s, or that the king of Mitanni
may have sent an embassy to his court. And we now have a good deal more
than the indirect evidence of the treaty with the Hittites to show that
Canaan was again a province of the Egyptian empire. The names of some of
its cities which were captured in the early part of the Pharaoh's reign
may still be read on the walls of the Ramesseum at Thebes. Among them
are Ashkelon, Shalam or Jerusalem, Merom, and Beth-Anath, which were
taken by storm in his eighth year. Dapul, "in the land of the Amorites,"
was captured at the same time, proving that the Egyptian forces
penetrated as far as the Hittite frontiers. At Luxor other Canaanite
names figure in the catalogue of vanquished states. Thus we have Carmel
of Judah, Ir-shemesh and Hadashah (Josh. xv. 37), Gaza, Sela and
Jacob-el, Socho, Yurza, and Korkha in Moab. The name of Moab itself
appears for the first time among the subject nations, while we gather
from a list of mining settlements, that Cyprus as well as the Sinaitic
peninsula was under Egyptian authority.
A sarcastic account of the misadventures of a military officer in
Palestine, which was written in the time of Ramses, is an evidence of
the complete occupation of that country by the Egyptians. All parts of
Canaan are alluded to in it, and as Dr. Max Mueller has lately pointed
out, we find in it for the first time the names of Shechem and
Kirjath-Sepher. Similar testimony is borne by a hieroglyphic inscription
recently discovered by Dr. Schumacher on the so-called "Stone of Job" in
the Hauran. The stone (_Sakhrat 'Ayyub_) is a monolith westward of the
Sea of Galilee, and not far from Tel 'Ashtereh, the ancient
Ashtaroth-Karnaim, which was a seat of Egyptian government in the time
of Khu-n-Aten. The monolith is adorned with Egyptian sculptures and
hieroglyphs. One of the sculptures represents a Pharaoh above whose
likeness is the cartouche of Ramses II., while opposite the king, to the
left, is the figure of a god who wears the crown of Osiris, but has a
full face. Over the god is his name in hieroglyphics. The name, however,
is not Egyptian, but seems to be intended for the Canaanite Yakin-Zephon
or "Yakin of the North." It is plain, therefore, that we have here a
monument testifying to the rule of Ramses II., but a monument which was
erected by natives of the country to a native divinity. For a while the
hieroglyphic writing of Egypt had taken the place formerly occupied by
the cuneiform
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