“To Amanappa, my father; Rib-Addi, thy son! At my father's feet I fall. Again and again I asked thee, ‘Canst thou not rescue me from the hand of Abd-Ashera? All the Habiri are on his side; the princes will hear no remonstrances, but are in alliance with him; thereby is he become mighty.’ But thou hast answered me, ‘Send thy messenger with me to Court, and then will I, if nothing be said against it (i.e., by the king), send him again and again with royal troops to thee till the Pidati march forth to secure thy life.’ Then I answered thee, ‘I will not delay to send the man, but nothing of this must come to the ears of Abd-Ashera, for [Yanhamu has] taken [silver] from his hand.’ (As much as to say that if Abd-Ashera gives Yanhamu a hint, the messenger will never get beyond Lower Egypt.) But thou hast said, ‘Fear not, but send a ship to the Yarimuta, and money and garments will come to thee thence.’ Now, behold, the troops which thou hast given me have fled, because thou hast neglected me, while I have obeyed thee. He hath spoken with the official [pg 042] (Yanhamu?) nine times [in vain]. Behold, thou art delaying with regard to this offence as with the others. What then can save me? If I receive no troops I shall forsake my city, and flee, doing that which seems good to me to preserve my life.”
Yanhamu's bias against Rib-Addi is made evident in many other letters which the poor wretch addressed to the Court:
“If I should make a treaty with Abd-Ashera as did Yap-Addi and Zimrida, then I should be safe. Furthermore, since Simyra is indeed lost to me, and Yanhamu hath received Bit-Arti, he ought to send me provision of grain that I may defend the king's city for him. Thou, oh king, speak to Yanhamu; ‘Behold, Rib-Addi is in thy hand, and all injury done to him falls on thee.’ ”
This desire was not complied with, for the Phœnician vassal was at length robbed of all his cities and possessions, so that even the callous Egyptian Government felt obliged at last to send a threatening embassy to Aziru, the son of Abd-Ashera, and the real author of the difficulties in Gebal. At the same time the surrender was demanded of certain “enemies of the king,” who were in all probability principal adherents of Aziru. When the messenger Hani arrived with this note, Aziru, evidently warned in good time, had promptly vanished over the hills, and none of the royal commands could be carried out. He [pg 043] pretends to have settled down in Tunip, which he must previously have seized, but at once returned home on hearing of Hani's arrival. Unfortunately it was too late. The cunning Amorite brought forward one excuse after another. “Even if thy actions be just, yet if thou dissemble in thy letters at thy pleasure, the king must at length come to think that thou liest in every case,” is a passage in the letter brought by Hani. Aziru replies in a tone of injured innocence:
“To the great king, my lord, my god, my sun; Aziru, thy servant. Seven times and again seven times, &c. Oh, lord, I am indeed thy servant; and only when prostrate on the ground before the king, my lord, can I speak what I have to say. But hearken not, O lord, to the foes who slander me before thee. I remain thy servant for ever.”
This trusty vassal added to his other known faults the peculiarity of conspiring readily with the Hittite foes of the Court. His insolence helped him successfully out of these awkward difficulties also whenever the matter came under discussion. When preparing fresh raids he did not hesitate to invent news of Hittite invasions which he was bound to resist, and all territory which he then took from his co-vassals would, according to his own account, otherwise certainly have fallen into the hands of the enemy. But as the result was always the same—i.e., to the [pg 044] advantage of Aziru alone—the opinion began to prevail in Egyptian councils that this restless vassal should be summoned to Court and tried. For many years Aziru succeeded in evading these fatal and dangerous, or at best very costly orders. But finally he was forced to obey, and with heavy heart and well-filled treasure chests set off for Egypt. Apparently he relied on his principal ally Dudu, whom in his letters he always addresses as “father”; but this pleasant alliance did not avail to protect the disturber of the peace from provisional arrest. The last letter in the Aziru series, which had obviously been confiscated and subsequently found its way back into the archives, is a letter of condolence from the adherents or sons of Aziru to their imprisoned chief. Nevertheless, the political activity of the Amorite chief seemed to many Syrian, and especially to Phœnician princes as on the whole for the good of the land, and, therefore, to be supported. His appearance put the longed-for end to a far less endurable condition of things. Two communications from Akizzi, the headman of the city of Katna, near Damascus, exhibit the difference clearly. When Akizzi sent his first communication to Nimmuria every petty chief went raiding on his own account: Teuwatta of Lapana, Dasha, Arzawia and all the rest of them. These vanished with the entrance of Aziru upon [pg 045] the scene, though the change was by no means welcome to Akizzi. In the Lebanon things were no better. Here Namyauza was struggling with the headmen of Puzruna and Khalunni. “They began hostilities together with Biridashwi against me and said: ‘Come, let us kill Namyauza.’ But I escaped.” This promiscuous warfare raged most fiercely in the south. Here a certain Labaya tried to play the part taken by Aziru in the north. But fortune was less favourable to Labaya. Probably he failed to induce his undisciplined officers to act in unison, and the unhappy man's sole achievement seems to have been the welding of his foes into a compact body against himself. He lost his territory, kept up the struggle a little longer as a freebooter, was taken captive at Megiddo, escaped again on the eve of being shipped to Egypt, and fell in battle or died a natural death after at length meeting apparently with some success in Judæa.
Jerusalem was under a royal “Uweu,” a term perhaps best rendered “captain,” named Abdikheba. A neighbouring prefect, Shuwardata, asserted occasionally that he had entered into conspiracies with Labaya, and Abdikheba in fact complained of hostilities on all sides. Milki-El and his father-in-law Tagi, chiefs in the Philistian plain near Gath, were his principal opponents. They recruited troops from among the Habiri in [pg 046] the hope that Abdikheba, finding himself practically blockaded, would weary of the struggle and abandon the field. He was evidently very nearly driven to this when he wrote:
“Infamous things have been wrought against me. To see it would draw tears from the eyes of the king, so do my foes press me. Shall the royal cities fall a prey to the Habiri? If the Pidati do not come in the course of this year, let the king send messengers to fetch me and all my brethren that we may die in the presence of the king, our lord.”
By the Habiri we must here understand no other than the Hebrews, who were therefore already to be found in the “Promised Land,” but had not yet firmly established themselves there. They swarmed in the Lebanon, where Namyauza had formally enlisted one of their hordes; and yet it seems as if they already held Shechem and Mount Ephraim as free tribal property. At any rate, no letter thence to the king has been discovered, although there is one mention of the city Shakmi (Shechem). The genuinely ancient passages in the scriptural accounts of the conquest in the Book of Joshua, and still more the valuable fragments in the first chapter of Judges, are fairly in accordance with what we here learn from the tablets.
Abdikheba's letters may be considered along with those of Milki-El and Tagi, of whom Yanhamu, [pg 047] the powerful official, had just made an example. Their voices take up the chorus of complaint: