the letters are sometimes on the most trivial of
subjects. It is clear that schools and libraries must have existed
throughout the civilised East, where the Babylonian characters could be
taught and learned, and where Babylonian literature and official
correspondence could be stored up. Among the tablets found at Tel
el-Amarna are some fragments of Babylonian literature, one of which has
served as a lesson-book, and traces of dictionaries have also been
discovered there.

The religious reforms of Khu-n-Aten resulted in the fall of the dynasty
and the Egyptian empire. The letters from Canaan, more especially those
from the vassal-king of Jerusalem, show that the power of Egypt in Asia
was on the wane. The Hittites were advancing from the north, Mitanni and
Babylonia were intriguing with disaffected Canaanites, and the
Canaanitish governors themselves were at war with one another. The
Pharaoh is entreated to send help speedily; if his troops do not come at
once, it is reputed, they will come too late. But it would seem that the
troops could not be spared at home. There, too, civil war was breaking
out, and though Khu-n-Aten died before the end came, his sepulchre was
profaned, his mummy rent to pieces, and the city he had built destroyed.
The stones of the temple of his god were sent to Thebes, there to be
used in the service of the victorious Amon; and the tombs prepared for
his mother and his followers remained empty. In the national reaction
against the Asiatised court and religion of Khu-n-Aten, the Canaanitish
foreigners who had usurped the highest offices were either put to death
or driven into exile, and a new dynasty, the Nineteenth, arose, whose
policy was "Egypt for the Egyptians."

Ramses I. was regarded as the founder of the Nineteenth dynasty. His
reign was short, and he was followed by his son Seti I., who once more
led his armies into Asia and subdued the coast-land of Syria. Seti was
succeeded by his son Ramses II., who died at a great age after a reign
of sixty-seven years (B.C. 1348-1281), and whose mummy, like that of his
father, is now in the Cairo Museum. He set himself to restore the
Asiatic empire of Thothmes. But the Hittites barred his way. They had
established themselves at Kadesh on the Orontes, and a long war of
twenty-one years ended at last in a treaty of peace in which the two
combatants agreed to respect from henceforth the existing boundaries of
Egypt and Kadesh. Egypt was left with Pales