Patriarchal Palestine

by A. H. Sayce

The annals of the next two years are in too mutilated a condition to yield much information. Moreover, the campaigns carried on in them were mainly in the Soudan. In B.C. 1461 the record closes. It was in that year that the account of the Pharaoh's victories "which he had gained from the 23rd until the (4)2nd year" were engraved upon the wall of the temple. (The inscription has "32nd year," but as the wars extended beyond the 40th year of the king's reign this must be a sculptor's error.) And the chronicle concludes with the brief but expressive words, "Thus hath he done: may he live for ever!"

Thothmes, indeed, did not live for ever, but he survived the completion of his temple fourteen years. His death was followed by the revolt of Northern Syria, and the first achievement of his son and successor, Amenôphis II., was its suppression. Ni and Ugarit, the centres of disaffection, were captured and punished, and among the prisoners from Ugarit were 640 "Canaanite" merchants with their slaves. The name of Canaanite had thus already acquired that secondary meaning of "merchant" which we find in the Old Testament (Is. xxiii. 8; Ezek. xvii. 4). It is a significant proof of the commercial activity and trading establishments of the Canaanite race throughout the civilized world. Even a cuneiform tablet from Kappadokia, which is probably of the same age as the tablets of Tel el-Amarna, gives us the name of Kinanim "the Canaanite" as that of a witness to a deed. It was not always, however, that the Canaanites were so honourably distinguished. At times the name was equivalent to that of "slave" rather than of "merchant," as in a papyrus [Anast. 4, 16, 2.] where mention is made of Kan'amu or "Canaanite slaves from Khal." So too in another papyrus we hear of a slave called Saruraz the son of Naqati, whose mother was Kadi from the land of Arvad. The Egyptian wars in Palestine must necessarily have resulted in the enslavement of many of its inhabitants, and, as we have seen, a certain number of young slaves formed part of the annual tax levied upon Syria.

The successors of Thothmes III. extended the Egyptian empire far to the south in the Soudan. But its Asiatic limits had already been reached. Palestine, along with Phoenicia, the land of the Amorites and the country east of the Jordan, was constituted into an Egyptian province and kept strictly under Egyptian control. Further north the connection with the imperial government was looser. There were Egyptian fortresses and garrisons here and there, and certain important towns like Tunip near Aleppo and Qatna on the Khabûr were placed under Egyptian prefects. But elsewhere the conquered populations were allowed to remain under their native kings. In some instances, as, for example, in Anugas or Nukhasse, the kings were little more than satraps of the Pharaoh, but in other instances, like Alasiya, north of Hamath, they resembled the rulers of the protected states in modern India. In fact, the king of Alasiya calls the Pharaoh his "brother," and except for the obligation of paying tribute was practically an independent sovereign.

The Egyptian dominion was acknowledged as far north as Mount Amanus. Carchemish, soon to become a Hittite stronghold, was in Egyptian hands, and the Hittites themselves had not yet emerged from the fortresses of the Taurus. Their territory was still confined to Kataonia and Armenia Minor between Melitênê and the Saros, and they courted the favour of the Egyptian monarch by sending him gifts. Thothmes would have refused to believe that before many years were over they would wrest Northern Syria from his successors, and contend on equal terms with the Egyptian Pharaoh.

The Egyptian possessions on the east bank of Euphrates lay along the course of the Khabûr, towards the oasis of Singar or Shinar. North of the Belikh came the powerful kingdom of Mitanni, Aram-Naharaim as it is called in the Old Testament, which was never subdued by the Egyptian arms, and whose royal family intermarried with the successors of Thothmes. Mitanni, the capital, stood nearly opposite Carchemish, which thus protected the Egyptian frontier on the east.

Southward of the Belikh the frontier was formed by the desert. Syria, Bashan, Ammon, and Moab were all included in the Pharaoh's empire. But there it came to an end. Mount Seir was never conquered by the Egyptians. The "city" of Edom appears in one of the Tel el-Amarna tablets as a foreign state whose inhabitants wage war against the Egyptian territory. The conquest of the Edomites in their mountain fastnesses would have been a matter of difficulty, nor would anything have been gained by it. Edom was rich neither agriculturally nor commercially; it was, in fact, a land of barren mountains, and the trade which afterwards passed through the Arabah to Elath and Ezion-geber in the Gulf of Aqabah was already secured to the Egyptians through their possession of the Gulf of Suez. The first and last of the Pharaohs, so far as we know, who ventured on a campaign against the wild tribes of Mount Seir, was Ramses III. of the twentieth dynasty, and his campaign was merely a punitive one. No attempt to incorporate the "Red Land" into his dominions was ever made by an Egyptian king.

The Sinaitic peninsula, the province of Mafkat or "Malachite," as it was called, had been in the possession of the Egyptians since the time of Zosir of the third dynasty, and it continued to be regarded as part of the Egyptian kingdom up to the age of the Ptolemies. The earliest of Egyptian rock-sculptures is engraved in the peninsula, and represents Snefru, the founder of the fourth dynasty, slaughtering the Beduin who inhabited it. Its possession was valued on account of its mines of copper and malachite. These were worked by the Egyptian kings with the help of convict labour. Garrisons were established to protect them and the roads which led to them, colonies of officials grew up at their side, and temples were built dedicated to the deities of Egypt. Even as late as the reign of Ramses III. the amount of minerals produced by the mines was enormous. They existed for the most part on the western side of the peninsula, opposite the Egyptian coast; but Ramses III. also opened copper mines in the land of 'Ataka further east, and the name of the goddess Hathor in hieroglyphics has been found by Dr. Friedmann on the shores of Midian.

Vanquished Syria was made to contribute to the endowments of the Egyptian temples. Thus the temple of Amon at Thebes was endowed by Thothmes III. with the revenues of the three cities Anugas, Inu'am, and Harankal; while Seti I., the father of Ramses II., bestowed upon it "all the silver, gold, lapis-lazuli, malachite, and precious stones which he carried off from the humbled land of Syria." Temples of the Egyptian gods, as well as towns, were built in Syria itself; Meneptah founded a city in the land of the Amorites; Ramses III. erected a temple to Amon in "the land of Canaan, great as the horizon of heaven above, to which the people of Syria come with their gifts"; and hieroglyphic inscriptions lately discovered at Gaza show that another temple had been built there by Amenophis II. to the goddess Mut.

Amenophis had suppressed the rebellion in Northern Syria with little trouble. Seven Amorite kings were carried prisoners to Egypt from the land of Takhis, and taken up the river as far as Thebes. There six of them were hung outside the walls of the city, as the body of Saul was hung by the Philistines outside the walls of Beth-shan, while the seventh was conveyed to Napata in Ethiopia, and there punished in the same way in order to impress a lesson of obedience upon the negroes of the Soudan.

Amenophis II. was succeeded by Thothmes IV., who was called upon to face a new enemy, the Hittites. It was at the commencement of his reign that they first began to descend from their mountain homes, and the frontier city of Tunip had to bear the brunt of the attack. It was probably in order to strengthen himself against these formidable foes that the Pharaoh married the daughter of the king of Mitanni, who changed her name to Mut-em-ua. It was the beginning of those inter-marriages with the princes of Asia which led to the Asiatized court and religion of Amenophis IV., and finally to the overthrow of the eighteenth dynasty.