* The term Shephelah signifies the plain; it is applied by the Biblical writers to the plain bordering the coast, from the heights of Gaza to those of Joppa, which were inhabited at a later period by the Philistines (Josh. xi. 16; Jer. xxxii. 44 and xxxiii. 13).

** Guerin describes at length the road from Gaza to Raphia.  The only town of importance between them in the Greek period was Ienysos, the ruins of which are to be found near Khan Yunes, but the Egyptian name for this locality is unknown:  Aunaugasa, the name of which Brugsch thought he could identify with it, should be placed much farther away, in Northern or in Coele-Syria.

The Egyptians, on their march from the Nile valley, were wont to stop at this spot to recover from their fatigues; it was their first halting-place beyond the frontier, and the news which would reach them here prepared them in some measure for what awaited them further on.  The army itself, the “troop of Ra,” was drawn from four great races, the most distinguished of which came, of course, from the banks of the Nile:  the Amu, born of Sokhit, the lioness-headed goddess, were classed in the second rank; the Nahsi, or negroes of Ethiopia, were placed in the third; while the Timihu, or Libyans, with the white tribes of the north, brought up the rear.  The Syrians belonged to the second of these families, that next in order to the Egyptians, and the name of Amu, which for centuries had been given them, met so satisfactorily all political, literary, or commercial requirements, that the administrators of the Pharaohs never troubled themselves to discover the various elements concealed beneath the term.  We are, however, able at the present time to distinguish among them several groups of peoples and languages, all belonging to the same family, but possessing distinctive characteristics.  The kinsfolk of the Hebrews, the children of Ishmael and Edom, the Moabites and Ammonites, who were all qualified as Shausu, had spread over the region to the south and east of the Dead Sea, partly in the desert, and partly on the confines of the cultivated land.  The Canaanites were not only in possession of the coast from Gaza to a point beyond the Nahr el-Kebir, but they also occupied almost the whole valley of the Jordan, besides that of the Litany, and perhaps that of the Upper Orontes.* There were Aramaean settlements at Damascus, in the plains of the Lower Orontes, and in Naharaim.**

* I use the term Canaanite with the meaning most frequently attached to it, according to the Hebrew use (Gen. x. 15- 19).  This word is found several times in the Egyptian texts under the forms Kinakhna, Kinakhkhi, and probably Kunakhaiu, in the cuneiform texts of Tel el-Amarna.

** As far as I know, the term Aramaean is not to be found in any Egyptian text of the time of the Pharaohs:  the only known example of it is a writer’s error corrected by Chabas.