era of Egyptian conquest.  In the Tel el-Amarna tablets they are always called Kassites, a name which could have been given to them only after the conquest of Babylonia by the Kassite mountaineers of Elam, and the rise of a Kassite dynasty of kings.  This was about 1730 B.C.  For some time subsequently, therefore, the government of Babylonia must still have been acknowledged in Canaan.  With this agrees a statement of the Egyptian historian Manetho, upon which the critics, in their wisdom or their ignorance, have poured unmeasured contempt.  He tells us that when the Hyksos were driven out of Egypt by Ahmes I., the founder of the eighteenth dynasty, they occupied Jerusalem and fortified it—­not, as would naturally be imagined, against the Egyptian Pharaoh, but against “the Assyrians,” as the Babylonians were called by Manetho’s contemporaries.  As long as there were no monuments to confront them the critics had little difficulty in proving that the statement was preposterous and unhistorical, that Jerusalem did not as yet exist, and that no Assyrians or Babylonians entered Palestine until centuries later.  But we now know that Manetho was right and his critics wrong.  Jerusalem did exist, and Babylonian armies threatened the independence of the Canaanite states.  In one of his letters, Ebed-Tob, king of Jerusalem, tells the Pharaoh that he need not be alarmed about the Babylonians, for the temple at Jerusalem is strong enough to resist their attack.  Rib-Hadad the governor of Gebal bears the same testimony.  “When thou didst sit on the throne of thy father,” he says, “the sons of Ebed-Asherah (the Amorite) attached themselves to the country of the Babylonians, and took the country of the Pharaoh for themselves; they (intrigued with) the king of Mitanna, and the king of the Babylonians, and the king of the Hittites.”  In another despatch he speaks in a similar strain:  “The king of the Babylonians and the king of Mitanna are strong, and have taken the country of the Pharaoh for themselves already, and have seized the cities of thy governor.”  When George the Synkellos notes that the Chaldaeans made war against the Phoenicians in B.C. 1556, he is doubtless quoting from some old and trustworthy source.

We must not imagine, however, that there was any permanent occupation of Canaan on the part of the Babylonians at this period of its history.  It would seem rather that Babylonian authority was directly exercised only from time to time, and had to be enforced by repeated invasions and campaigns.  It was the influence of Babylonian civilization and culture that was permanent, not the Babylonian government itself.  Sometimes, indeed, Canaan became a Babylonian province, at other times there were only certain portions of the country which submitted to the foreign control, while again at other times the Babylonian rule was merely nominal.  But it is clear that it was not until Canaan had been thoroughly reduced by Egyptian arms that the old claim of Babylonia to be its mistress was finally renounced, and even then we see that intrigues were carried on with the Babylonians against the Egyptian authority.