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Updated: October 9, 2025
Syria, Bashan, Ammon, and Moab were all included in the Pharaoh's empire. But there it came to an end. Mount Seir was never conquered by the Egyptians. The "city" of Edom appears in one of the Tel el-Amarna tablets as a foreign state whose inhabitants wage war against the Egyptian territory.
Sometimes they were the Herusha or "Lords of the Sands," sometimes the Shasu or "Plunderers," sometimes again the Sutê or "Archers." The third name was borrowed from the Babylonians; in return, as we learn from the tablets of Tel el-Amarna, the Babylonians adopted the second.
It is curious that the commencement of this legend, the latter portion of which has been found at Tel el-Amarna, had been brought to the British Museum from the ruins of the library of Nineveh many years ago. But until the discovery of the conclusion, its meaning and character were indecipherable.
How this could have happened has been explained by the Tel el-Amarna tablets. It was while Canaan was under the influence of Babylonian culture and Babylonian government that the myths and traditions of Babylonia made their way to the West. Among the tablets are portions of Babylonian legends, one of which has been carefully annotated by the Egyptian or Canaanite scribe.
The Jebusites, however, were merely the local tribe which in the early days of the Israelitish occupation of Canaan were in possession of Jerusalem, and they were probably either Hittite or Amorite in race. At any rate there is no trace of them in the cuneiform letters of Tel el-Amarna.
See Jensen's valuable articles, "The Queen in the Babylonian Hades and her Consort," in the Sunday School Times, March 13 and 20, 1897. The text is published, Winckler and Abel, Der Thontafelfund von El-Amarna, iii. 164, 165. Written phonetically e-ri-ish. The word is entered as a synonym of sharratum, 'queen, VR. 28, no. 2; obverse 31.
The precise character of the heretical dogma, which Amenhetep IV proclaimed and desired his subjects to. accept, has lately been well explained by Mr. de Garis Davies in his volumes, published by the "Archaeological Survey of Egypt" branch of the Egypt Exploration Fund, on the tombs of el-Amarna. He shows that the heretical doctrine was a monotheism of a very high order.
It is an interesting fact that among the numerous letters found at Tell el-Amarna were two texts of quite a different character. These were legends, both in the form of school exercises, which had been written out for practice in the Babylonian tongue. One of them was the legend of Adapa, in which we noted just now a distant resemblance to the Hebrew story of Paradise.
The Tel el-Amarna correspondence breaks off suddenly in the midst of a falling empire, with its governors in Canaan fighting and intriguing one against the other, and appealing to the Pharaoh for help that never came.
The Tel el-Amarna tablets have made it impossible to return to the old critical point of view; the probabilities henceforward are in favour of the early date and historical truth of the Old Testament narratives, and not against them.
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