* The Kefatiu, whose name was first read Kefa, and later Kefto, were originally identified with the inhabitants of Cyprus or Crete, and subsequently with those of Cilicia, although the decree of Canopus locates them in Phoenicia.

Zahi originally comprised that portion of the desert and of the maritime plain on the north-east of Egypt which was coasted by the fleets, or traversed by the armies of Egypt, as they passed to and fro between Syria and the banks of the Nile.  This region had been ravaged by Ahmosis during his raid upon Sharuhana, the year after the fall of Avaris.  To the south-east of Zahi lay Kharu; it included the greater part of Mount Seir, whose wadys, thinly dotted over with oases, were inhabited by tribes of more or less stationary habits.  The approaches to it were protected by a few towns, or rather fortified villages, built in the neighbourhood of springs, and surrounded by cultivated fields and poverty-stricken gardens; but the bulk of the people lived in tents or in caves on the mountain-sides.  The Egyptians constantly confounded those Khauri, whom the Hebrews in after-times found scattered among the children of Edom, with the other tribes of Bedouin marauders, and designated them vaguely as Shausu.  Lotanu lay beyond, to the north of Kharu and to the north-east of Zahi, among the hills which separate the “Shephelah” from the Jordan.*

* The name of Lotanu or Rotanu has been assigned by Brugsch to the Assyrians, but subsequently, by connecting it, more ingeniously than plausibly, with the Assyrian iltanu, he extended it to all the peoples of the north; we now know that in the texts it denotes the whole of Syria, and, more generally, all the peoples dwelling in the basins of the Orontes and the Euphrates.  The attempt to connect the name Rotanu or Lotanu with that of the Edomite tribe of Lotan (Gen. xxxvi. 20, 22) was first made by P. de Saulcy; it was afterwards taken up by Haigh and adopted by Renan.

As it was more remote from the isthmus, and formed the Egyptian horizon in that direction, all the new countries with which the Egyptians became acquainted beyond its northern limits were by degrees included under the one name of Lotanu, and this term was extended to comprise successively the entire valley of the Jordan, then that of the Orontes, and finally even that of the Euphrates.  Lotanu became thenceforth a vague and fluctuating term, which the Egyptians applied indiscriminately to widely differing Asiatic nations, and to which they added another indefinite epithet when they desired to use it in a more limited sense:  that part of Syria nearest to Egypt being in this case qualified as Upper Lotanu, while the towns and kingdoms further north were described as being in Lower Lotanu.  In the same way the terms Zahi and Kharu were extended to cover other and more northerly regions.  Zahi was applied to the coast as far as the mouth of the Nahr el-Kebir and to the