their march from the Nile valley, were wont to stop
at this spot to recover from their fatigues; it was their first
halting-place beyond the frontier, and the news which would reach them
here prepared them in some measure for what awaited them further on.
The army itself, the "troop of Ra," was drawn from four great races, the
most distinguished of which came, of course, from the banks of the Nile:
the Amu, born of Sokhit, the lioness-headed goddess, were classed in
the second rank; the Nahsi, or negroes of Ethiopia, were placed in the
third; while the Timihu, or Libyans, with the white tribes of the
north, brought up the rear. The Syrians belonged to the second of these
families, that next in order to the Egyptians, and the name of Amu,
which for centuries had been given them, met so satisfactorily all
political, literary, or commercial requirements, that the administrators
of the Pharaohs never troubled themselves to discover the various
elements concealed beneath the term. We are, however, able at the
present time to distinguish among them several groups of peoples and
languages, all belonging to the same family, but possessing distinctive
characteristics. The kinsfolk of the Hebrews, the children of Ishmael
and Edom, the Moabites and Ammonites, who were all qualified as Shausu,
had spread over the region to the south and east of the Dead Sea, partly
in the desert, and partly on the confines of the cultivated land. The
Canaanites were not only in possession of the coast from Gaza to a point
beyond the Nahr el-Kebir, but they also occupied almost the whole valley
of the Jordan, besides that of the Litany, and perhaps that of the Upper
Orontes.* There were Aramaean settlements at Damascus, in the plains of
the Lower Orontes, and in Naharaim.**

* I use the term Canaanite with the meaning most frequently
attached to it, according to the Hebrew use (_Gen_. x. 15-
19). This word is found several times in the Egyptian texts
under the forms Kinakhna, Kinakhkhi, and probably Kunakhaiu,
in the cuneiform texts of Tel el-Amarna.

** As far as I know, the term Aramaean is not to be found in
any Egyptian text of the time of the Pharaohs: the only
known example of it is a writer's error corrected by Chabas.
W. Max Mueller very justly observes that the mistake is
itself a proof of the existence of the name and of the
acquaintance of the Egyptians with it.

The country beyond