If the Travels of a Mohar are a guide-book to the geography of Palestine in the age of the nineteenth Egyptian dynasty, the lists of places conquered by Thothmes III., and engraved by his orders on the walls of his temple at Karnak, are a sort of atlas of Canaanite geography in the age of the eighteenth dynasty.  The name of each locality is enclosed in a cartouche and surmounted by the head and shoulders of a Canaanitish captive.  The hair and eyes of the figures are painted black or rather dark purple, while the skin is alternately red and yellow.  The yellow represents the olive tint of the Mediterranean population, the red denotes the effects of sunburn.  An examination of the names contained in the cartouches makes it clear that they have been derived from the memoranda made by the scribes who accompanied the army of the Pharaoh in its campaigns.  Sometimes the same name is repeated twice, and not always in the same form.  We may conclude, therefore, that the memoranda had not always been made by the same reporter, and that the compiler of the lists drew his materials from different sources.  It is further clear that the memoranda had been noted down in the cuneiform characters of Babylonia and not in the hieroglyphs of Egypt.  Thus, as we have seen, the name of Beth-el is transcribed from its Babylonian form of Bit-sa-ili, the Assyrian equivalent of the Hebrew Beth-el.

The names have been copied from the memoranda of the scribes in the order in which they occurred, and without any regard to their relative importance.  While, therefore, insignificant villages are often noted, the names of important cities are sometimes passed over.  Descriptive epithets, moreover, like abel “meadow,” arets “land,” har “mountains,” ’emeq “valley,” ’en “spring,” are frequently treated as if they were local names, and occupy separate cartouches.  We must not, consequently, expect to find in the lists any exhaustive catalogue of Palestinian towns or even of the leading cities.  They mark only the lines of march taken by the army of Thothmes or by his scouts and messengers.

Besides the Canaanitish lists there are also long lists of localities conquered by the Pharaoh in Northern Syria.  With these, however, we have nothing to do.  It is to the places in Canaan that our attention must at present be confined.  They are said to be situated in the country of the Upper Lotan, or, as another list gives it, in the country of the Fenkhu.  In the time of Thothmes III. accordingly the land of the Upper Lotan and the land of the Fenkhu were synonymous terms, and alike denoted what we now call Palestine.  In the word Fenkhu it is difficult not to see the origin of the Greek Phoenix or “Phoenician.”