135 B.—Apparently without a name. He is only a dog, but will march with chariots and horses to meet the Egyptian soldiers (bitati).
130 B.—Sutarnamu, of his city Zicaruenu,[364] bows to the King. He asks for soldiers of garrison, as they are obstructing the district of the King's land near him. Probably the site is the present village Dhikerîn, near Gath on the south, which was the Caphar Dikerin of the Talmud (Tal. Jer. “Taanith,” iv. 8), in the region of Daroma (now Deirân), near Ekron (see Ekha ii. 2). He asks for soldiers.
131 B.—Samuaddu, of the town of Sama'una, listens to all the King's messages. Perhaps Sammûnieh, an ancient and important ruin immediately east of Kirjath Jearim ('Erma), on the way to Jerusalem, by the Valley of Sorek, is the place intended.
Nos. 79, 80, 81 B. M. are short and broken letters, which appear only to acknowledge messages received. No. 80 is from a certain Nebo...; in No. 79 there appears to be no personal name, and in No. 81 it is destroyed.
The names of these villages establish a regular chain of posts from Gaza, by Lachish, to the valleys of Sorek and Elah, which seem to have been the most eastern parts of the country in which chariots were to be found. There is no mention of chariots at Jerusalem, or at any village which was not accessible by a flat valley-road. By these posts communication was kept up, it would seem, with Jerusalem; and the messengers probably travelled by this route, avoiding Ajalon. It was by this route that Adonizedek proposed that Amenophis should come up to help him. Whether any such expedition was attempted, [pg 278] none of the letters seem to indicate. The troops had been withdrawn, and the Egyptian policy seems to have been to call out the native levies of the Amorite charioteers. Perhaps, when the five kings had been killed at Makkedah, no further steps were taken, but the lowlands remained unconquered till the time of Samuel and David. Even in Solomon's time Gezer was only received as the dower of the daughter of the Pharaoh (1 Kings ix. 16) who had burned the place and killed its Canaanite population. In Judges we read that Judah “could not drive out the inhabitants of the Shephelah (or lowlands) because they had chariots of iron” (i. 19). The coast road was still open when Dusratta was writing to his son-in-law Amenophis IV twenty years later; and all lower Galilee was, for some few years, with Philistia and Syria, reconquered by Rameses II, who, however, never entered the Judæan mountains.
This concludes the sum of 176 letters from Palestine, the translation of which has occupied me for nearly two years. I have no doubt that it may be improved upon in detail; but the general results seem to be too well corroborated, by comparison of the numerous epistles, which throw light on one another, to admit of any very important changes.
Royal Letters
Dusratta's Letters