At this point the coast turns in a north-easterly direction, and is flanked with high sand-hills, behind which the caravans pursue their way, obtaining merely occasional glimpses of the sea. Here and there, under the shelter of a tower or a half-ruined fortress, the traveller would have found wells of indifferent water, till on reaching the confines of Syria he arrived at the fortified village of Raphia, standing like a sentinel to guard the approach to Egypt. Beyond Raphia vegetation becomes more abundant, groups of sycamores and mimosas and clusters of date-palms appear on the horizon, villages surrounded with fields and orchards are seen on all sides, while the bed of a river, blocked with gravel and fallen rocks, winds its way between the last fringes of the desert and the fruitful Shephelah;* on the further bank of the river lay the suburbs of Gaza, and, but a few hundred yards beyond, Gaza itself came into view among the trees standing on its wall-crowned hill.**
* The term Shephelah signifies the plain; it is applied by
the Biblical writers to the plain bordering the coast, from
the heights of Gaza to those of Joppa, which were inhabited
at a later period by the Philistines (Josh. xi. 16; Jer.
xxxii. 44 and xxxiii. 13).
** Guérin describes at length the road from Gaza to Raphia.
The only town of importance between them in the Greek period
was Iênysos, the ruins of which are to be found near Khan
Yunes, but the Egyptian name for this locality is unknown:
Aunaugasa, the name of which Brugsch thought he could
identify with it, should be placed much farther away, in
Northern or in Coele-Syria.
The Egyptians, on their march from the Nile valley, were wont to stop at this spot to recover from their fatigues; it was their first halting-place beyond the frontier, and the news which would reach them here prepared them in some measure for what awaited them further on. The army itself, the “troop of Râ,” was drawn from four great races, the most distinguished of which came, of course, from the banks of the Nile: the Amû, born of Sokhît, the lioness-headed goddess, were classed in the second rank; the Nahsi, or negroes of Ethiopia, were placed in the third; while the Timihû, or Libyans, with the white tribes of the north, brought up the rear. The Syrians belonged to the second of these families, that next in order to the Egyptians, and the name of Amu, which for centuries had been given them, met so satisfactorily all political, literary, or commercial requirements, that the administrators of the Pharaohs never troubled themselves to discover the various elements concealed beneath the term. We are, however, able at the present time to distinguish among them several groups of peoples and languages, all belonging to the same family, but possessing distinctive characteristics. The kinsfolk of the Hebrews, the children of Ishmael and Edom, the Moabites and Ammonites, who were all qualified as Shaûsû, had spread over the region to the south and east of the Dead Sea, partly in the desert, and partly on the confines of the cultivated land. The Canaanites were not only in possession of the coast from Gaza to a point beyond the Nahr el-Kebir, but they also occupied almost the whole valley of the Jordan, besides that of the Litâny, and perhaps that of the Upper Orontes.* There were Aramaean settlements at Damascus, in the plains of the Lower Orontes, and in Naharaim.**
* I use the term Canaanite with the meaning most frequently
attached to it, according to the Hebrew use (Gen. x. 15-
19). This word is found several times in the Egyptian texts
under the forms Kinakhna, Kinakhkhi, and probably Kûnakhaîû,
in the cuneiform texts of Tel el-Amarna.
** As far as I know, the term Aramæan is not to be found in
any Egyptian text of the time of the Pharaohs: the only
known example of it is a writer’s error corrected by Chabas.
W. Max Müller very justly observes that the mistake is
itself a proof of the existence of the name and of the
acquaintance of the Egyptians with it.
The country beyond the Aramaean territory, including the slopes of the Amanos and the deep valleys of the Taurus, was inhabited by peoples of various origin; the most powerful of these, the Khâti, were at this time slowly forsaking the mountain region, and spreading by degrees over the country between the Afrîn and the Euphrates.*
The Canaanites were the most numerous of all these groups, and had they been able to amalgamate under a single king, or even to organize a lasting confederacy, it would have been impossible for the Egyptian armies to have broken through the barrier thus raised between them and the rest of Asia; but, unfortunately, so far from showing the slightest tendency towards unity or concentration, the Canaanites were more hopelessly divided than any of the surrounding nations. Their mountains contained nearly as many states as there were valleys, while in the plains each town represented a separate government, and was built on a spot carefully selected for purposes of defence. The land, indeed, was chequered with these petty states, and so closely were they crowded together, that a horseman, travelling at leisure, could easily pass through two or three of them in a day’s journey.**
* Thûtmosis III. shows that, at any rate, they were
established in these regions about the XVIth century B.C.
The Egyptian pronunciation of their name is Khîti, with
the feminine Khîtaît, Khîtit; but the Tel el-Amarna texts
employ the vocalisation Khâti, Khâte, which must be more
correct than that of the Egyptians, The form Khîti seems
to me to be explicable by an error of popular etymology.
Egyptian ethnical appellations in îti formed their plural
by -âtiû, -âteê, -âti, -âte, so that if Khâte, Khâti,
were taken for a plural, it would naturally have suggested
to the scribes the form Khîti for the singular.
** Thûtmosis III., speaking to his soldiers, tells them that
all the chiefs the projecting spur of some mountain, or on a
solitary and more or less irregularly shaped eminence in the
midst of a plain, and the means of defence in the country
are shut up in Megiddo, so that “to take it is to take a
thousand cities:” this is evidently a hyperbole in the mouth
of the conqueror, but the exaggeration itself shows how
numerous were the chiefs and consequently the small states
in Central and Southern Syria.
Not only were the royal cities fenced with walls, but many of the surrounding villages were fortified, while the watch-towers, or migdols* built at the bends of the roads, at the fords over the rivers, and at the openings of the ravines, all testified to the insecurity of the times and the aptitude for self-defence shown by the inhabitants.
* This Canaanite word was borrowed by the Egyptians from the
Syrians at the beginning of their Asiatic wars; they
employed it in forming the names of the military posts which
they established on the eastern frontier of the Delta: it
appears for the first time among Syrian places in the list
of cities conquered by Thûtmosis III.