It is now nearly twenty years ago since the archæological world was startled, not to say revolutionized, by the discovery of the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna in Upper Egypt. Nor was it the archæological world only which the discovery affected. The historian and the theologian have equally had to modify and forsake their old ideas and assumptions, and the criticism of the Old Testament writings has entered upon a new and altogether unexpected stage. The archæologist, the historian and the Biblical critic alike can never again return to the point of view which was dominant before 1887, or regard the ancient world of the East with the unbelieving eyes of a Grote or a Cornewall Lewis. A single archæological discovery has upset mountains of learned discussion, of ingenious theory and sceptical demonstration.

At the risk of repeating a well-worn tale, I will describe briefly the nature of the discovery. In the ruins of a city and palace which, like the palace of Aladdin, rose out of the desert sands into gorgeous magnificence for a short thirty years and then perished utterly, some 300 clay tablets were found, inscribed, not with the hieroglyphics of Egypt, but with the cuneiform characters of Babylonia. They were, in fact, the contents of the Foreign Office of Amon-hotep IV., the “Heretic King” of Egyptian history, who endeavoured to reform the old religion of Egypt and to substitute for it a pantheistic monotheism. This was about 1400 years before the birth of Christ, and a full century before the Israelitish Exodus. The attempt failed in spite of the fanatical efforts of its royal patron to force it upon his people, and of his introduction of religious persecution for the first time into the world. The Eighteenth dynasty, to which he belonged, and which had conquered Western Asia, went down in civil and religious war; the Asiatic Empire of Egypt was lost, and a new dynasty sat on the throne of Thebes.

The archives in the Foreign Office included not only the foreign correspondence of Amon-hotep’s own reign, but the foreign correspondence also of his father, which he had carried with him from Thebes when he founded his new capital at Tel el-Amarna. And the scope and character of it are astounding. There are letters from the kings of Babylonia and Assyria, of Mesopotamia and the Hittites, of Cilicia and Cappadocia, besides letters and communications of all sorts from the Egyptian governors and vassal princes in Canaan and Syria. Most of the correspondence is in the language of Babylonia; it is only in a few rare instances that the cuneiform characters embody the actual language of the people from whom the letters were sent. It is difficult to imagine anything more subversive of the ideas about the ancient history of the East, which were current twenty years ago, than the conclusions to be drawn from this correspondence. It proved that, so far as literary culture is concerned, the civilized Oriental world in the Mosaic age was quite as civilized as our own. There were schools and libraries all over it, in which a foreign language and a complicated foreign system of writing formed an essential part of education. It proved that this education was widely spread: there are letters from Bedâwîn shêkhs as well as from a lady who was much interested in politics. It showed that this correspondence was active and regular, that those who took part in it wrote to each other on the trivial topics of the day, and that the high-roads and postal service were alike well organized. We learned that the nations of the Orient were no isolated units cut off from one another except when one of them made war with the other, but that, on the contrary, their mutual relations were as close and intimate as those of modern Europe. The Babylonian king in his distant capital on the Euphrates sent to condole with the Egyptian Pharaoh on his father’s death like a modern potentate, and was every whit as anxious to protect and encourage the trade of his country as Mr. Chamberlain. Indeed, the privileges of the merchant and the sacredness of his person had long been a matter of international law.

In one respect the advocates of international harmony and arbitration were better off in the Mosaic age than they are in the Europe of to-day. There was no difficulty about diversities of language and the danger of being misunderstood. The language of diplomacy, of education and trade was everywhere the same, and was understood, read and written by all educated persons. Even the Egyptian lord of Western Asia had to swallow his pride and write in the language and script of Babylonia when he corresponded with his own subjects in Canaan. Indeed, like English officials in Egypt, who are supposed to write to one another on official business in French, his own Egyptian envoys and commissioners sent their official communications in the foreign tongue. The Oriental world in the century before the Exodus thus anticipated the Roman Empire.

Canaan was the centre and focus of the correspondence. It was the battle-ground and meeting-place of the great powers of the Eastern world. It had long been a province of Babylonia, and, like the rest of the Babylonian Empire, subject to Babylonian law and permeated by Babylonian literary culture. It was during these centuries of Babylonian government that it had come to adopt as its own the script and language of its rulers; the deities of Babylonia were worshipped on the high places of Palestine, and Babylonian legends and traditions were taught in its schools.

Out of Canaan had marched the Hyksos who conquered Egypt. The names of their kings found on the monuments that have survived to us are distinctively Canaanite of the patriarchal period; among them is Jacob-el, or Jacob, whom the Alexandrine Jews seem to have identified with their own ancestor. While the Hyksos Pharaohs reigned, Egypt was but a dependency of Canaan; the source of Hyksos power lay in Canaan, and their Egyptian capital was accordingly placed close to the Canaanitish frontier.

When, after five generations of warfare, the native princes of Thebes succeeded at last in expelling the Hyksos conquerors from the valley of the Nile and in founding the Eighteenth dynasty, they perceived that their best hope of preventing a second Asiatic conquest lay in possessing themselves of the land which was, as it were, the key to their own. The Hyksos conquest, in fact, had shown that Canaan was at once a link between Asia and Africa, and the open gate which let the invader into the fertile fields of Egypt. The war, therefore, that had ended by driving the Asiatic out of Egypt was now carried into his own home. Campaign after campaign finally crushed Canaanitish resistance, and the Egyptian standards were planted on the banks of the Euphrates. Palestine and Syria were transformed into Egyptian provinces; in the language of the tenth chapter of Genesis, they became the brothers of Mizraim.

The Tel el-Amarna letters tell us how the new provinces were organized. The most important cities were placed under Egyptian governors, many of whom, however, were natives. But they were carefully watched by Egyptian commissioners, to whom the control of the military forces was entrusted, as well as by special high-commissioners sent from time to time by the imperial Government. Local jealousies and rivalries, moreover, among the governors prevented union among them against the central power, and up to a certain point were not discouraged by the Egyptian Foreign Office. The Tel el-Amarna letters offer us a curious picture of the extent to which their mutual animosities were carried in the days when the Egyptian Empire was growing feeble. All the governors protest their devotion to the court, and all like are accused by their rivals of intriguing and even fighting against it.

Besides the states which were thus directly under Egyptian rule, there were also protected states. Here the representative of the old line of kings was allowed to retain a titular authority, though in reality his power was not greater than that of the governors in other states. But, whether governor or protected prince his duty to the imperial Government was clearly marked out for him. He had to levy the taxes and send a fixed amount of tribute to the Egyptian Treasury, to provide a certain number of militia, and to send official reports to the king. He had further to see that the troops of the army of occupation were duly provided with pay and maintenance.

The army of occupation in the reign of Amon-hotep IV. does not seem to have been large. The imperial forces were needed at home to enforce the new faith upon the Egyptian people, and to put down the discontent that was growing there. We hear, however, of “the household troops,” who belonged to the standing army of Egypt and formed the nucleus of the permanent garrison. How many of them were native Egyptians it is impossible to say; as we hear of Kushites or Ethiopians among them, it is probable that the Sudanese were at least as largely employed on foreign service as the Egyptians themselves. The Egyptian has never been fond of military service, whereas, we all now know, the Sudanese is essentially a fighting animal.

Both sides of the Jordan were included in the Egyptian administration. One of the Tel el-Amarna letters, for example, is from a governor of “the field of Bashan.” It is characteristic of the whole series, and shows what the relations were between the army of occupation and the native levies. I cannot do better than quote it in full: “To the king, my lord, thus says Artamanya, the governor of the Field of Bashan, thy servant: at the feet of the king, my lord, seven times seven do I fall. Behold, thou hast written to me to join the household troops, and how could I be a dog (of the king) and not go? Behold, I and my soldiers and my chariots will join the household troops in whatever place the king my lord orders.”

The name of Artamanya is not Semitic; neither is it Egyptian. The fact brings us to one of the most interesting and unexpected results of the decipherment of the Tel el-Amarna correspondence. And this is that the ruling caste in the Palestine of the Mosaic age was largely of Hittite origin, or had come from those countries of the north whose population was related in blood and language to the Hittites of Asia Minor.

In Northern Mesopotamia was a kingdom which ranked with those of Egypt and Babylonia as regarded power and influence. Its native name was Mitanni; the Hebrews, like the Egyptians, called it the kingdom of Aram Naharaim. It stretched from Assyria to the Orontes, and contended with the Hittites of Carchemish for the possession of the fords of the Euphrates. Its rulers had descended upon it from the highlands of Armenia and the Caucasus, and had reduced the native Aramæan population to servitude. There are frequent references in the Tel el-Amarna tablets to Mitannian intrigues in Canaan. Mitannian armies had from time to time marched against the Canaanitish cities, and although there was now a nominal alliance between Mitanni and Egypt, and the royal families of the two countries were united by marriage, the Mitannian court never lost an opportunity of sending secret support to the disaffected princes of Canaan or of encouraging them in their revolts from the Egyptian Government. In many parts of the country the ruling family continued to be Mitannian, and accordingly we find more than one governor who bears a Mitannian name. Thus one of them, as we see, was governor of Bashan, and there was another who had his seat near the Sea of Galilee.

Mitannian influence, however, was chiefly confined to the northern part of Palestine. It was otherwise with the Hittites, whose marauding bands penetrated as far south as the frontiers of Egypt. The important part they played in the early history of Canaan and the substantial element they must have contributed to the future population of the country has but lately been disclosed to us by the advance that has been made in the interpretation of the Tel el-Amarna texts. We have at last obtained an explanation of the fact that whereas in the older Babylonian period Canaan was known as “the land of the Amorites,” it was called by the Assyrians “the land of the Hittites.” The Assyrian kings even speak of Judah and Moab as “Hittite,” and the town of Ashdod is described by Sargon as a “Hittite” state. What this must mean has indeed long been recognized by the Assyriologists. When the Assyrians first became acquainted with Palestine the Hittites must have been there the dominant power. But how and when this came about we have but just begun to learn, and it is the story of the Hittite occupation of Canaan, as a better knowledge of the Tel el-Amarna tablets is making possible, that I now propose to describe.

The Hittite race was of Cappadocian origin. Professor Ramsay has pointed out that the hieroglyphic characters which they used in their inscriptions must have been invented on the treeless plateau of Central Asia Minor, and that their capital, whose ruins now strew the ground at Boghaz Keui, north of the Halys, was the centre towards which all the early high-roads of Asia Minor converge. But they extended on both sides of the Taurus Mountains, and at an early date had planted themselves in Northern Syria. I have lately succeeded in deciphering their inscriptions, which have so long baffled our attempts to read them, and one result of my decipherment is the discovery of an unexpected fact. I find that the name of Hittite was confined to that portion of the race which lived eastward and southward of the Taurus. In Asia Minor itself, their first cradle and home, they called themselves Kas or Kasians; it was the kingdom of Kas over which the Hittite lords of Boghaz Keui claimed to rule, and it is still as kings of Kas that they are entitled on the monuments of Carchemish, though here they also acknowledge the name of Hittite.

The name of Kas is met with in the Tel el-Amarna tablets, where it has hitherto been misunderstood. The kings of the Hittites, of Mitanni and of Kas are associated together as supporting the enemies of the Egyptian Pharaoh or attacking his cities in Syria, Hitherto we have supposed that Kas signified Babylonia, though the supposition had but little in its favour, and a different name is given to Babylonia in passages where there is no doubt as to what country is meant. Now, however, all becomes clear: in the age of the tablets there were still four Hittite kingdoms in the north: Kas in Asia Minor, the Hittites proper, east and south of the Taurus, Mitanni in Mesopotamia, and Naharaim on the Orontes. Shortly afterwards they were all swallowed up in the empire of the “great king” of the Hittites, whose southern capital was at Kadesh. Some Kasians had found their way to Jerusalem, where the king Ebed-Kheba—whose name is compounded with that of a Mitannian deity—writes to the Egyptian Government to excuse his conduct in regard to them. They had been accused of plundering the Pharaoh’s territory and murdering his servants; he assures the court that nothing of the sort is true. They are still in his house, where it would seem they formed his bodyguard. But, on the other hand, there were other Hittites in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem who were really enemies to the king and threatened Jerusalem itself. These he calls Khabiri, or “Confederates,” a name in which, despite history and probability, certain writers have insisted upon seeing the Hebrews of the Old Testament. But Dr. Knudtzon’s fresh collation of the Tel el-Amarna texts has at last dispelled the mystery. The Khabiri turn out to have been bands of Hittite condottieri, who sold their military services to the highest bidder and carved out principalities for themselves in the south of Canaan. The Egyptian Government found them useful in escorting and protecting the trading caravans to Asia Minor and the Taurus region, and as long as their leaders professed themselves the devoted servants of the Pharaoh it was quite willing to overlook such little accidents as their capture and sack of a Canaanitish town or the murder of a Canaanitish prince.

One of these Hittite leaders, Aita-gama by name, had possessed himself of the city of Kadesh on the Orontes, which in the following century was to become the capital of a Hittite empire. In a letter to the Egyptian court he has the audacity to assert that he was merely claiming his patrimony, the whole district having belonged to his father. If there is any truth in this it can only mean that his father had already led a troop of Hittite raiders into this portion of the Egyptian territory.

Along with Aita-gama two other Hittite chieftains had marched, Teuwatti, whose name appears in the native texts under the form of Tuates, and Arzawaya. Arzawaya means “a man of Arzawa,” the country whose language has been revealed to us in one of the Tel el-Amarna letters, and which proves to be the same as the Hittite dialect found in the cuneiform tablets of Boghaz Keui. We are told that he came from a city which was in the neighbourhood of the Karmalas, in Southern Cappadocia. Arzawaya helped Teuwatti to conquer Damascus and then led his followers further south. Here he acted as a free-lance, hiring himself and his mercenaries to the rival Canaanitish princes and professing himself to be all the while a faithful servant of the Egyptian king. It is amusing to read one of his letters to the Egyptian court: “To my lord the king thus writes Arzawaya, of Rukhiza. At the feet of my lord I prostrate myself. My lord the king wrote that I should join the household troops of the king my lord and his numerous officers.” Here follow four words of Hittite which are accompanied by the translation: “I am a servant of the king my lord.” Then the letter proceeds: “I will join the household troops of the king my lord and his officers; and I will send everything after them and march wherever there is rebellion against the king my lord. And we will deliver his enemies into the hand of the king our lord.” Doubtless Arzawaya expected to be well paid for his help.

There is another letter from Arzawaya to the Pharaoh in which he calls himself “the dust of his feet and the ground on which he treads.” But in this letter he has to explain away the share he took in entering the town of Gezer along with Labbawa,[156] another Hittite leader, and there infringing the royal prerogative by summoning a levy of the militia. In the eyes of the home Government this was a much more serious matter than merely plundering or killing a few of its Canaanitish subjects, as it was equivalent to usurping the functions of the imperial power.

Labbawa also had to write and ask for forgiveness, and assure the Pharaoh that he is his “devoted slave,” who does “not withhold his tribute” or disobey the “requests” of the Egyptian commissioners. In fact, he concludes his letter with declaring that “if the king should write to me: Run a sword of bronze into your heart and die, I would not fail to execute the king’s command.” All the same, however, he had established himself securely on Mount Shechem, from whence, like Joshua in after days, he was able to make raids on the surrounding Canaanitish towns. In the north we hear of him at Shunem and Gath-Rimmon, where he first appeared upon the scene in the train of the Egyptian army at a time when Amon-hotep III. was suppressing an insurrection in that part of Palestine. It is probable that he had just arrived with his band of condottieri, attracted by the pay and the chance of plunder that the Egyptian Pharaoh offered the free-lance. By a curious fatality it was also in this same locality that he afterwards met his death at the hands of the people of Gina—the Cana of Galilee, probably, of St. John’s Gospel.

Labbawa cast envious eyes on the important city of Megiddo, and its governor—who, by the way, is mentioned in one of the cuneiform tablets found three years ago by the Austrian excavators on the site of Taanach—sent piteous appeals for assistance against him to the Egyptian Government. The beleaguered governor declared that so closely invested was he by the Hittite free-lances that he could not venture outside the gates of his town. The peasantry were afraid even to bring vegetables into it, and unless help were forthcoming from Egypt, Megiddo was doomed. After all, however, Labbawa was not only unable to possess himself of the Canaanitish stronghold, but was taken prisoner and confined in the very place he had hoped to capture. But fortune befriended him. He managed to bribe the governor of Acre, and the latter, on the pretext that he was going to send Labbawa by sea to Egypt, took him out of prison and set him free.

Labbawa now turned his attention to the south of Palestine—the future territory of Judah. Here he entered into alliance with the king of Jerusalem, or, to speak more precisely, was taken into his pay, and the two together waged war on the neighbouring states. One of the Egyptian governors complains that they had robbed him of Keilah, and he had to wait for Labbawa’s death before he could recover his city.

One of the two letters in the Tel el-Amarna collection which are in the Arzawan or Hittite language was written by Labbawa, as we have lately learned from Dr. Knudtzon’s revised copy of it. In this he calls himself a native of the Hittite district of Uan, near Aleppo, and refers to “the Hittite king,” though our knowledge of the language is too imperfect to allow us to understand the meaning of the reference. The letter is addressed simply “to my lord,” and we do not know, therefore, whether it was intended for Hittite or Egyptian eyes. After his settlement in Palestine, however, Labbawa adopted the official language of the country; his letters to the Pharaoh are in Babylonian, and his son bore the characteristically Semitic name of Mut-Baal. The fact is an interesting example of the rapid way in which the Hittite settlers in Palestine were Semitized. They brought no women with them, and their wives accordingly were natives of Canaan.

Labbawa left two sons behind him, who, in spite of their Semitic education, followed in their father’s footsteps and continued to lead his company of Hittite mercenaries. Mut-Baal, moreover, made himself useful to the Government by escorting the trading caravans to Cappadocia, a fact which proves that he still maintained relations with the country of his origin. The alliance between Ebed-Kheba of Jerusalem and his father, however, had come to an end; Ebed-Kheba now had the Hittites of Kas in his pay, and no longer needed the services of the sons of Labbawa. They therefore transferred themselves to his rivals, together with the sons of Arzawaya, who, like Labbawa, was now dead, and Ebed-Kheba soon found himself in difficulties. The result was letter after letter from him to the Egyptian court, begging for help against his enemies, and declaring that if no help came the king’s territory would be lost. These appeals seem to have met with no response; the Egyptian Government was by no means assured of Ebed-Kheba’s loyalty, and knew that if the territory of Jerusalem were to pass into the hands of the Hittite chieftain it would make but little difference to the imperial power. The tribute would still be paid, the Egyptian commissioner would still be respected, and the new rulers of the district would profess themselves the faithful subjects of the Pharaoh. There would merely be a change of governors, and nothing more. The Hittite mercenaries were formidable only in the petty struggles which took place between the rival Canaanitish governors; when it came to dealing with the regular army of Egypt they were numerically too few to be of account.

Ebed-Kheba calls the followers of Labbawa and Arzawaya “Khabiri.” I have long ago pointed out that the word is found elsewhere in the Assyrian texts in the sense of “Confederates,” and that its identification with the Hebrews of the Old Testament, though phonetically possible, is historically impossible. Now that we know the nationality of Labbawa and Arzawaya the question is finally settled, and we can explain a hitherto puzzling passage in one of Ebed-Kheba’s letters, in which he says that “when ships were on the sea the arm of the mighty king seized Naharaim and Kas, but now the Khabiri have seized the cities of the king.” Naharaim lay southward of the gulf of Antioch, while Kas extended to the Cilician coast, and they were thus, both of them, within reach of a maritime Power; they were, moreover, both of them Hittite regions, Naharaim being the district afterwards called Khattinâ, “the Hittite land,” by the Assyrians, while Kas was the Hittite kingdom of Cappadocia. Ebed-Kheba, therefore, is drawing a comparison between the power of “the mighty king” in the days when an Egyptian fleet controlled the sea and the present time when Hittite marauders are seizing without let or hindrance the king’s cities on the very borders of Egypt. Even Lachish and Ashkelon had joined the enemy.

Perhaps the most important of the King of Jerusalem’s letters is one which has hitherto been misunderstood, partly owing to its being broken in half and the relation of the two halves to one another not being recognized, partly to the imperfections of the published copy. Now that a complete and accurate text of it lies before us, its meaning has ceased to be a riddle, and I will therefore give here the first translation that has been made of the completed text—

“To the king my lord thus says Ebed-Kheba thy servant: at the feet of my lord the king seven times seven I prostrate myself. Behold, Malchiel has not separated himself from the sons of Labbawa and the sons of Arzawaya so as to claim the king’s land for them. A governor who commits such an act, why has not the king questioned him (about it)? Behold, Malchiel and Tagi have committed such an act by seizing the city of Rabbah. And now as to Jerusalem, if this land belongs to the king, why is it that Gaza has been appointed for the (residence of the) king (’s commissioner)? Behold the land of Gath-Carmel is in the power of Tagi, and the men of Gath are (his) bodyguard. He is (now) in Beth-Sannah. But (nevertheless) we will act. Malchiel wrote to Tagi that they should give Labbawa and Mount Shechem to the district of the Khabiri, and he took some boys as slaves. They granted all their demands to the people of Keilah. But we will rescue Jerusalem. The garrison which you sent by Khaya the son of Meri-Ra has been taken by Hadad-mikhir and stationed in his house at Gaza. [I have sent messengers] to Egypt, [and may] the king [listen to me].... There is no garrison of the king [here]. Verily by the life of the king Pa-ur has gone down to Egypt; he has left me and is in Gaza. But let the king entrust to him a garrison for the defence of the land. All the land of the king has revolted. Send Yenkhamu and let him take charge of the king’s land.

“(Postscript): To the secretary of the king says Ebed-Kheba your servant: [bring] what I say clearly before the king. Kindest regards to you! I am your servant.”

The references in this letter are explained in other letters from the same correspondent. Malchiel was the native governor of the Hebron district, and had married the daughter of Tagi, whose name does not sound Semitic. The Hittite mercenaries of Labbawa from Shechem and of Arzawaya, who does not seem to have established himself in any special district of the country, were now in the pay of Malchiel, while Ebed-Kheba, as we have seen, had secured the services of another body of Hittites from Kas. He had been accused at the Egyptian court of seeking by their means to make himself independent, and more than one of his letters is occupied with defending himself and bringing a counter-charge against Malchiel. Malchiel, however, secured the support of the royal commissioner, Yenkhamu, who agreed to his employment of the Hittite condottieri. With their assistance Keilah had been recovered from the hands of Ebed-Kheba, who, at an earlier date, had got Labbawa to seize it for him, but after Labbawa’s death the tables were turned, and his sons had offered their services to the rival party, doubtless for the sake of better pay. It was now that Malchiel summoned the militia of Gezer, Gath-Carmel and Keilah, and made himself master of Rabbah, a small place north-west of Keilah and Hebron, which Ebed-Kheba asserted belonged to his territory. The tide was beginning to turn against the King of Jerusalem: his enemies were in greater favour at court than he was himself, and they had the support of the Hittite bands. It was in vain that he appealed to the Egyptian Government for aid and declared that not only had his rivals given Mount Shechem to the Hittite free-lances, but that by their action against himself they were delivering the whole of Southern Palestine into Hittite hands. “The king,” he writes, “no longer has any territory, the Khabiri have wasted all the lands of the king. If the royal troops come this year, the country will remain my lord the king’s, but if no troops come, the territory of the king my lord is lost.”

At this point the story breaks off abruptly. The Tel el-Amarna correspondence comes to an end and the fate of Jerusalem and the surrounding districts is unknown to us. Soon afterwards religious troubles at home forced the Egyptian Government to withdraw its troops from Canaan altogether, and for awhile the Egyptian empire in Asia ceased to exist. It was restored, however, by Seti I. and his son, Ramses II, at the beginning of the Nineteenth dynasty, and among the cities whose conquest is celebrated by Ramses on the walls of the Ramesseum at Thebes is Shalem or Jerusalem. But this second Egyptian empire in Asia did not last long, and when the Israelitish Exodus took place it was already passing away. When some years later the Israelitish invaders planted themselves in Labbawa’s old stronghold on Mount Shechem, the Egyptian occupation of Canaan belonged to the history of the past.

Like the Saxons in England, however, the Hittite chieftains must have founded principalities for themselves in the south of Canaan, as we know from the evidence of the Tel el-Amarna tablets and the Egyptian monuments that they did in the north. Ezekiel, in fact, tells us that the mother of Jerusalem was a Hittite, and the Jebusites, from whom Jerusalem took its name in the age of the Israelitish conquest, were probably the descendants of the followers of the Hittite Arzawaya. They had, moreover, found a Hittite population already settled in the country, descendants of older bands who had made their way from the highlands of Asia Minor to the frontiers of Egypt in days when as yet Abraham was unborn. At the very commencement of the Egyptian twelfth dynasty we hear of the Pharaohs destroying “the palaces of the Hittites” in Southern Palestine,[157] and archæology has recently shown that the painted pottery discovered in the earlier strata of Lachish and Gezer by English excavators had its original home in Northern Cappadocia and is an enduring evidence of Hittite culture and trade.

The Hittites had been preceded in their occupation of Canaan by the Amorites, as we have learnt from the Babylonian inscriptions. But in the Tel el-Amarna age the specifically Amoritish territory was in the north, eastward of Tyre and Gebal. Here Ebed-Asherah and his son Aziru had their seat and from hence they led their forces northwards towards Aleppo to resist “the king of the Hittites” on behalf of the Egyptian Government, or attacked the Phœnician cities on their own account. In the north, in fact, they played much the same part as the Hittite mercenaries did in the south, with the additional advantage of being able to secure secret assistance when it was needed from Mitanni. Between Amorites and Hittites the Canaanites must have had a somewhat unhappy time, like the Britons after the departure of the Roman legions, who found themselves the alternate prey of Saxons and Scots. But we can now understand and appreciate the ethnological notice in the Book of Numbers (xiii. 29), which tells us that “the Hittites and the Jebusites and the Amorites dwell in the mountains, and the Canaanites dwell by the sea and by the coast of Jordan.”

The Amorite princes, however, were more formidable to the Egyptian Government than the Hittite chieftains, or else must have played their cards a little too openly, for we find Aziru receiving a scolding such as the Egyptian court seldom had the courage or energy to give. The letter from the Egyptian Foreign Office, which is a long one, is worth translating in full—

“To the governor of the land of the Amorites [thus] says the king your lord. The governor of Gebal, thy brother, whom his brother has driven from the gate (of the city) has said: ‘Take me and bring me back into my city, [and] I will then give you money, [for] I have nothing [of value] with me now.’ So he spoke to you.

“Behold, you write to the king your lord saying: I am your servant like all the loyal governors who are each in his city. Yet you have acted wrongly in taking a governor whom his brother had driven from the gate of his city, and being in Sidon you handed him over to the governors (there) at your own discretion, as if you did not know that they were rebellious.

“If you are really a servant of the king why have you not seen that he should go up to the presence of the king your lord instead of thinking, ‘This governor wrote to me saying, “Take me to thyself and restore me to my city”’?

“But if you have acted loyally and nothing that I write is correct, the king has devised a lie in saying that nothing which you declare is true.

“But it happens that one has heard that you have made a treaty with the (Hittite) prince of Kadesh to deliver food and drink to one another, and it is true. Why have you acted thus? Why have you made a treaty with a governor with whom another governor is at enmity? For if you act with loyalty to him and observe your and his engagements you cannot look after (our) interests as you have undertaken to do long ago. Whatever be your conduct in the matter you are not on the side of the king your lord.

“Now as for these men to whom you want to turn, they are seeking to get you into the fire and to burn (you) and all you most love. Whereas if you submit yourself to the king your lord, what is there which the king cannot do for you? If in anything you love to act wickedly and if you lay up wickedness, even thoughts of rebellion, in your heart, then you will die by the axe of the king along with all your family. Submit therefore to the king your lord, and you shall live, for you know that the king has no wish to be angry with all the land of Canaan.

“And since you write: ‘Let the king excuse me this year and I will go next year to the court of the king my lord, my son not being with me,’ the king your lord accordingly will excuse you this year as you have asked. Go yourself instead of sending your son, and you shall see the king in the sight of whom all the world lives, and do not say: let me be excused this year also from going to the court of the king your lord; and do not send your son to the king your lord; he must not go in your place.

“And now the king your lord has heard that you wrote to the king saying, ‘Let the king my lord permit Khanni the messenger of the king to come to me for the second time, and I will deliver the enemies of the king into his hand.’ Now he will go to you as you have asked; do you therefore deliver them (to him) and do not let a single one of them escape. Now the king your lord sends you the names of the king’s enemies in this letter by the hand of Khanni the king’s messenger; so deliver them to the king your lord and let not a single one of them escape, but put fetters of bronze upon their feet. Behold, the men you are to send to the king your lord are Sarru with all his sons, Tuia, Liya with all his sons, Yisyari with all his sons, (and) the son-in-law of Manya with his sons and wives. The treasurer of Khanni is the official who will read the dispatch. Dâsirtî, Pâlûwa and Nimmakhî have gone [to collect taxes?] into the country of the Amorites.

“And know that the king, the Sun-god in heaven, is well; his soldiers and chariots are many; from the upper country to the lower country, from the rising of the sun [to] the setting of the sun all is peace.”

We hear again of one of the rebels mentioned in this letter in the tablet discovered at Lachish in Palestine by Mr. Bliss. Yisyari is there described as inciting the governor of Lachish to revolt and promising assistance if he would call out the militia of his city against the king. That an Amorite of the north should thus have been able to interfere in the politics of a city in the south of Palestine is an interesting illustration of what I may call the solidarity of Syria and Canaan in the pre-Mosaic period. They had not yet been broken up into a series of isolated States; like the Hittites, the Amorites still claimed to be a power in the future territory of Judah as well as in the neighbourhood of Sidon or Hamath.

It is possible that a well-known but somewhat mysterious personage of the Old Testament was one of the Hittite leaders who succeeded in carving out a principality for himself: I mean Balaam the son of Beor. He is said to have come from the Hittite town of Pethor near Carchemish, and besides being a seer and a prophet he was also a soldier who fell in the ranks of the Midianites in a war against Israel. But Balaam the son of Beor was not only a native of Pethor; we hear of him again in the Book of Genesis, and here he appears as the first king of Edom, his name heading the list of Edomite kings extracted from the state annals of Edom and probably brought to Jerusalem when David conquered the country. In the light of what we have learnt from the tablets of Tel el-Amarna it is perhaps not going too far to suppose that in Balaam we have one of those Hittite chieftains who, after playing the part of prophet, made himself leader of a band of Hittite free-lances and established a kingdom for himself in Edom, finally falling in battle by the side of his Midianite allies.

However this may be, the important place occupied by the Hittites in creating the Canaan which the Israelites invaded is now clear. While the larger bands of Hittite raiders settled in the north, where they prepared the way for the Hittite king himself with his regular army, and where Hittite power became so firmly established that even the great Ramses could not dislodge it, smaller companies of condottieri made their way to the extreme south of Palestine, hiring their services to the rival governors and princes and seizing a town or district for themselves when the opportunity offered. So long as the tribute was paid, and its subjects were not too troublesome, the Egyptian Government looked on with equanimity while the states of Canaan were practically ruled by the leaders of foreign mercenaries who transferred their services from one paymaster to another with the most perfect impartiality.

What is most curious is that the Imperial Government recognized the legal position not only of the Hittite or Amorite mercenaries, but even of organized bands of Bedâwîn and outlaws. As for the Bedâwîn, it had companies of them in its own pay, like the Egyptian Government in more recent times, and the governor of Gebal complains that the Egyptian commissioner Pa-Hor had sent some of the latter to murder his garrison of Serdani or Sardinians, who were themselves mercenaries in the Egyptian army. That bodies of outlaws should have been subsidized by the native princes with the permission, or at least the connivance, of the Egyptian court may seem surprising. But after all it is only what we find happening in later times when the king of Gath similarly enrolled David and his band of outlaws into his bodyguard without any remonstrance on the part of the other Philistine “lords.” Still it is startling to find one of the Pharaoh’s governors coolly announcing that he and his soldiers and chariots, together with his brothers, his “cut-throats” and his Bedâwîn, are ready to join the royal troops, at the very time when another governor is piteously begging the great king to “save” him “out of the hands of the cut-throats and Bedâwîn.” Here is a strange picture of Canaanitish life in the days when as yet the Israelite was not in the land.

The fact is, the Canaanites were an unwarlike people. Inland, they were agriculturists; on the sea-coast they were traders. And, like other trading communities, they were disinclined to fight, preferring to entrust the protection of themselves and their property to a paid soldiery, while at the same time their wealth made them a tempting prize to the assailant. It is true that they maintained a native militia, as we have learned from one of the cuneiform tablets discovered at Taanach, but it was upon a small scale, and apparently so long as the person on the roll could produce the one or two men for whom he was responsible he was not himself obliged to serve. It was again a case of paying others to fight instead of themselves.

The fighting population of Canaan, in short, were the foreigners, and these it was who gradually made themselves its practical masters. The leaders of the mercenaries became the rulers of the Canaanite states, which thus passed into the hands of a dominant military caste. When the Israelites entered the country it was with this military upper class that they had principally to deal; where the Canaanite had not its protection he trusted for his defence to his iron chariots and the strong and lofty walls of his towns. It is instructive to read the long list of unconquered cities and districts given by the Hebrew historian in the first chapter of the Book of Judges; among them are the Jebusites of Jerusalem, while we are told that “the Amorites forced the children of Dan into the mountain, for they would not suffer them to come down to the valley.”

Canaan, it will probably be thought, was a somewhat insecure country in which to live in the days of the Egyptian Empire. There seem to have been constant turmoil and confusion, governor attacking governor and bribing bands of foreign mercenaries to help him. But the turmoil and confusion were mainly on the surface. When a town is taken from one governor by another we do not hear of its population or their possessions suffering materially; they soon appear upon the scene again as prosperous as before. It is merely the governor and his immediate surroundings who suffer; the capture of the town was probably an affair amicably arranged between the condottieri who were attacking it and the condottieri who were its defenders. The Egyptian commissioners go up and down the country, hearing complaints and settling disputes, and no one ventures even to protest against their decisions, while a few Egyptian troops are stationed in places where the Government was not quite sure of the fidelity of its subjects. Caravans of merchants passed through Canaan going from Egypt to the north, and the traders of Babylonia and Asia Minor travelled along its high-roads under the escort of Hittite and other chieftains who were subsidized for the purpose by the Egyptian court. Even in the days when the Egyptian Government was breaking up, the constant fighting among the foreign mercenaries and their employers seems to have affected the mass of the population little, if at all.

What happened when the strong hand and controlling power of the Egyptian Pharaoh were removed we do not yet know. We must look for information to the systematic excavations that are at last being made on the sites of the old Canaanitish towns. Already cuneiform tablets have been found on them, and though these belong to the Egyptian period we may hope that before long others may be discovered of later date. We have still to bridge over the age which elapsed between the final withdrawal of Egyptian domination and the conquest of the country by Philistines and Israelites. When that age begins the script and official language of Canaan are still Babylonian; when it closes the cuneiform characters have been superseded by the letters of the Phœnician alphabet, and the language of the inscriptions engraved in them is the language no longer of Babylonia or of Hittite lands, but of Canaan itself.