le us to carry the record back to the fifteenth
century b.c. In certain of the tablets now as Berlin (Winckler and Abel,
42 and 45) the Phoenician governor of the Pharaoh asks that help should
be sent him from Melukhkha and Egypt: "The king should hear the words of
his servant, and send ten men of the country of Melukhkha and twenty men
of the country of Egypt to defend the city [of Gebal] for the king." And
again, "I have sent [to] Pharaoh" (literally, "the great house") "for a
garrison of men from the country of Melukhkha, and... the king has
just despatched a garrison [from] the country of Melukhkha." At a still
earlier date we have indications that Melukhkha and Magan denoted the
same region of the world. In an old Babylonian geographical list which
belongs to the early days of Chaldsean history, Magan is described as
"the country of bronze," and Melukhkha as "the country of the _samdu_,"
or "malachite." It was this list which originally led Oppert, Lenormant,
and myself independently to the conviction that Magan was to be looked
for in the Sinaitic Peninsula. Magan included, however, the Midian of
Scripture, and the city of Magan, called Makkan in Semitic Assyrian, is
probably the Makna of classical geography, now represented by the ruins
of Mukna.

As I have always maintained the historical character of the annals of
Sargon of Accad, long before recent discoveries led Professor Hilprecht
and others to adopt the same view, it is as well to state why I
consider them worthy of credit. In themselves the annals contain
nothing improbable; indeed, what might seem the most unlikely portion
of them--that which describes the extension of Sargon's empire to the
shores of the Mediterranean--has been confirmed by the progress of
research. Ammi-satana, a king of the first dynasty of Babylon (about
2200 B.C.), calls himself "king of the country of the Amorites," and
the Tel el-Amarna tablets have revealed to us how deep and long-lasting
Babylonian influence must have been throughout Western Asia. Moreover,
the vase described by Professor Maspero in the present work proves that
the expedition of Naram-Sin against Magan was an historical reality, and
such an expedition was only possible if "the land of the Amorites," the
Syria and Palestine of later days, had been secured in the rear.
But what chiefly led me to the belief that the annals are a document
contemporaneous with the events narrated in them, are two facts which
do not s