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Behold, now Namyauza hath delivered up to the Habiri all the king’s cities in the land of Kadesh and in Ube. But I will march forth, and if thy gods and thy sun go before me I will restore these places from the Habiri to the king that I may show myself subject to him. I will drive out these Habiri, and my lord the king shall rejoice in his servant Itakama.
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 recruited troops from among the Habiri in 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?
The tablets are full of references to these complicated struggles, which it is not always possible to follow in detail. Additional confusion was caused by the immigration of Bedawìn tribes. In the north the nomadic Sutu, in the south the Habiri pressed forward and encroached upon Egyptian territory.
In Palestine, no doubt, peace as regards Egypt would soon have been restored had not the Habiri proceeded to seize certain strongholds, which they used as centres for further expeditions, thus involving the settled inhabitants in wider quarrels.
It is evident that this further pressure was calculated to bring matters to a crisis, for, like the tribute, it affected pre-eminently the vassal chiefs and tribes. We find the Habiri especially in the very act of ruining some of these petty princes, others of whom preferred to make treaties with their unwelcome guests, though this indeed was apparently in secret only.
One of the two may be identical with the king of Tana; who, as Rib-Addi briefly mentions, was about to march to Gebal, but was forced by scarcity of water to return home. A few letters from women are among the tablets. Two probably came from the wife of Milki-El, who was hard pressed by the Habiri when her husband was called to Egypt.
The Hittites in Itakama’s force were, of course, prominently mentioned to alarm Pharaoh. They may have been Hittite spearmen enrolled by the prince of Kadesh, much as the Habiri and Sutu had been enlisted by his chief rival Namyauza. It is even possible that the soldiers of Kadesh had always been armed in Hittite fashion; perhaps the town was already inhabited by people of Hittite stock.
But about a generation before our date the northernmost of those bold "Habiri," under an elective sheikh Saul, had pushed the Philistines out of Bethshan and other points of vantage in mid-Palestine, and had become once more free of the hills which they had held in the days of Pharaoh Menephthah.
The heaviest blows could not in the long run prevent the Habiri from returning to the attack again and again at brief intervals. Their need of expansion was greater than their fear, and, after all, it mattered little to Pharaoh whether the Habirite or the Canaanite paid tribute in Palestine as soon as the intruder was prepared to acknowledge his rights.
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