high places whereon so many of them stood also received religious worship. The most prominent of the mountains of Syria were deified: Carmel became a Penu-el or "Face of God," Hermon was "the Holy One," and Mount Lebanon was a Baal. The rivers and springs also were adored as gods, and the fish which swam in them were accounted sacred. On the Phoenician coast was a river Kadisha, "the holy," and the Canaanite maiden saw in the red marl which the river Adonis brought down from the hills the blood of the slaughtered Sun-god Tammuz.

The temple of Solomon, built as it was by Phoenician architects and workmen, will give us an idea of what a Canaanitish temple was like. In its main outlines it resembled a temple in Babylonia or Assyria. There, too, there was an outer court and an inner sanctuary, with its parakku or "mercy-seat," and its ark of stone or wood, in which an inscribed tablet of stone was kept. Like the temple of Jerusalem, the Babylonian temple looked from the outside much like a rectangular box, with its four walls rising up, blank and unadorned, to the sky. Within the open court was a "sea," supported at times on oxen of bronze, where the priests and servants of the temple performed their ablutions and the sacred vessels were washed.

The Canaanitish altar was approached by steps, and was large enough for the sacrifice of an ox. Besides the sacrifices, offerings of corn and wine, of fruit and oil were also made to the gods. The sacrifices and offerings were of two kinds, the zau'at or sin-offering, and the shelem or thank-offering. The sin-offering had to be given wholly to the god, and was accordingly termed kalil or "complete"; a part of the thank-offering, on the other hand, might be carried away by him who made it. Birds, moreover, might constitute a thank-offering; they were not allowed when the offering was made for sin. Such at least was the rule in the later days of Phoenician ritual, to which belong the sacrificial tariffs that have been preserved.

In these sacrificial tariffs no mention is made of human sacrifices, and, as M. Clermont-Ganneau has pointed out, the ram takes in them the place of the man. But this was the result of the milder manners of an age when the Phoenicians had been brought into close contact with the Greeks. In the older days of Canaanitish history human sacrifice had held a foremost place in the ritual of Syria. It was the sacrifice of the firstborn son that was demanded in times of danger and trouble, or when the family was called upon to make a special atonement for sin. The victim was offered as a burnt sacrifice, which in Hebrew idiom was euphemistically described as passing through the fire.

Side by side with these human sacrifices were the abominations which were performed in the temples in honour of Ashtoreth. Women acted as prostitutes, and men who called themselves "dogs" foreswore their manhood. It was these sensualities practised in the name of religion which caused the iniquity of the Canaanites to become full.

It is pleasanter to turn to such fragments of Canaanitish mythology and cosmological speculation as have come down to us. Unfortunately most of it belongs in its present form to the late days of Greek and Roman domination, when an attempt was made to fuse the disjointed legends of the various Phoenician states into a connected whole, and to present them to Greek readers under a philosophical guise. How much, therefore, of the strange cosmogony and history of the gods recorded by Philon of Gebal really goes back to the patriarchal epoch of Palestine, and how much of it is of later growth, it is now impossible to say. In the main, however, it is of ancient date.

This is shown by the fact that a good deal of it has been borrowed directly or indirectly from Babylonia. How this could have happened has been explained by the Tel el-Amarna tablets. It was while Canaan was under the influence of Babylonian culture and Babylonian government that the myths and traditions of Babylonia made their way to the West. Among the tablets are portions of Babylonian legends, one of which has been carefully annotated by the Egyptian or Canaanite scribe. It is the story of the queen of Hades, who had been asked by the gods to a feast they had made in the heavens. Unable or unwilling to ascend to it, the goddess sent her servant the plague-demon, but with the result that Nergal was commissioned to descend to Hades and destroy its mistress. The fourteen gates of the infernal world, each with its attendant warder, were opened before him, and at last he seized the queen by the hair, dragging her to the ground, and threatening to cut off her head. But Eris-kigal, the queen of Hades, made a successful appeal for mercy; she became the wife of Nergal, and he the lord of the tomb.

Another legend was an endeavour to account for the origin of death. Adapa or Adama, the first man, who had been created by Ea, was fishing one day in the deep sea, when he broke the wings of the south wind. The south wind flew to complain to Anu in heaven, and Anu ordered the culprit to appear before him. But Adapa was instructed by Ea how to act. Clad in a garment of mourning, he won the hearts of the two guardians of the gate of heaven, the gods Tammuz and Gis-zida ("the firmly-fixed post"), so that they pleaded for him before Anu. Food and water were offered him, but he refused them for fear that they might be the food and water of death. Oil only for anointing and clothing did he accept. "Then Anu looked upon him and raised his voice in lamentation: 'O Adapa, wherefore atest thou not, wherefore didst thou not drink? The gift of life cannot now be thine.'" Though "a sinful man" had been permitted "to behold the innermost parts of heaven and earth," he had rejected the food and water of life, and death henceforth was the lot of mankind.

It is curious that the commencement of this legend, the latter portion of which has been found at Tel el-Amarna, had been brought to the British Museum from the ruins of the library of Nineveh many years ago. But until the discovery of the conclusion, its meaning and character were indecipherable. The copy made for the library of Nineveh was a late edition of the text which had been carried from Babylonia to the banks of the Nile eight hundred years before, and the fact emphasizes once more the Babylonian character of the culture and literature possessed by Palestine in the Patriarchal Age.

We need not wonder, therefore, if it is to Babylonia that the cosmological legends and beliefs of Phoenicia plainly point. The watery chaos out of which the world was created, the divine hierarchies, one pair of deities proceeding from another and an older pair, or the victory of Kronos over the dragon Ophioneus, are among the indications of their Babylonian origin. But far more important than these echoes of Babylonian mythology in the legendary lore of Phoenicia is the close relationship that exists between the traditions of Babylonia and the earlier chapters of Genesis. As is now well known, the Babylonian account of the Deluge agrees even in details with that which we find in the Bible, though the polytheism of Chaldæa is there replaced by an uncompromising monotheism, and there are little touches, like the substitution of an "ark" for the Babylonian "ship," which show that the narrative has been transported to Palestine. Equally Babylonian in origin is the history of the Tower of Babel, while two of the rivers of Eden are the Tigris and Euphrates, and Eden itself is the Edin or "Plain" of Babylonia.

Not so long ago it was the fashion to declare that such coincidences between Babylonian and Hebrew literature could be due only to the long sojourn of the Jews in Babylonia during the twenty years of the Exile. But we now know that the traditions and legends of Babylonia were already known in Canaan before the Israelites had entered the Promised Land. It was not needful for the Hebrew writer to go to Chaldæa in order that he might learn them; when Moses was born they were already current both in Palestine and on the banks of the Nile. The Babylonian colouring of the early chapters of Genesis is just what archaeology would teach us to expect it would have been, had the Pentateuch been of the age to which it lays claim.

Here and there indeed there are passages which must be of that age, and of none other. When in the tenth chapter of Genesis Canaan is made the brother of Cush and Mizraim, of Ethiopia and Egypt, we are carried back at once to the days when Palestine was an Egyptian province. The statement is applicable to no other age. Geographically Canaan lay outside the southern zone to which Egypt and Ethiopia belonged, except during the epoch of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, when all three were alike portions of a single empire. With the fall of that empire the statement ceased to be correct or even conceivable. After the era of the Israelitish conquest Canaan and Egypt were separated one from the other, not to be again united save for a brief space towards the close of the Jewish monarchy. Palestine henceforth belonged to Asia, not to Africa, to the middle zone, that is to say, which was given over to the sons of Shem.

There is yet another passage in the same chapter of Genesis which takes us back to the Patriarchal Age of Palestine. It is the reference to Nimrod, the son of Cush, the beginning of whose kingdom was Babel and Erech, and Accad and Calneh in the land of Shinar, and who was so familiar a figure in the West that a proverb was current there concerning his prowess in the chase. Here again we are carried to a date when the Kassite kings of Babylonia held rule in Canaan, or led thither their armies, and when the Babylonians were called, as they are in the Tel el-Amarna tablets, the Kassi or sons of Cush. Nimrod himself may be the Kassite monarch Nazi-Murudas. The cuneiform texts of the period show that the names borne by the Kassite kings were strangely abbreviated by their subjects; even in Babylonia, Kasbe and Sagarta-Suria, for instance, being written for Kasbeias and Sagarakti-Suryas, the latter of which even appears as Sakti-Surias, while Nazi-Murudas itself is found under the form of Nazi-Rattas. Similarly Duri-galzu and Kurigalzu take the place of Dur-Kurigalzi. There is no reason, therefore, why Nazi-Murudas should not have been familiarly known as Na-Muruda, more especially in distant Canaan.

Indeed we can almost fix the date to which the lifetime of Nimrod must be assigned. We are told that out of his kingdom "one went forth into Assyria," and there "builded" Nineveh and Calah, The cuneiform inscriptions have informed us who this builder of Calah was. He was Shalmaneser I., who was also the restorer of Nineveh and its temples, and who is stated by Sennacherib to have reigned six hundred years before himself. Such a date would coincide with the reign of Ramses II., the Pharaoh of the Oppression, as well as with the birth-time of Moses. It represents a period when the influence of Babylonia had not yet passed away from Canaan, and when there was still intercourse between the East and the West. Ramses claims to have overcome both Assyria and Shinar, and though the Shinar he means was the Shinar of Mesopotamia and not Chaldæa, it lay within the limits of Babylonian control. The reign of Ramses II. is the latest period down to which, with our present knowledge, we can regard the old influence of Babylonia in Canaan as still continuing, and it is equally the period to which, if we are to listen to the traditional teaching of the Church, the writer of the Pentateuch belonged. The voice of archaeology is thus in agreement with that of authority, and here as elsewhere true science declares herself the handmaid of the Catholic Church.

INDEX

 (deity), 256

Abel (place), 153

Abel-mizraim, 201

Abiliya, 126

Abimelech, 123, 127, 128, 129

Abram (in Babylonian), 169

Achshaph or Ekdippa, 211, 219, 229

Acre (Akku), 134, 154, 155, 157, 229, 235

Adai, 142

Adami, 219, 228

Adapa or Adama, 265

Addar, 153

Adon, 131

Adoni-zedek, 75

Adullam, 212, 221

Ahitub, 154

Ahmes I., 88, 94

Aia, 207

Ajalon, 137, 142

Akizzi, 131

Akkad, 55

Alasiya, 67, 107, 157, 223

'Aluna or 'Arna, 97, 228

Amalekites, 26, 35, 40, 41, 53

Amanus, 62, 107

Amber, 85, 242

Amenôphis II., 106, 110

Amenôphis III., 111, 112, 135

Amenôphis IV. or Khu-n-Aten, 71, 86, 112 et seq.

Ammi, 22, 64, 206

Ammi-anshi, 63, 206

Ammi-satana, 63

Ammiya, 131

Ammon, 22, 36, 38, 64, 179

Ammunira, 124

Amon (god), 87, 99, 110, 114

Amon-apt, 128, 152

Amorites, 28, 35, 36, 38, 40, 41, 42, 43 et seq., 56, 58, 65, 100, 110, 112, 119, 124 et seq., 152, 160, 163, 186, 239

Amorites, god of, 257

Amraphel, 64, 66, 67

Anab, 221

Anaharath, 229

Anakim, 36, 37

Anat, 82, 232, 257

Anu, 82, 169, 257, 259, 260

Anugas or Nukhasse, 98, 102, 107, 110

Aphekah, 239

Apphadana, 111

Aqabah, Gulf of, 26, 108

Aram-Naharaim (Mitanni), 72, 85, 86, 94, 101, 103, 108, 111, 131, 138, 149, 157, 163

Ararat, 46

Argob, 23

Ariel, 213

Arioch (see Eri-Aku), 63, 168

Arisu, 162

Arka, 26, 52, 128, 131

Article, definite, 248

Arvad, 52, 85, 100, 106, 129

Arzai, 143

Asher, 219

Ashêrah, 191, 255

Ashiti-Khaur, 260

Ashkelon, 141, 150, 160, 236

Ashtaroth-Karnaim, 35, 36, 133, 153, 161, 228

Ashtoreth, 168, 253 et seq., 264

Asphalt, 70

Assyria, 99, 105, 153, 155, 157

Aten-Ra, 113

Augustine, St., 41

Aupa (see Ube), 132

Avim, 54

Ayâb, 152, 153

Aziru, 124 et seq., 129, 131, 133

Baal, 253

Baalbek, 24

Babylon, 66, 67, 91, 102, 105

Babylonia, 55, 62, 72, 83, 100, 111, 124, 138, 142, 143

Babylonians, 87, 89

Balaam, 22, 64, 154

Bashan, 23, 35, 36, 38, 64, 95, 112, 133

Bedad, 257

Beduin, 26, 35, 53, 95, 124, 127, 133, 156, 209, 210

Beer-sheba, 180, 182, 183, 189

Bek'a, 25

Belshazzar, 175

Bene-berak, 135

Beth-anath, 157, 160, 164, 232, 235, 236, 239

Beth-el, 152, 153, 157, 190 et seq., 196, 212, 222, 232, 235

Bethels, 261 et seq.

Beth-lehem, 39, 75, 82, 197, 260

Beth-On, 192

Beth-Sannah, 143

Bethuel, 125

Beth-Ya, 232

Beya or Bâya, 151

Beyrout, 25, 124, 126, 164, 210, 211, 217

Bin-sumya, 136

Biridasyi, 133

Biridî, 134, 135

Bliss, Mr., 85, 119

Bosra, 133

Botanical Gardens at Thebes, 102

Burna-buryas, 111, 153 et seq.

Buzruna, 133

Calah, 269

Camel, 170

Cana, 222

Canaan, 41 et seq., 154, 157, 267; art of, 243 et seq.; merchants in, 154, 243

Canaanite words, 216, 245-8

Canaanites, 41, 106

Carchemish, 44, 45, 62, 66, 86, 99, 107

Carmel of Judah, 72, 146, 157, 160, 232, 235, 236, 239

Carmel, Mount, 29, 164, 229, 236, 238, 262

Cedars, 19

Chedor-laomer, 35, 64, 168

Chimham, 157, 235

Chinneroth, 228

Chiun, 258

Circumcision, 176

Copper, 57, 62, 85, 109, 242

Creation legends, 267

Cush, 91, 149, 268

Cyprus, 57, 60, 85, 98, 103, 157, 160

Dagon, 82, 169, 259

Damascus, 24, 35, 65, 98, 133, 176, 227, 236

Dapul, 160, 220, 236

Dead Sea, 21, 22, 74, 165, 177

Debir, 80, 221, 236, 237, 239

Deluge story, 267

Dor, 26

Dothan, 227

Doughty, Mr., 262

Dragoman, 146

Dudu, 125

Ea, 87

Ebed-Asherah, 89, 126 et seq.

Ebed-Sullim, 129

Ebed-Tob, 51, 71, 72, 75, 78, 88, 118, 121, 135, et seq., 155, 174

Ebyôn, 245

Edom, town of, 153; god, 229, 256

Edomites, 39, 53, 108, 206, 248

Ekron, 231

Elam, 56, 63, 88

Elephants, 101

Eliezer, 176

Elimelech, 140, 148

Elimelech of Tyre, 129

Ellasar (Larsa), 64, 69

El-rabi-Hor, 131

Emim, 36, 37, 38

En-athon, 136, 154

En-gedi, 40

En-han-nabi, 153

Ephraim, Mount, 30; sons of, 202, 231

Eri-Aku (Arioch), 63, 65 et seq.

Eta-gama (or Aidhu-gama), 129, 131, 132, 133

Ethiopia, 142, 149

Euphrates, 96, 101

Fenkhu, 104, 226

Galeed, 192

Gath, 137, 143, 144, 203, 230, 231

Gath-Carmel, 138, 143, 146, 148, 231

Hadad, 82, 257

Hadad-dan, 151

Hadad-el, 143

Hadad-Rimmon, 257

Hadad-sum, 250

Hadashah, 74, 160, 165, 236, 238, 239, 241

Hamath, 43, 53, 164, 211, 219, 227, 239

Harankal, 98, 110

Har-el, 77, 184, 231

Harran, 73, 166, 259

Havilah, 62

Hazezon-tamar, 40, 50, 179

Hazor, 94, 129, 211, 219, 228

Heber, 147

Hebrew language, 246 et seq.; words in tablets, 247

Hebron, 36, 37, 43, 46, 93, 146, 148, 164, 172, 185 et seq., 197, 201, 232, 239

Hêkâl, etymology of, 73, 249

Hêkalim, 231

Helkath, 232

Hermon, 18, 29, 52, 164, 239, 262

Herodotus, 43, 262

Hin, 245

Gath-Rimmon, 135

Gaulos, 245

Gaza, 94, 96, 110, 143, 144, 150, 157, 181, 215, 236, 239

Gaza or Khazi, 134, 226

Gebal, 43, 53, 85, 89, 94, 123 et seq., 152, 211, 217

Gebel Usdum, 178

Gerar, 181, 189

Gezer, 94, 134, 136, 141, 144, 151

Gibeah, 232

Gilu-khipa, 111

Girgashites, 43, 51

Goshen, 201

Gudea, 62, 70

Hittites, 41, 43, 46 et seq., 86, 89, 102, 104, 107, 110, 118, 124, 131, 156, 157, 163, 185, 209, 251

Hivites, 43, 52

Horites, 35, 39, 52, 64

Horus, 92

Hui, 156

Hyksos, 88, 91 et seq., 170, 201

Ibleam, 229

Ihem or Iha (see Yahem), 96, 239

Ilgi, 129

Inuam, 98, 110, 133, 157, 235, 236

Ionian, 127

'Ir, 249

Ir-Shemesh, 238

Iron, 84, 224, 242

Isaiah, 74

Israel, meaning of name, 194

Istar (Ashtoreth), 87, 168, 253

Ituraea, 23

Jabbok, 193

Jachin and Boaz, 161, 262

Jacob-el, 160, 164, 194, 202, 232, 236, 239

Jacob's well, 195

Jebusites, 43, 51

Jehovah-jireh, 77

Jephthah-Hadad, 122, 139

Jerusalem (see Salem), 29, 43, 50, 51, 71, 75, 77 et seq., 88, 142, 143, 160, 165, 173, 236, 239; etymology of name, 73

Joktheel, 239

Joppa, 150, 151, 213, 230

Jordan, 21, 74, 212, 237, 239

Joseph, 200 et seq.

Joseph-el, 202, 230

Kadesh on the Orontes, 43, 96, 98, 104, 111, 131, 132, 157, 163, 209, 217, 226

Kadesh-barnea, 35, 39, 58, 64, 180

Kadmonites, 63, 206

Kaft, 83, 85

Kana'an, 41, 157

Kanneh, 132

Kassites, 88, 147, 149, 269

Kedesh (goddess), 256

Keilah, 71, 144, 145, 146

Kenites, 224

Khabiri, 51, 122, 138, 141, 143, 144, 146 et seq.

Khalunni, 133

Khammurabi, 62, 66

Khani, 125

Khata, 44

Khata-sil, 158

Khatip (Hotep), 125, 126

Khayapa, 127

Khazi (Gaza), 134

Khu-n-Aten (Amenôphis IV.), 71, 113 et seq., 120

Kikar, 72, 76, 142

Kinanat, 132

Kinza, 129

Kiriathaim, 35, 38

Kirjath-Sepher, 81, 161, 220, 221

Kishion, 228

Kudur-Lagamar (Chedor-lao-mer), 65, 69

Kudur-Mabug, 65, 69

Kumidi (or Kamdu), 126, 129, 133, 157, 164, 217, 227, 235, 239

Kuri-galzu, 155

Labai, 51, 134 et seq., 141, 143, 145

Lachish, 85, 119, 122, 139, 141, 148

Lagamar, 69

Laish, 25, 228

Lakhmu, 82, 260

Larsa (Ellasar), 65, 66, 69

Lebanon, 27, 60, 62, 101, 262

Levi-el, 239

Libnah, 164, 239

Lot, 65

Lotan (Lutennu), 95, 150, 156, 206

Ma'arath, 232

Mabug, 65

Machpelah, 187, 188

Mad-ga, 70

Mafkat (Sinai), 57, 109

Magan (Sinai), 57, 60

Magoras, 164, 210, 217, 238

Malachite, 109, 110

Malchiel, 135 et seq., 141, 143, 144, 146, 152

Manahath, 150

Max Müller, Dr. W., 81, 160, 206, 221

Mearah, 217

Megiddo, 30, 31, 94, 97 et seq., 134, 135, 150, 212, 226, 257

Melchizedek, 71 et seq., 173

Melkarth, 43

Meneptah, 110, 161, 162, 181

Merom, 160, 227, 236

Midian, 57, 109

Migdol, 153, 155, 165, 230, 239

Misheal, 229

Misi, 95

Mitanni (Aram-Naharaim), 86, 89, 108, 111, 124, 150, 160

Miya-Riya (Meri-Ra), 143

Mizraim, 42

Moab, 21, 36, 38, 53, 153, 165, 180, 237

Mohar, Travels of a, 84, 189, 204 et seq., 209

Moloch, 82, 258

Moriah, 77, 184 et seq.

Moses, 267

Mosheh, 153

Most High God, 173

Musikhuna, 150

Mut-Hadad, 152

Na'amah, 231

Namya-yitsa, 129, 133, 134

Naram-Sin, 57, 59, 60, 168

Nazi-Murudas, 269

Nebo, 82, 257

Negela, 26

Ni, 101, 106, 125, 131, 132

Nimrod, 91, 269

Nin-ip, 79, 144, 174, 256, 258; Bit, 127, 144

Nukhasse (Anugas), 98, 102, 107, 116, 125, 132

On, 25, 92, 191

Pa-Hor, 126

Pakhanate, 128

Palasa, 131

Pa-ur, 142, 144

Pella, 157, 228, 235

Penuel, or Peniel, 193, 262

Perizzites, 20, 52, 162

Pethor, 22, 64

Petrie, Prof., 48, 62, 113, 120

Philistines, 17, 54, 163, 182

Phoenicia, 25, 85, 99, 152, 191

Phoenician alphabet, 251

Phoenicians, 33, 177

Pinches, Mr., 70, 231

Pu-Hadad, 150

Purple-dye, 84, 85

Qana or Qina, 97

Qatna, 107, 132

Ra, 92

Rabbah, 78, 143, 144, 146, 232

Ramses II., 21, 45, 74, 81, 110, 157 et seq., 161, 204, 234, 269

Ramses III., 21, 53, 74, 109, 110, 162 et seq., 181, 235, 240

Raphia, 222

Raphon, 37, 228

Rehob, 222, 231

Rehoboth, 189, 223

Rephaim, 35, 36, 37, 48, 228

Resheph, 21, 237, 251, 256

Rethpana, Lake of, 21, 165, 237, 239

Rianap, 150

Rib-Hadad, 89, 123 et seq., 152

Rimmon, 82, 257

Rimmon-nirari, 116

Rowlands, Dr., 39, 180

Sacrifice of the firstborn, 183, 264

Sacrifices, 263

Salem or Shalem (Jerusalem), 71, 74, 160, 165, 173, 239

Salim (god), 73, 75, 79, 144, 174

Samas-akh-iddin, 116

Sangar (see Singara), 68, 102

Saratum or Zurata, 135, 154

Sarepta, 211

Sardinians, 95, 127

Sargon of Akkad, 49, 55, 87, 167

Scheil, Dr., 121

Schumacher, Dr., 161

Seal-cylinders, 60, 83, 120, 252

Seir, 39, 53, 108, 138, 146

Sela, 160, 236, 239

Set, 251

Seti I., 41, 110, 157, 235

Seti or Suta, 134, 138

Shalem or Salem, 195

Shasu (see Beduin), 40, 41, 104

Shaveh, 71

Shechem, 29, 30, 49, 134, 160, 170, 195, 198, 211, 219

Shenir, 28, 59, 164, 239

Shiloh, 30

Shimron, 227

Shimron-meron, 220

Shinab, 70

Shinar, 67, 68, 269

Ships, 85, 247

Shunem, 135, 229

Sibti-Hadad, 152

Siddim, 35, 40, 64, 177, 178

Sidon, 42, 94, 126, 128, 129, 164, 211, 250

Sihon, 50

Sin (city), 52

Sin (god), 59, 87, 259

Sinai, 57, 58, 100, 109, 160, 259

Singara (see Sangar), 67, 108, 157

Sinuhit, 63, 205 et seq.

Sirah, 232

Sirion, 28

Sitti or Sati, 40

Socho, 160, 230, 236

Sodom, 65, 76, 172, 177, 237

Sonzar, 132

Stone of Job, 161

Subari, 87

Subsalla, 62

Sum-Adda, 154

Sumer, 55, 67

Sumerian, 249

Suri, 87

Sutarna, 111, 150

Sutatna or Zid-athon, 154, 155

Sutekh, 92

Sute, 40, 95, 127, 134, 143

Su-yardata or Su-ardatum, 137, 144, 145

Su-yarzana, 134

Taanach, 97, 150, 229

Tadu-khipa, 112

Tagi, 137, 143, 146

Takhis, 100, 110, 211, 220

Tamar (Tumur), 150

Tammuz, 262

Tanit, 194, 260

Tapun, 232

Tarqu, 222

Tebah, 245

Teie, 112, 120

Tel el-Amarna, 120 et seq.

Tel-loh, 61

Temple, 262

Terebinth, 19

Thahash, 100, 220

Thothmes II., 94, 101

Thothmes III., 36, 44, 53, 67, 78, 83, 94 et seq., 110, 146, 208, 224, 242

Thothmes IV., 110

Tibhath, 217, 227

Tidal, 64, 70

Tidanum, 59, 62

Timnah, 220

Tithes, 175

Tomkins, Mr., 37, 82

Tree, sacred, 182

Trumbull, Dr., 39, 180

Tunip, 99, 104, 107, 111, 125 et seq., 133

Turbazu, 122, 138

Tusratta, 112

Tut-ankh-Amon, 156

Tyre, 43, 85, 94, 123, 127, 129, 157, 162, 211, 218, 235, 244, 262

Ube or Ubi, 132, 216, 222

Ugarit, 106, 236

Ur, 65, 166

Uru, 73, 77

Usu, 128, 157, 211, 218, 235

Winckler, Dr., 78

Yabitiri, 150

Yabni-el, 122

Yahem (see Ihem), 230

Yamutbal, 65, 69

Yankhamu, 146, 151

Yapa-Hadad, 127

Yapakhi, 134

Yasdata, 135

Yerzeh, 150, 160, 230, 236

Yidya, 150

Yikhbil-Khamu, 140, 144

Yisyara, 121

Zahi, 83, 103

Zakkal, 163

Zamzummim, 36, 38

Zedek, 75

Zelah, 122, 139, 148, 232

Zelem, 258

Zemar, 26, 52, 100, 123, 126 et seq., 152

Zephath, 232

Zimmern, Dr., 79

Zimrida or Zimridi, 121, 122, 123, 127, 128, 129, 130, 139

Zinzar, 132

Zion, 197

Zippor, 162

Zoan, 93, 170, 198

Zorah, 137

Zurata or Saratum, 135, 154

Zuzim, 35