Patriarchal Palestine

The geographical lists of Thothmes III. served as a model for the Pharaohs who came after him. They also adorned the walls of their temples with the names of the places they had captured in Palestine, in Northern Syria, and in the Soudan, and when a large space had to be filled the sculptor was not careful to insert in it only the names of such foreign towns as had been actually conquered. The older lists were drawn upon, and the names which had appeared in them were appropriated by the later king, sometimes in grotesquely misspelt forms. The climax of such empty claims to conquests which had never been made was reached at Kom Ombo, where Ptolemy Lathyrus, a prince who, instead of gaining fresh territory, lost what he had inherited, is credited with the subjugation of numerous nations and races, many of whom, like the Hittites, had long before vanished from the page of history. The last of the Pharaohs whose geographical list really represents his successes in Palestine was Shishak, the opponent of Rehoboam and the founder of the twenty-second dynasty. The catalogue of places engraved on the wall of the shrine he built at Karnak is a genuine and authentic record.

So too are the lists given by the kings who immediately followed Thothmes III., Amenophis III. of the eighteenth dynasty, Seti I. and Ramses II. of the nineteenth, and Ramses III. of the twentieth. It is true that in some cases the list of one Pharaoh has been slavishly copied by another, but it is also true that these Pharaohs actually overran and subjugated the countries to which the lists belong. Of this we have independent testimony.

At one time it was the fashion to throw doubt on the alleged conquests of Ramses II. in Western Asia. This was the natural reaction from the older belief, inherited from the Greek writers of antiquity, that Ramses II. was a universal conqueror who had carried his arms into Europe, and even to the confines of the Caucasus. With the overthrow of this belief came a disbelief in his having been a conqueror at all. The disbelief was encouraged by the boastful vanity of his inscriptions, as well as by the absence in them of any details as to his later Syrian wars.

But we now know that such scepticism was over-hasty. It was like the scepticism which refused to admit that Canaan had been made an Egyptian province by Thothmes III., and which needed the testimony of the Tel el-Amarna tablets before it could be removed. As a matter of fact, Egyptian authority was re-established throughout Palestine and even on the eastern bank of the Jordan during the reign of Ramses II., and the conquests of the Pharaoh in Northern Syria were real and not imaginary. Such has been the result of the discoveries of the last three or four years.

We have no reason to doubt that the campaigns of Ramses III. in Asia were equally historical. The great confederacy of northern barbarians and Asiatic invaders which had poured down upon Egypt had been utterly annihilated; the Egyptian army was flushed with victory, and Syria, overrun as it had been by the invaders from the north, was in no position to resist a fresh attack. Moreover, the safety of Egypt required that Ramses should follow up the destruction of his assailants by carrying the war into Asia. But it is noticeable that the places he claims to have conquered, whether in Canaan or further north, lay along the lines of two high-roads, and that the names of the great towns even on these high-roads are for the most part conspicuously absent. The names, however, are practically those already enumerated by Ramses II., and they occur in the same order. But the list given by Ramses III. could not have been copied from the older list of Ramses II. for a very sufficient reason. In some instances the names as given by the earlier monarch are mis-spelt, letters having been omitted in them or wrong letters having been written in place of the right ones, while in the list of Ramses III. the same names are correctly written.

Seti I., the father of Ramses II., seems to have been too fully engaged in his wars in Northern Syria, and in securing the road along the coast of the Mediterranean, to attempt the re-conquest of Palestine. At Qurnah, however, we find the names of 'Aka or Acre, Zamith, Pella, Beth-el (Beth-sha-il), Inuam, Kimham (Jer. xli. 17), Kamdu, Tyre, Usu, Beth-Anath, and Carmel among those of the cities he had vanquished, but there is no trace of any occupation of Southern Canaan. That seems to have come later with the beginning of his son's reign.

On the walls of the Ramesseum at Thebes there are pictures of the storming and capture of the Palestinian cities. Most of them are now destroyed, but we can still read the names of Ashkelon, of Salem or Jerusalem, of Beth-Anath and Qarbu[tu], of Dapul in the land of the Amorites, of Merom, of Damascus, and of Inuam. Elsewhere we have mention of Yurza and Socho, while at Karnak there are two geographical lists which mark two of the lines of march taken by the troops of Ramses II. The first list contains the following names: (1) the district of Salem; (2) the district of Rethpana; (3) the country of the Jordan; (4) Khilz; (5) Karhu; (6) Uru; (7) Abel; (8) Carmel; (9) the upper district of Tabara or Debir; (10) Shimshon; and (n) Erez Hadashta, "the new land." In the second list we read: (1) Rosh Kadesh, or Mount Carmel; (2) Inzat; (3) Maghar; (4) Rehuza; (5) Saabata; (6) Gaza; (7) the district of Sala'; (8) the district of Zasr; (9) Jacob-el; and (10) the land of Akrith, the Ugarit of the Tel el-Amarna tablets.

We have already seen that long before the time of Ramses II. Jerusalem was an important city and fortress, the capital of a territory of some size, known by the name of Uru-Salim, "the city of the god of peace." "The city of Salem" could easily be abbreviated into "Salem" only; and it is accordingly Salem which alone is used in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis as well as in the inscriptions of Ramses II. and Ramses III. The name of Rethpana, which follows that of Salem, is faultily written in the list of Ramses II., and it is from that of Ramses III. that we have to recover its true form. Ramses III., moreover, tells us that Rethpana was a lake, and since its name comes between those of Jerusalem and the Jordan it must represent the Dead Sea. The Canaanite form of Rethpana would be Reshpon, a derivative from the name of Resheph, the god of fire and lightning, whose name is preserved in that of the town Arsuf, and whose "children" were the sparks (Job v. 7). The name was appropriate to a region which was believed to have been smitten with a tempest of flames, and of which we are told that "the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire."

Khilz, the fourth name in the list, is probably the Babylonian Khalzu, or "fortress." At all events it was the first town on the eastern side of the Jordan, and it may well therefore have guarded the ford across the river. Karhu is the Korkha of the Moabite Stone, perhaps the modern Kerak, which was the capital of Moab in the age of Ahab, and Uru is the Babylonian form of the Moabite Ar, or "city," of which we read in the Book of Numbers (xxi. 28). The land of "Moab" itself is one of the countries which Ramses claims to have subdued. The Carmel mentioned in the list is Carmel of Judah, not the more famous Carmel on the coast. As for Tabara or Debir, it will be that ancient seat of Canaanite learning and literature, called Kirjath-Sepher and Debir in the Old Testament, the site of which is unfortunately still unknown. It must have lain, however, between Carmel and Shimshon, "the city of the Sun-god," with which it is probable that the Biblical Ir-Shemesh should be identified (Josh. xix. 41). Erez Hadashta, "the New Land," is called Hadashah in the Book of Joshua (xv. 37), where it is included among the possessions of Judah.

The second list, instead of taking us through Judah and Moab, leads us southward along the coast from Mount Carmel. Maghar is termed by Ramses III. "the spring of the Maghar," and is the Magoras or river of Beyrout of classical geography. The river took its name from the maghdrat or "caves" past which it runs, and of which we have already heard in the Travels of a Mohar. The two next names which represent places on the coast to the north of Gaza are quite unknown, but Sala', which is written Selakh by Ramses III. (from a cuneiform original), is possibly the rock-city Sela (2 Kings xiv. 7), better known to us as Petra. Of Jacob-el we have already had occasion to speak.

It is in the ruined temple of Medinet Habu that Ramses III. has recorded his victories and inscribed the names of the peoples and cities he had overcome. We gather from the latter that his armies had followed the roads already traversed by Ramses II., had marched through the south of Palestine into Moab, and had made their way along the sea-coast into Northern Syria. One after the other we read the names of Hir-nam or Har-nam, called Har-Nammata in the Mohar's Travels, of Lebanoth, of Beth-Anath and Qarbutu (Josh. xv. 59), of Carmim, "the vineyards," and Shabuduna or Shebtîn, of Mashabir (?), of Hebron and its 'Èn or "Spring," of the "district of Libnah," of 'Aphekah and 'Abakhi (Josh. xv. 53), of Migdal—doubtless the Migdal-Gad of Josh. xv. 53—and Qarzak, of Carmel of Judah and the Upper District of Debir, of Shimshon and Erez Hadasth, of the district of Salem or Jerusalem and the "Lake of Rethpana," of the Jordan, of Khilz the fortress, of Korkha and of Uru. A second list gives us the line of march along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. First we have 'Akata, perhaps Joktheel in Judah (Josh. xv. 38), then Karka and [Zidi]puth, Abel and the district of Sela', the district of Zasr and Jacob-el, Rehuza, Saaba and Gaza, Rosh-Kadesh, Inzath and the "Spring," Lui-el, which we might also read Levi-el, Bur, "the Cistern," Kamdu, "Qubur the great," Iha, Tur, and finally Sannur, the Saniru of the Assyrian texts, the Shenir of the Old Testament (Deut. iii. 9). This brings us to Mount Hermon and the land of the Amorites, so that it is not surprising to find after two more names that of Hamath.

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.