A very few years ago Palestine was still archæologically an unknown land. Its history subsequent to the Israelitish conquest could be gathered from the Old Testament, and Egyptian papyri of the age of the Nineteenth dynasty had told us something about its condition immediately prior to that event. Thanks to the Palestine Exploration Fund, the country had been carefully surveyed, and the monuments still existing on its surface had been noted and registered. But the earlier history of the people, their races and origin, their social and religious life, and their relation to the rest of the world, were still a blank. Of the Canaan invaded by the children of Israel we knew nothing from an archæological point of view, and very little even of the Palestine that was governed by Israelitish judges and Jewish kings.

The veil has at last been lifted which so long lay over the face of Palestine. Cuneiform texts have come to clear up its civil history, while the spade of the excavator has supplemented their evidence on the more purely archæological side. The history of Palestine can now be followed back not only into the neolithic, but even into the palæolithic age, and the source and character of Canaanite civilization have been in large measure revealed to us.

First and foremost among the materials which have made this possible are the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna in Upper Egypt, which were discovered in 1887. Tel el-Amarna, about midway between Minia and Assiut, is the site of a city which sprang, like a meteor, into a brief but glorious existence under the so-called “heretic king” Amon-hotep IV. about B.C. 1400. Amon-hotep, under the guidance of his mother, had endeavoured to suppress the old state religion of Egypt, and to substitute for it a pantheistic monotheism. In spite of persecution, however, the adherents of the old faith proved too strong for the king; he was forced to leave Thebes, the capital of his fathers, and to build a new capital further north, where he changed his name to that of Khu-n-Aten, and called artists from the islands of the Mediterranean to adorn his palace. When moving from Thebes he naturally transferred to the new seat of government both the Foreign Office and its records in so far as they covered the reign of his father Amon-hotep III. and his own. For reasons unknown to us they do not extend further back.

They were all in the cuneiform script, and for the most part in the Babylonian language. The fact came upon the historian with a shock of surprise, and had far-reaching consequences, historical as well as archæological. In the first place, they proved what had already been suspected, that under the Eighteenth dynasty Egypt possessed an Asiatic empire which stretched to the banks of the Euphrates. Then, secondly, they showed that Western Asia was at the time intersected by high-roads along which merchants and couriers were constantly passing, and an active literary correspondence was carried on. Thirdly—and this was the greatest surprise of all—they made it clear that this correspondence was in the script and language of Babylonia, and that it was shared in by writers of various nationalities and languages, of all classes of society and of both sexes. The Hittite and Cappadocian kings wrote to the Pharaoh in cuneiform characters, just as did the kings of Babylonia and Assyria. Arab shêkhs and Hittite condottieri joined in the correspondence, and politically-minded ladies did the same. Even the Egyptian Government was compelled to suppress all feelings of national vanity, and to conduct the whole of its correspondence with its own governors and vassals in Palestine or Syria in the foreign language and syllabary. There is no trace anywhere of the use of either the Egyptian language or the Egyptian mode of writing.

From these facts other facts follow. The age of the Eighteenth Egyptian dynasty must have been quite as literary as the age of our own eighteenth century, and international correspondence must have been quite as easy, if not easier. Education, moreover, must have been very widely spread; all the civilized world was writing and reading; and the system of writing was a most complicated one, demanding years of study and memory. In spite of this it was known not only to a professional class of scribes and the officials of the Government, but also to the shêkhs of petty Canaanitish towns and even to Bedâwîn chiefs. And along with the system of writing went a knowledge of the foreign language of Babylonia—the French of Western Asia—including some slight acquaintance with the extinct language of the Sumerians. All this presupposes libraries and archive-chambers where books and dispatches could be stored, as well as schools where the Babylonian script and language could be taught and learned.

Such libraries and schools had existed in Babylonia from a very early age. Every great city had its library, every great temple its muniment-room. Here the clay books were numbered and arranged on shelves, catalogues being provided which gave their titles. The system under which the longer literary or semi-scientific works were arranged and catalogued was at once ingenious and complete. By the side of the library was naturally the school. Here every effort was made to facilitate the progress of the scholars, more especially in the study of the Sumerian language and texts. The characters of the syllabary were classified and named; comparative grammars, dictionaries and reading-books of Sumerian and Semitic Babylonian were compiled, lists of Semitic synonyms were drawn up, explanatory commentaries were written on older works, and interlinear translations provided for the Sumerian texts. But with all this the cuneiform system of writing must have been hard even for the native Babylonian to learn, and in the case of the foreigner its difficulties were multiplied. It may be doubted whether the average boy of to-day, who finds the spelling of his own English almost too much for him, would have had the memory and patience to learn the cuneiform characters. Even in Sumerian times the difficulty of the task was realized, for there is a Sumerian proverb that “he who would excel in the school of the scribes must rise with the dawn.”[117] It says much for the educational zeal of the Oriental world in the century before the Exodus that it was just this difficult and complicated script which it chose as its medium for correspondence.

The fact, however, points unmistakably to its cause. The reason why the Babylonian language and syllabary were thus in use throughout Western Asia, and why even the Egyptian Government was obliged to employ them in its communications with its Asiatic subjects, can only have been because Babylonian culture was too deeply rooted there to be superseded by any other. Before Egypt appeared upon the scene under the conquerors of the Eighteenth dynasty, Western Asia, as far as the Mediterranean, must have been for centuries under the direct influence and domination of Babylonia. I say domination as well as influence, for in the ancient East military conquest was needed to enforce an alien language and literature, theology and system of law upon another people. And even military conquest was not always sufficient, as witness the Assyrian and Persian conquests of Egypt, or the Roman conquest of Syria.

We now have monumental testimony that such domination there actually was. As far back as B.C. 3800, Sargon of Akkad had founded a Semitic empire which had its centre in Babylon, and which stretched across Asia to the shores of the Mediterranean. We learn from his annals that three campaigns were needed to subdue “the land of the Amorites,” as Syria and Palestine were called, and that at last, after three years of warfare, all the coast-lands of “the sea of the setting sun” acknowledged his sway. He set up an image of himself on the Syrian coast in commemoration of his victories, and moulded his conquests “into one” great empire. His son and successor, Naram-Sin, extended his conquests into the Sinaitic peninsula, and a seal-cylinder, on which he is adored as a god, has been found in Cyprus. But Sargon was a patron of literature as well as a conqueror; his court was filled with learned men, and one of the standard works of Babylonian literature is said to have been compiled during his reign. The extension of Babylonian rule, therefore, to Western Asia meant the extension of Babylonian civilization, an integral part of which was its script.

Here, then, is an explanation of the archæological fact that the graves of the copper and early bronze age in Cyprus, which mark the beginning of civilization in the country, contain numerous seal-cylinders made in imitation of those of Babylonia.[118] Examples of the seal-cylinders from which they were copied have also been discovered there. Among them is the cylinder on which Naram-Sin is adored as a god, another is an extremely fine specimen of the style that was current in the age of Sargon of Akkad.[119] Along with the seal-cylinder it is probable that the clay tablet was also introduced to the people of the West. Though the clay tablets found by Dr. Evans and others in Krete may not go back to so remote a date, the linear Kretan characters belong to the same system of writing as the Cypriote syllabary, and an inscription in the letters of this syllabary on a seal-cylinder from the early copper-age cemetery of Paraskevi near Nikosia has recently been published by myself.[120] We may infer that the prototypes of the tablets of Knossos or Phæstos once existed in Cyprus and Syria, though in the damp climate of the Mediterranean the unbaked clay of which they were made has long since returned to its original dust.

A few centuries after the age of Sargon of Akkad we find Gudea, a Sumerian prince in Southern Babylonia, bringing limestone from “the land of the Amorites,” blocks of alabaster from the Lebanon, and beams of cedar from Mount Amanus, for his buildings in the city of Lagas. Gold-dust and acacia wood were at the same time imported from the “salt” desert which lay between Palestine and Egypt, and stones from the mountains of the Taurus, to the north-east of the Gulf of Antioch, were floated down the Euphrates on rafts.[121] At a later date we hear of the kings of the Babylonian dynasty which had its capital at Ur, conducting military expeditions to the district of the Lebanon.

About B.C. 2100 Northern Babylonia was occupied by a dynasty of kings, whose names show that they belonged to the Western division of the Semitic family. The language of Canaan—better known to us as Hebrew—and that of Southern and North-eastern Arabia, were at the time substantially one and the same, and as the same deities were worshipped and the same ancestors were claimed throughout this portion of the Semitic world, Assyriologists are not agreed as to whether the dynasty in question should be regarded as coming from Canaan or from Southern Arabia. The Babylonians themselves called the names Amorite, so it is possible that they would have pronounced the kings to have been Amorite also. The point, however, is of little moment; the fact remains that Northern Babylonia passed under the rule of sovereigns who belonged to the Western and not to the Babylonian branch of the Semitic race, and who made Babylon their capital. The contract tablets and other legal documents of this period show that Babylonia was at the time full of Amorite, that is Canaanite, settlers, most of whom had come there for the sake of trade. At Sippara there was a district called “the field of the Amorites,” over which, therefore, they must have had full legal rights. Indeed, it would seem that in the eyes of the law the Amorite settlers were on a complete footing of equality with the natives of the country.

This fact, so little in harmony with our ordinary idea of the exclusiveness of the ancient East, is largely explained by the further fact that Canaan and Syria were now acknowledged portions of the Babylonian Empire. When Babylonia was conquered by the Elamites, and the West Semitic king of Babylon allowed to retain his crown as an Elamite vassal, his claim to rule over “the land of the Amorites” passed naturally to his suzerain. Accordingly we find Chedor-laomer of Elam in the Book of Genesis marching to Canaan to put down a local rebellion there, while Eri-Aku, or Arioch, of Larsa, at the same date describes an Elamite prince as “governor of the land of the Amorites.” When Khammu-rabi, or Amraphel, the king of Babylon, at last succeeded in shaking off the Elamite yoke and making himself monarch of a free and united Babylonia, “the land of the Amorites” followed the fortunes of Babylonia as a matter of course. On a monument discovered at Diarbekir, in Northern Mesopotamia, the only title taken by the Babylonian sovereign is that of “king of the land of the Amorites.” And the same title is borne by one at least of his successors in the dynasty.

For more than two thousand years, therefore, Western Asia was more or less closely attached to Babylonia. At times it was as much a part of the dominions of the Babylonian king as the cities of Babylonia itself, and it is consequently not surprising that it should have become thoroughly interpenetrated with Babylonian culture. There was an excellent postal service connecting Canaan with Babylonia which went back to the days of Naram-Sin, and some of the clay bullæ which served as stamps for the official correspondence at that period are now in the Museum of the Louvre.[122] On the other hand, a clay docket has been found in the Lebanon, dated in the reign of the son of Khammu-rabi, which contains one of the notices sent by the Babylonian Government to its officials at the beginning of each year, in order that they might know what was its official title and date.[123]

When this close connection between Babylonia and its Syrian provinces was broken off we do not as yet know. Perhaps it did not take place until the conquest of Babylonia by a horde of half-civilized mountaineers from Elam about B.C. 1800. At any rate, from this time forward, though the influence of Babylonian culture continued, Babylonian rule in the West was at an end. From the Tel el-Amarna correspondence we learn that the Babylonian Government was still inclined to intrigue in Palestine; the memories of its ancient empire were not altogether obliterated, and just as the English sovereigns called themselves kings of France long after they had ceased to possess an inch of French ground, so the Babylonian kings doubtless persuaded themselves that they were still by right the rulers of Canaan.

The wild mountaineers from the Kossæan highlands who had conquered Babylon soon passed under the spell of Babylonian culture, and became themselves Babylonian in habits, if not in name. They founded a dynasty which lasted for five hundred and seventy-six years and nine months. It is a curious coincidence that Egypt also was governed about the same time by foreign conquerors, whose primitive wildness had been tamed by the influences of Egyptian civilization, which they had adopted as the Kossæan mountaineers adopted that of Babylonia, and whose rule also lasted for more than five hundred years. The Hyksos who conquered Egypt have been convincingly shown by recent discoveries to have been Semites, speaking a language of the West Semitic type.[124] They came from Canaan, and their conquest of Egypt made of it a dependency of Canaan. Hence they fixed their head-quarters in the northern part of their Egyptian territories, where they could easily keep up communication with Asia.

The excavations undertaken by the Palestine Exploration Fund at Lachish, Gezer and other sites in Southern Canaan have made it clear that throughout the Hyksos period Egypt and that part of Palestine were closely connected with one another. How much further eastward the government or influence of the Hyksos may have extended we do not know; the figure of a lion inscribed with the name of a Hyksos Pharaoh has been discovered in Babylonia, but this may have been brought from elsewhere. At any rate, so far as Palestine is concerned, we may say that the Hyksos period in Egypt coincides with the disappearance of Babylonian rule in Canaan. From that time onward Canaan looks towards Egypt, and not towards Babylonia.

But even before the beginning of the Hyksos period Canaan—or at all events Southern Canaan—is Egyptian rather than Babylonian. That has been abundantly proved by Mr. Macalister’s excavations at Gezer. Objects of the age of the Twelfth dynasty have been disinterred there, and of such a character as to make it evident that the country was already subject to Egyptian influence long before the appearance of the Hyksos. An Egyptian of that age was buried within the precincts of the consecrated “high place,” and a stela commemorating him erected on the spot.

Both at Gezer and at Lachish it has been possible to trace the archæological chronology of the sites by the successive cities which arose upon them. Gezer was the older settlement of the two; its history goes back to the neolithic age, when it was inhabited by a race of short stature who lived in caves and burned their dead, and whose pottery was of the roughest description. Some of it was ornamented with streaks of red or black on a yellow or red wash, like coarse pottery of the age of the Third Egyptian dynasty which I have found in so-called “prehistoric” graves at El-Kab. Two settlements of the neolithic population can be made out, one resting upon the other; in the second there was a distinct advance in civilization, and the place became a town surrounded by a wall. The neolithic race was succeeded by a taller race with Semitic characteristics, to whom the name of Amorite has been given; they buried the dead in a contracted position, and were acquainted with the use of copper and later of bronze. The city was now defended by a solid wall of stone, intersected with brick towers; as Mr. Macalister observes, in a country where stone is the natural building material the employment of brick must be due to foreign influence. He thinks the influence was Egyptian; this is very possible; but considering that building with brick was a salient feature in Babylonian civilization, the influence may have come rather from the side of Babylonia.

The first “Amorite” city at Gezer was coeval with the earliest city at Lachish—the modern Tel el-Hesy, where the Amorite settlers had no neolithic predecessors. At Gezer their sanctuary has been discovered. It was a “high place” formed of nine great monoliths running from north to south, and surrounded by a platform of large stones. The second monolith, polished with the kisses of the worshippers, was possibly the central object of veneration, the bœtylos or beth-el, as it was termed.[125] This beth-el, or “house of God,” takes us back to Semitic Babylonia. The veneration of isolated stones was common to all branches of the Semitic race; it may have come down to them from the days when their ancestors wandered over the desert plains of Arabia, where the solitary rocks assumed fantastic shapes that appealed to their imagination and excited feelings of awe, while their shadows offered a welcome retreat in the heat of noon-day. In the historical age, however, it was not the rock itself that was adored, but the divinity whose home it had become by consecration with oil. The brick-built temple was called by the Babylonians a bit-ili, beth-el, or “house of God,” and the name was easily transferred to the consecrated stones, the worship of which was coeval with the beginnings of Semitic history. But though the worship of stones was primitive, the belief that the stone was not a fetish, but the shrine of divinity, belonged to an age of reflection and points to a Babylonian source.

The first Amorite city at Gezer was succeeded by a second, in which the high place underwent enlargement and was provided with a temenos. Under its pavement have been found memorials of the grim rites performed in honour of its Baal—the bones of children and even adults who had been sacrificed and sometimes burnt and then deposited in jars. Similar sacrifices, it would seem, were offered when a new building was erected, since children’s bones have been disinterred from under the foundations of houses, both at Gezer and at Taanach and Megiddo. The bones were placed in jars along with lamps and bowls, which, it has been suggested, were intended to receive the blood of the victim. The old sacred cave of the neolithic race was now brought into connection with the high place of the “Amorite” settlers, and the skeleton of a child has been found in it resting on a flat stone.

This fourth city at Gezer—the second since the Semites first settled there—has yielded objects which enable us to assign to it an approximate date. These objects are Egyptian, and belong to the age of the Twelfth dynasty. Many of them are scarabs, but there is also the tombstone of the Egyptian who was buried under the shadow of the Amorite sanctuary. Fragments of diorite and alabaster vases also occur, telling of trade with Egypt, and in the upper and later part of the stratum painted pottery makes its appearance similar to that met with in the corresponding stratum at Lachish. I shall have more to say about this painted pottery in the next chapter; here it is sufficient to state that it is related to the early painted pottery of the Ægean, but is itself of Hittite origin, and can be traced back to the Hittite centre in Cappadocia.

The fourth city had a long existence. It lasted from the period of the Twelfth Egyptian dynasty to the middle of the Eighteenth. Then it was ruined by an enemy and its old wall partially destroyed—doubtless by Thothmes III. when he conquered Palestine (about B.C. 1480). Upon its ruins rose another Amorite town. A new city wall was built of larger circumference and greater strength; it measured fourteen feet in thickness, and the stones of which it was composed were large and well shaped. The houses erected on the débris of the brick towers belonging to the old wall were filled with scarabs, beads, fragments of pottery and other objects contemporary with the reign of Amon-hotep III. (B.C. 1400). At Lachish the ruins of the third city were full of similar objects, and among them was a cuneiform tablet in which reference is made to the governor of Lachish mentioned in the Tel el-Amarna correspondence. At Taanach the Austrian excavators discovered an archive-chamber, the contents of which were of the same age. Taanach was merely a third-rate or fourth-rate town, but its shêkh possessed a fortified residence, in a subterranean chamber of which his official records and private correspondence were kept in a coffer of terra-cotta. They were all in the Babylonian language and script. Among them is a list of the number of men each landowner (?) was required to furnish for the local militia, and there are also the letters which passed between the shêkh and his friends about their private affairs. How little of an official character is to be found in these letters may be gathered from the following translation of one of them: “To Istar-yisur (writes) Guli-Hadad.—Live happily! May the gods grant health to yourself, your house and your sons! You have written to me about the money ... and behold I will give fifty pieces of silver, since this has not (yet) been done.—Again: Why have you sent your salutation here afresh? All you have heard there I have (already) learned through Bel-ram.—Again: If the finger of the goddess Asherat appears, let them announce (the omen) and observe (it), and you shall describe to me both the sign and the fact. As to your daughter, we know the one, Salmisa, who is in the city of Rabbah, and if she grows up, you must give her to the prince; she is in truth fit for a lord.”[126]

These Taanach letters are a final proof, if any were needed, of the completely Babylonian nature of Canaanitish civilization in the century before the Exodus. When we find the petty shêkhs of obscure Canaanite towns corresponding with one another on the trivial matters of every-day life in the foreign language and syllabary of Babylonia, it is evident that Babylonian influence was still as strong in Palestine as it had been in the days when “the land of the Amorites” was a Babylonian province. It is also evident that there must have been plenty of schools in which the foreign language and syllabary could be taught and studied, and that the clay literature of Babylonia had been carried to the West. Indeed the Tel el-Amarna collection contains proof of this latter fact. Along with the letters are fragments of Babylonian literary works, one of which has been interpunctuated in order to facilitate its reading by the Egyptian scholar.

On the other hand, apart from the cuneiform tablets the more strictly archæological evidence of Babylonian influence upon Canaan is extraordinarily scanty. Naturally we should discover no traces of “the goodly Babylonish garments” which, as we learn from the Book of Joshua, were imported into the country, the climate of Palestine not being favourable to their preservation; but it is certainly strange that so few seal-cylinders or similar objects have been disinterred, either at Gezer and Lachish in the south, or at Taanach and Megiddo in the north. What makes it the stranger is that Mr. Macalister has opened a long series of graves, beginning with the neolithic race and coming down to Græco-Roman times, and that while the influence of Egypt is sufficiently visible in them, that of Babylonia is almost entirely absent. It is true that a few seal-cylinders have been met with in the excavations on the city sites, but with the exception of one found at Taanach[127] I do not know of any that can be said to be of purely Babylonian manufacture; most of them are of Syrian make, and represent a Syrian modification of the Babylonian type. And yet there are seal-cylinders from the Lebanon, now in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, which are purely Babylonian in origin, and belong to the period of Khammu-rabi.[128]—There are also two seal-cylinders of later pattern in M. de Clercq’s collection, on which are representations of the Egyptian gods Set and Horus—similar to those found on scarabs from the Delta of the time of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth dynasties—as well as of the Canaanite god Reshef, accompanied by cuneiform inscriptions which on palæographic grounds must be assigned to the age of the Tel el-Amarna tablets. As the inscriptions record the names of Hadad-sum and his son Anniy, “citizens of Sidon, the crown of the gods,” we know that they have come from the Phœnician coast.[129] Like the cuneiform tablets, they bear witness to the long-continued influence of Babylonian culture in Canaan on its literary side.

When we turn to theology and law, the same influence is recognizable. The deities of Canaan were to a large extent Babylonian, with Babylonian names. The Babylonian gods Ana, Nebo, Rimmon (Rammân), Hadad and Dagon meet us in the names of places and persons, and Ashtoreth, who shared with Baal the devotion of the inhabitants of Palestine, is the Babylonian Istar with the suffix of the feminine attached to her name. Even Asherah, in whom Semitic scholars were long inclined to see a genuinely Canaanitish goddess, turns out to have been of Babylonian origin, and to be the feminine counterpart of Asir, or Asur, the national god of Assyria. The recently-discovered legal code of Khammu-rabi has shown that such glimpses as we have in the Book of Genesis of the laws and legal customs of Canaan in the patriarchal age all presuppose Babylonian law. From time to time usages are referred to and laws implied which have no parallel in the Mosaic code, and are therefore presumably pre-Israelite. But though they have no parallel in the Mosaic code, we have now learnt that they were all provided for in the code of Khammu-rabi. Thus Abram’s adoption of his slave and house-steward Eliezer is in strict accordance with the provisions of the old Babylonian law. Adoption, indeed, which was practically unknown among the Israelites, was a leading feature in Babylonian life, and the childless man was empowered to adopt an heir, even from among his slaves, to whom he left his name and his property. So, again, Sarai’s conduct in regard to Hagar, or Rachel’s conduct in regard to Bilhah, is explained by the Babylonian enactment which allowed the wife to present her husband with a concubine; while we can now understand why Hagar was not sold after her quarrel with Sarai, for the Babylonian law laid down that “if a man has married a wife, and she has given a concubine to her husband by whom he has had a child, should the concubine afterwards have a dispute with her mistress because she has borne children, her mistress cannot sell her; she can only lay a task upon her and make her live with the other slaves.”

In the account of Isaac’s marriage with Rebekah it is again a provision of the old Babylonian code with which we meet. There we hear of the bride receiving a dowry from the father of the bridegroom, and of other presents being made to her mother in conformity with Babylonian usage. So, too, the infliction of death by burning with which Judah threatened his daughter-in-law Tamar, on the supposition that she was a widow, has its explanation in the legislation of Khammu-rabi, where the same punishment is enacted against a nun who has been unfaithful to her vows of virginity or widowhood. The story of the purchase of the cave of Machpelah, moreover, has long been recognized by Assyriologists as pre-supposing an acquaintance with the legal forms of a Babylonian sale of land in the Khammu-rabi age.

With all this heritage of Babylonian culture, therefore, it is curious that the excavators in Palestine have come across so few material evidences of intercourse with Babylonia. Mr. Macalister is inclined to believe that it must belong to a period anterior to the Twelfth Egyptian dynasty. But this raises a chronological question of some difficulty. We have seen that the earlier and inner city wall of Gezer served as the defence of three successive settlements, and that it was partially destroyed along with the city it protected about B.C. 1480. Now the outer and more massive wall which superseded it also served to protect three cities, the latest of which was deserted during the Maccabean period, about B.C. 100. Hence, Mr. Macalister argues, “if we may assume the rate of growth to have been fairly uniform, we are led back to B.C. 2900 as the (latest) date” for the foundation of the first wall. During this long period of time twenty-eight feet of débris accumulated; below this are as much as twelve feet of neolithic accumulation.[130]

The conquests of Sargon of Akkad would accordingly have fallen within the neolithic epoch. But in this case it is strange that the use of copper, with which Babylonia had long been acquainted, was not communicated to its Western province, and that it should have needed a new race and the lapse of nearly a thousand years for its introduction. Moreover, specific evidences of Babylonian civilization are quite as much wanting in the remains of the first Amorite city as they are in those of the second. And unless we adopt a date for the Twelfth Egyptian dynasty, which on other grounds seems out of the question, it is hard to see how the Khammu-rabi dynasty can be placed before it. What little evidence we possess at present goes to indicate that the Khammu-rabi dynasty was contemporaneous with the earlier Hyksos kings or their immediate predecessors. And yet not only do we know that the Khammu-rabi dynasty ruled in Palestine, but the adoption of the cuneiform script, which was at least as old as the age of that dynasty, as well as the testimony of theology and law, proves that its rule must have exercised a profound and permanent influence upon the people of Canaan. How is it, then, that while the excavations have brought to light so many evidences of Egyptian domination, there is so little in the way of material objects to show that Palestine was once and for several centuries a Babylonian province?[131]

Perhaps the excavations which are still proceeding at Megiddo may throw some light upon the problem. Meanwhile, we may remember that thus far the greater part of the objects that have been found belong to the less wealthy and educated part of the population. The annals of Thothmes III. prove that, so far as the upper classes were concerned, the picture of Canaanitish luxury presented in the Old Testament had a foundation of fact. Among the spoils taken from the princes of Canaan we hear of tables, chairs and staves of cedar and ebony inlaid or gilded with gold, of a golden plough and sceptre, of richly-embroidered stuffs similar to those depicted on the walls of the Egyptian monuments, of chariots chased with silver, of iron tent-poles studded with precious stones, and of “bowls with goats’ heads on them, and one with a lion’s head, the workmanship of the land of the Zahi,” that is to say, of the Canaanitish coast. These latter were doubtless imitations of the gold and silver cups with double handles and animals’ heads imported from Krete, which were also received as tribute from the Canaanitish princes by the Egyptian king. Other gifts comprised chariots plated with gold, iron armour with gold inlay, a helmet of gold inlaid with lapis-lazuli, the tusks of elephants, rings of gold and silver that were used as money, copper and lead, as well as jars of wine, oil and balsam. Of all these articles, the copper and lead excepted, it is needless to say next to nothing has been discovered by the excavators. The most valuable work of art yet met with is a bronze sword of precisely the same shape as one found in Assyria, which bears upon it the name of Hadad-nirari I. (B.C. 1330).[132]

On the palæographical side the forms of the cuneiform characters used in Canaan go back to the script of the age of Khammu-rabi and his predecessors. From a purely Assyriological point of view, no regard being had to other considerations, I should date their introduction into Palestine about B.C. 2300. The chronology that would best harmonize the historical facts would thus be one which made the dominance of Egypt in Palestine under the Twelfth dynasty precede the Babylonian rule of the Khammu-rabi period. Against it is the negative evidence of archæological discovery, so few traces of this rule having been discovered in the course of the excavations. But neither in archæology nor in anything else is negative evidence of much value.

At any rate, thanks to the decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions, the main facts are clear. Canaan was once a province of the Babylonian Empire, and during the long period of time that this was the case it became permeated with the literary culture of Babylonia. The civilization which was partially destroyed by the Israelitish invasion had its roots in the valley of the Euphrates.

Gezer, it is true, was one of the cities in which no visible break with the past was made by the irruption of the desert tribes. It escaped capture by the invaders, and it was only in the reign of Solomon, when the Israelites had already entered into the heritage of the old Canaanitish culture, that it was handed over by the king of Egypt to his Jewish son-in-law. But at Lachish the marks of the destruction of the town by Joshua are still visible. Above the ruins of the Amorite cities is a bed of ashes left by the charcoal-burners who squatted on the site before it was again rebuilt. Above the stratum of ashes all must be Israelitish, and the objects found in the remains of the cities that stand upon it testify accordingly to a complete change. No more cuneiform tablets are met with, and but few Egyptian scarabs; the pottery is different, and the “high place” has disappeared. The bowl and lamp, indeed, are still buried under the walls of the newly-built house, but the bones of sacrificed children which they once contained are replaced by sand. As the Israelitish power increased the old Babylonian influence necessarily lessened. When the cuneiform syllabary finally made way for the so-called Phœnician alphabet is still uncertain, but it was at all events before the days of Solomon. Already in the Amorite period the characters of the Kretan linear script discovered by Dr. Evans are found scratched on fragments of pottery, indicating that besides the cuneiform another form of writing was known; it may be that the Israelitish conquest, by destroying the centres of Canaanitish civilization and the schools of the scribes, gave a first blow to the tradition of Babylonian learning, and that the work of destruction was subsequently completed by the Philistine wars.