The picture of Canaan presented to us by the Tel el-Amarna correspondence has been supplemented by the discovery of Lachish.  Five years ago Prof.  Flinders Petrie undertook to excavate for the Palestine Exploration Fund in the lofty mound of Tel el-Hesi in Southern Palestine.  Tel el-Hesi stands midway between Gaza and Hebron on the edge of the Judaean mountains, and overlooking a torrent stream.  His excavations resulted in the discovery of successive cities built one upon the ruins of the other, and in the probability that the site was that of Lachish.  The excavations were resumed by Mr. Bliss in the following year, and the probability was raised to practical certainty.  The lowest of the cities was the Lachish of the Amorite period, whose crude brick walls, nearly twenty-nine feet in thickness, have been brought to light, while its pottery has revealed to us for the first time the characteristics of Amorite manufacture.  The huge walls bear out the testimony of the Israelitish spies, that the cities of the Amorites were “great and walled up to heaven” (Deut. i. 28).  They give indications, however, that in spite of their strength the fortresses they enclosed must have been captured more than once.  Doubtless this was during the age of the Egyptian wars in Canaan.

As at Troy, it is probable that it was only the citadel which was thus strongly fortified.  Below it was the main part of the town, the inhabitants of which took refuge in the citadel when an enemy threatened to attack them.  The fortified part, indeed, was not of very large extent.  Its ruins measured only about two hundred feet each way, while the enclosure within which it stands is a quarter of a mile in diameter.  Here a regular series of pottery has been found, dating from the post-exilic age through successive strata back to the primitive Amoritish fortress.  To Prof.  Petrie belongs the credit of determining the characteristics of these various strata, and fixing their approximate age.

The work begun by Prof.  Petrie was continued by Mr. Bliss.  Deep down among the ruins of the Amoritish town he found objects which take us back to the time of Khu-n-Aten and his predecessors.  They consist of Egyptian beads and scarabs of the eighteenth dynasty, and on one of the beads are the name and title of “the royal wife Teie.”  Along with them were discovered beads of amber which came from the Baltic as well as seal-cylinders, some of them imported from Babylonia, others western imitations of Babylonian work.  The Babylonian cylinders belong to the period which extends from 3000 to 1500 B.C., while the imitations are similar in style to those which have been found in the pre-historic tombs of Cyprus and Phoenicia.

But there was one discovery made by Mr. Bliss which far surpasses in interest all the rest.  It is that of a cuneiform tablet, similar in character, in contents, and in age to those which have come from Tel el-Amarna.  Even the Egyptian governor mentioned in it was already known to us from the Tel el-Amarna correspondence as the governor of Lachish.  One of the cuneiform letters now preserved at Berlin was written by him, and Ebed-Tob informs us that he was subsequently murdered by the people of his own city.