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If, as seems probable, the Pharaoh of Joseph was Apepi, the last of the Shepherd Kings, and the Pharaoh of the Oppression was Rameses II., the third king of the nineteenth dynasty, we have a period of nearly three centuries between Joseph and the “new king who knew not Joseph.” The period appears to be much too long to make the expression “new king” seem natural, while at the same time a shorter period would hardly leave room for the descendants of Jacob to multiply and become a danger to Egypt. This perplexity is removed by the recent discovery of ancient writings under the extensive ruins existing at Tell-el-Amarna in Upper Egypt—a site about midway between Minieh and Siout, and on the eastern bank of the Nile. From these documents it appears that Semites were in great favour with Amenhotep IV. (Amenôphis), the last king of the eighteenth dynasty, whereas the new dynasty that succeeded abominated this foreign influence.

In the latter part of the eighteenth dynasty friendly relations prevailed between Egypt and Mitanni or Nahrina (Aram Naharaim, Judges iii. 8), a Mesopotamian district which lay opposite to the Hittite city of Carchemish. Amenôphis III. married a wife from the royal house of Mitanni; and the offspring of this marriage—Amenôphis IV.—in his turn married Tadukhepa, daughter of Duisratta, the Mitannian king. He was thus doubly drawn to look favourably upon the Mitannian form of faith, which, like that of the Semites, included the adoration of the winged solar disk. Meantime the Egyptian conquest of Palestine, whose petty kings and governors now ruled as satraps for the Egyptian monarch, had paved the way for strangers from Canaan and Syria to rise into favour at Pharaoh’s court. Amenôphis IV. surrounded himself with Semitic officers and courtiers, thus offending the nobles of Egypt; and by forsaking the ancient religion of his country, brought about a rupture with the powerful priesthood of Thebes. Forced to go forth, the “heretic king” built a new capital on the edge of the desert to the north. Here he assumed the name of Khu-en-Aten, “the glory of the solar disk,” while his architects and sculptors consecrated a new and peculiar style of art to the new religion, and even the potters decorated the vases they modelled with new colours and patterns.

“The archives of the empire were transferred from Thebes to the new residence of the king, and there stored in the royal palace, which stood among its gardens at the northern extremity of the city. But the existence and prosperity of Khu-en-Aten’s capital were of short duration. When the king died he left only daughters behind him, whose husbands assumed in succession the royal power. Their reigns lasted but a short time, and it is even possible that more than one of them had to share his power with another prince. At any rate it was not long before rulers and people alike returned to the old paths. The faith which Khu-en-Aten had endeavoured to introduce was left without worshippers, the Asiatic strangers whom he and his father had promoted to high offices of State were driven from power, and the new capital was deserted never to be inhabited again. The great temple of the solar disk fell into decay, like the royal palace, and the archives of Khu-en-Aten were buried under the ruins of the chamber wherein they had been kept.”

It is these archives which have now come to light, and which furnish such extraordinary information concerning the state of Egypt and Palestine in the century before the Oppression. In the winter of 1887 the fellahin of Egypt, searching for nitrous earth with which to manure their fields, discovered some three hundred ancient tablets inscribed with Babylonian cuneiform writing. The tablets are copies of letters and despatches from the kings and governors of Babylonia and Assyria, of Syria, Mesopotamia, and Eastern Cappadocia, of Phœnicia and Palestine, exchanging information with the Pharaoh of Egypt, or making reports as to the state of the country they governed. Among the correspondents of the Egyptian sovereigns were Assurynballidh of Assyria and Burnaburyas of Babylonia, which thus fix the date of Khu-en-Aten to about 1430 B.C. This shows incidentally that the Egyptologists have been quite right in not assigning the Exodus to an earlier period than 1320 B.C., that is to say, the reign of Menephtah, the son and successor of Rameses II.

At the date of the despatches Palestine and Phœnicia were garrisoned by Egyptian troops, and their affairs were more or less directed by Egyptian governors. But in some cases the native prince was allowed to retain his title and a portion of his power. Thus Jerusalem (which was then called Uru-’Salim—the seat or oracle of the god Salim, it is supposed, whose temple stood on the mountain of Moriah)—was ruled over by Ebed-tob. He appears to have been a priest rather than a king, since he tells us that he was appointed by an oracle of the god; and in that case the state over which he presided would be a Theocracy. Dr Sayce considers that an unexpected light is thus thrown on the person and position of Melchizedek. He was priest of El-Elyon, the “Most High God,” and king only in virtue of his priestly office. His father therefore is not named. [“Records of the Past.” New Series, vol. v.] There were as yet no signs of the Israelites coming into the land. But the Canaanite population was already threatened by an enemy from the north. These were the Hittites, to whom references are made in several of the despatches from Syria and Phœnicia. After the weakening of the Egyptian power, in consequence of the religious troubles which followed the death of Khu-en-Aten, the Hittites were enabled to complete their conquests in the south, and to drive a wedge between the Semites of the East and the West. With the revival of the Egyptian empire under the rulers of the nineteenth dynasty the southward course of Hittite conquest was checked; but the wars of Rameses II. against the Hittites of Kadesh on Orontes desolated and exhausted Canaan and prepared the way for the Israelitish invasion. Phœnicia seems to have been the furthest point to the north to which the direct government of Egypt extended. At any rate the letters which came to the Egyptian monarch from Syria and Mesopotamia were sent to him by princes who called themselves his “brothers,” and not by officials who were the “servants” of the king.

It is wonderful to find that in the fifteenth century before our era, active literary intercourse was carried on throughout the civilised world of Western Asia, between Babylonia and Egypt and the smaller states of Palestine, of Syria, of Mesopotamia, and even of Eastern Cappadocia. And this intercourse was carried on by means of the Babylonian language and the complicated Babylonian script. It implies that all over the civilised East there were libraries and schools, where the Babylonian language and literature were taught and learned. Babylonian in fact was as much the language of diplomacy and cultivated society as French has been in modern times, with the difference that whereas it does not take long to read French, the cuneiform syllabary required years of hard labour and attention before it could be acquired. There must surely have been a Babylonian conquest. In fact, Mr Theo. G. Pinches now finds, from a text of about B.C. 2115 to 2090, that Animisutana, king of Babylon at that time, was also king of Phœnicia among other places. [“Records of the Past” New Series, vol. v.]

One of the facts which result most clearly from a study of the tablets is that, not only was a Semitic language the medium of literary intercourse between the Pharaoh of Egypt and his officers abroad, but that Semites held high and responsible posts in the Egyptian Court itself. Thus we find Dudu, or David, addressed by his son as “my lord,” and ranking apparently next to the monarch; and there are in the Egyptian National Collection not only letters written by officials with Egyptian names, like Khapi or Hapi (Apis), but with such Semitic names as Rib-Addu, Samu-Addu, Bu-Dadu (the Biblical Bedad) and Milkili (the Biblical Malchiel). A flood of light is thus poured upon a period of Egyptian history which is of high interest for the student of the Old Testament. In spite of the reticence of the Egyptian monuments, we can now see what was the meaning of the attempt of Amenophis IV. to supersede the ancestral religion of Egypt. The king was in all respects an Asiatic. His mother, who seems to have been a woman of strong character,—able to govern not only her son, but even her less pliable husband,—came from the region of the Euphrates, and brought with her Asiatic followers, Asiatic ideas, and an Asiatic form of faith. The court became Semitised. The favourites and officials of the Pharaoh, his officers in the field, his correspondents abroad, bore names which showed them to be of Canaanite and even of Israelitish origin. If Joseph and his brethren had found favour among the Hyksos princes of an earlier day, their descendants were likely to find equal favour at the court of “the heretic king.”

We need not wonder, therefore, if Amenophis IV. found himself compelled to quit Thebes. The old aristocracy might have condoned his religious heresy, but they could not condone his supplanting them with foreign favourites. The rise of the nineteenth dynasty marks the successful reaction of the native Egyptian against the predominance of the Semite in the closing days of the eighteenth dynasty. It was not the founder of the eighteenth dynasty (Aahmes, who drove out the Hyksos) but the founder of the nineteenth dynasty that was “the new king who knew not Joseph.” Ever since the progress of Egyptology had made it clear that Rameses II. was the Pharaoh of the Oppression, it was difficult to understand how so long an interval of time as the whole period of the eighteenth dynasty could lie between him and that “new king,” whose rise seems to have been followed almost immediately by the servitude and oppression of the Hebrews. If Aahmes began the Oppression, how was it that a whole dynasty passed away before the Israelites cried out? The tablets of Tell-el-Amarna now show that the difficulty does not exist. Up to the death of Khu-en-Aten the Semite had greater influence than the native in the land of Mizraim.

How highly educated this old world was we are but just beginning to learn. But we have already learned enough to discover how important a bearing it has on the criticism of the Old Testament. It has long been tacitly assumed by the critical school that the art of writing was practically unknown in Palestine before the age of David. Little historical credence, it has been urged, can be placed in the earlier records of the Hebrew people, because they could not have been committed to writing until a period when the history of the past had become traditional and mythical. But this assumption can no longer be maintained. Long before the Exodus Canaan had its libraries and its scribes, its schools and literary men. The annals of the country, it is true, were not inscribed in the letters of the Phœnician alphabet on perishable papyrus; the writing material was imperishable clay, the characters were those of the cuneiform syllabary. Though Kirjath-Sepher (i.e., Book-Town) was destroyed by the Israelites, other cities mentioned in the Tell-el-Amarna tablets, like Gaza, or Gath, or Tyre, remained independent, and we cannot imagine that the old traditions of culture and writing were forgotten in any of them. In what is asserted by the critical school to be the oldest relic of Hebrew literature, the Song of Deborah, reference is made to the scribes of Zebulon “that handle the pen of the writer” (Judges v. 14); and we have now no longer any reason to interpret the words in a non-natural sense, and transform the scribe into a military commander (an officer who arranges men in a row instead of arranging letters and words). Only it is probable that the scribes still made use of the cuneiform syllabary, and not yet of the Phœnician alphabet. At all events the Tell-el-Amarna tablets have overthrown the primary foundation on which much of this criticism was built, and have proved that the populations of Palestine, among whom the Israelites settled, and whose culture they inherited, were as literary as the inhabitants of Egypt or Babylonia.

But apart from such side-lights as these upon ancient history, the discovery of the Tell-el-Amarna tablets has a lesson for us of momentous interest. The collection cannot be the only one of its kind. Elsewhere, in Palestine and Syria as well as in Egypt, similar collections must still be lying under the soil. Burnt clay is not injured by rain and moisture, and even the climate of Palestine will have preserved uninjured its libraries of clay. Such libraries must still be awaiting the spade of the excavator on the sites of places like Gaza, or others whose remains are buried under the lofty mounds of Southern Judea. Kirjath-Sepher must have been the seat of a famous library, consisting mainly, if not altogether, of clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform characters. As the city also bore the name of Debir, or “Sanctuary,” we may conclude that the tablets were stored in its chief temple, like the libraries of Assyria and Babylonia. When such relics of the past have been disinterred—as they will be if they are properly searched for—we shall know how the people of Canaan lived in the days of the Patriarchs, and how their Hebrew conquerors established themselves among them in the days when, as yet, there was no king in Israel.

[The information contained in this section is derived almost exclusively from the writings of Dr A. H. Sayce, who has taken a chief part in England in the decipherment of the Tell-el-Amarna inscriptions. See “Proc. Soc. Bib. Arch.” “Records of the Past.” New Series, vols, ii., iii., iv., and v.; “Victoria Institute Annual Address, 1889.” See additional facts in the Contemporary Review, Dec. 1890, and opinions in Naville’s Bubastis. For later excavations at Tell-el-Amarna, by Mr Flinders Petrie, see the Academy, 9th April 1892. For a suggestion by Conder that the tablets are in the Phœnician or Amorite language and writing of that time, see Quarterly Statement, July 1891.]