in their mountain fastnesses would have been a matter of difficulty, nor would anything have been gained by it.  Edom was rich neither agriculturally nor commercially; it was, in fact, a land of barren mountains, and the trade which afterwards passed through the Arabah to Elath and Ezion-geber in the Gulf of Aqabah was already secured to the Egyptians through their possession of the Gulf of Suez.  The first and last of the Pharaohs, so far as we know, who ventured on a campaign against the wild tribes of Mount Seir, was Ramses III. of the twentieth dynasty, and his campaign was merely a punitive one.  No attempt to incorporate the “Red Land” into his dominions was ever made by an Egyptian king.

The Sinaitic peninsula, the province of Mafkat or “Malachite,” as it was called, had been in the possession of the Egyptians since the time of Zosir of the third dynasty, and it continued to be regarded as part of the Egyptian kingdom up to the age of the Ptolemies.  The earliest of Egyptian rock-sculptures is engraved in the peninsula, and represents Snefru, the founder of the fourth dynasty, slaughtering the Beduin who inhabited it.  Its possession was valued on account of its mines of copper and malachite.  These were worked by the Egyptian kings with the help of convict labour.  Garrisons were established to protect them and the roads which led to them, colonies of officials grew up at their side, and temples were built dedicated to the deities of Egypt.  Even as late as the reign of Ramses III. the amount of minerals produced by the mines was enormous.  They existed for the most part on the western side of the peninsula, opposite the Egyptian coast; but Ramses III. also opened copper mines in the land of ’Ataka further east, and the name of the goddess Hathor in hieroglyphics has been found by Dr. Friedmann on the shores of Midian.

Vanquished Syria was made to contribute to the endowments of the Egyptian temples.  Thus the temple of Amon at Thebes was endowed by Thothmes III. with the revenues of the three cities Anugas, Inu’am, and Harankal; while Seti I., the father of Ramses II., bestowed upon it “all the silver, gold, lapis-lazuli, malachite, and precious stones which he carried off from the humbled land of Syria.”  Temples of the Egyptian gods, as well as towns, were built in Syria itself; Meneptah founded a city in the land of the Amorites; Ramses III. erected a temple to Amon in “the land of Canaan, great as the horizon of heaven above, to which the people of Syria come with their gifts”; and hieroglyphic inscriptions lately discovered at Gaza show that another temple had been built there by Amenophis II. to the goddess Mut.

Amenophis had suppressed the rebellion in Northern Syria with little trouble.  Seven Amorite kings were carried prisoners to Egypt from the land of Takhis, and taken up the river as far as Thebes.  There six of them were hung outside the walls of the city, as the body of Saul was hung by the Philistines outside the walls of Beth-shan, while the seventh was conveyed to Napata in Ethiopia, and there punished in the same way in order to impress a lesson of obedience upon the negroes of the Soudan.