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Updated: June 9, 2025
They had been steadily growing in power, and had intermarried into the royal family of Babylonia. Assur-yuballidh, one of whose letters to the Pharaoh has been found at Tel el-Amarna, had married his daughter to the uncle and predecessor of Burna-buryas, and his grandson became king of Babylon.
From Baalbek, the city of "Baal of the Bek'a," the traveller makes his way across Lebanon, and under the snows of Jebel Sannîn nearly 9000 feet in height to the old Phoenician city of Beyrout. Beyrout is already mentioned in the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna under the name of Beruta or Beruna, "the cisterns."
At a later date Babylonia itself was conquered by a foreign line of kings, and Canaan recovered its independence. But this was of no long duration. The cuneiform tablets found at Tel el-Amarna in Upper Egypt give us a vivid picture of its condition at the close of the Eighteenth dynasty. The Egyptian power was falling to pieces, and Palestine was threatened by Hittite invaders from the north.
The adoption of the Babylonian system of writing must have worked powerfully on the side of tincturing the Canaanitish language with Babylonian words. In the age of the Tel el-Amarna tablets there is no sign that any other system was known in the West.
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. 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 Tel el-Amarna tablets have told us something about the language of Canaan as it was spoken before the days when the Israelites entered the land. Some of the letters that were sent from Palestine contain the Canaanite equivalents of certain Babylonian words that occur in them.
These remains consist merely of the foundations and lowest wall-courses of a complicated and rambling building of many chambers, constructed of common unburnt brick and plastered with white stucco on walls and floors, on which were painted beautiful frescoes of fighting bulls, birds of the air, water-fowl, fish-ponds, etc., in much the same style as the frescoes of Tell el-Amarna executed in the next reign.
In the Tel el-Amarna tablets the god of Jerusalem is identified with the warlike Sun-god of Babylonia, Nin-ip, and there was a sanctuary of the same divinity further north, in Phoenicia. Foremost among the deities whose first home was on the banks of the Euphrates were Arm and Anat, and Rimmon.
Yisyara was the name of an Amorite, as we learn from one of the Tel el-Amarna tablets, where he is mentioned along with other rebels as being sent in fetters of bronze to the king. Of Dan-Hadad we know nothing further, but Zimrida's letter is as follows: Thy servant, the dust of thy feet, at the feet of the king my lord, the Sun-god from heaven, bows himself seven times seven.
Budge is of the opinion that many of the magic practices carried on in the Egyptian temples are to be traced back to the incantation rituals perfected by the Babylonian priests. In view of the early contact between Egypt and Babylonia, as revealed by the El-Amarna tablets, there were certainly abundant opportunities for the infusion of Babylonian views and customs into Egyptian cults.
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