[129] Collection De Clercq, Catalogue méthodique et raisonné, i. p. 217.
[130] Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund, January 1905, pp. 28, 29.
[131] The chronological difficulty, however, would be partially solved if the date recently proposed by Professor Petrie (Researches in Sinai, ch. xii.) for the Twelfth dynasty—B.C. 3459–3250—be adopted. The Twelfth dynasty would in this case have reigned a thousand years before the dynasty of Khammu-rabi, whose domination in Palestine would have been an interlude in the history of the Hyksos period, while the conquest of Canaan by Sargon and Naram-Sin would have coincided with the supersession of the neolithic population by the “Amorites,” who brought with them the copper and the culture of Babylonia.
[132] Unless we except the gold and silver ornaments found on the body of a woman in a deserted house at Taanach, which, as Dr. Sellin says, are by themselves sufficient to remove “all grounds for doubting such accounts as those in Joshua vii. 21, and Judges viii. 26” (Eine Nachlese auf dem Tell Ta’annek, p. 32).
[133] Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, New Series, xiv. 3, 4, pp. 377–732.
[134] Eustathius on Dion. Perieget. 767. See Lehmann in the Zeitschrift für Assyriologie, 1894, pp. 90 and 358–60.
[135] The Vannic kings always call themselves kings, not of the Khaldians, but of Biainas or Bianas, the Byana of Ptolemy, the Van of to-day.
[136] See more especially Belck’s comparison of the Vannic pottery with that of the Assyrian colony of Kara Eyuk, near Kaisariyeh, in the Verhandlungen der Berliner anthropologischen Gesellschaft, December 1901, p. 493. Besides the highly-polished lustrous red ware, he found at Kara Eyuk fragments of the same wheel-made wine-jars, “of gigantic size,” which characterized Toprak Kaleh, near Van. Similar jars, as well as lustrous red pottery, were discovered by Schliemann in the “prehistoric” strata at Troy. The animals’ heads in terra-cotta found at Kara Eyuk are stated by Dr. Belck to be similar to those of the Digalla Tepé, near Urumiya. For further details see infra.
[137] See Pinches in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1897, pp. 589–613; and myself in the Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology, 1897, p. 286.
[138] Thus we find from the Cappadocian cuneiform tablets discovered at Kara Eyuk, north-east of Kaisariyeh, that time was reckoned by the annual succession of officers called limmi as in Assyria.