severe lesson taught by Joshua's invasion seems not to have been without its effect upon the Sidonians and Tyrians, who retained their commercial pre-eminence to a considerably later date.* But the rest of Phcenicia seems gradually to have sunk from that time, and her supremacy in literature and the arts was i1Tecoverably gone. Modern research has only just recovered for us a great deal of the history of the Phoonicians which had long been lost. We knew of them as the race who introduced letters to the Greeks from the legend of Cadmus, and the ancient Hebrew letters were no doubt bonowed from their system. We knew that Phoonician colonies had been found at Cyprus, Rhodes, Crete, Asia Minor, Sicily, Sardinia; and that Carthage derived its appellation of Punic, and even its language, from them.+ We knew from the Bible that they were a Turanian race.+ But what we did not know was that under the name of Hittites, or rather Chittites (a name preserved at the town of Citium, now Chitti, in the Phrenician colony of Cyprus, the abode, according to Scripture, of the Chittim), they were among the leading peoples of the world at an early period; that Carchemish was their capital, and that they had there held a position of equality both with the Babylonian and Egyp• tian powers. The recent researches at Carchemish, discoverecl in 1874-75 by Mr. Skene, the British consul at Aleppo,§ on the west bank of the Euphrates, have established this fact. Previous to these discoveries the only authentic account of them, as distinct from tradition, was to be found in the monuments and records of those who had subdued them, II They appear to have been originally known to the Egyptians as Ru ten or Rutennu. ~ After• wards they were known as the Kheta or Khatti, and many fierce and de- structive wars were waged against them by the Babylonians and Egyptians.'~,i. Their power received a rude shock in the occupation of the south-western portion of their empire under J oshna, and the final blow to their pre-eminence • See notes on Tyre and Bidon (eh. xix. 29, and xi. 8). t Kenrick,• Phrnnicia,' chs. iv., v., Movers, 'Die Phonizier,' ii. 2, Inscriptions have been found in Greece, Malta, Carthage, in precisely the same alphabet and language as is found on the Moabite stone. And the Carthaginian passage in the Pwnulns of Plautus, though wofully disfigured by transcribers, is easily translatable, as Movers has restored it, when written in the Hebrew character. Bee a paper on this passage by Mr. Rodwell in the 'Trans. Soc. Bibi. Archreol. ,' ii. 235. • ! Gen. ix. 18; xl. 15---18. _Whether this be regarded as an ethnological or geographical view of these nations, the Scripture clearly regards them as Taranians. § See Times of Aug. 19, 1880. Mr. George Smith fully concurred with Mr. Skene in identifying the ruins as those of Carchemish. Ii See the great expedition of Thothmes III. against Carchemish, which took place during the life of Moses and before the Exodus (' Records of the Past,' ii.). ~ 'Records of the Past,' ii. 31 sqq. Thothmes III. speaks of the Syrians as Kharu, and in one pi= as K&tu, according to the translation of the account of the battle ol Megiddo, Palestine is spoken of as Te.neter and Kefe., and its inhabiti.nts as Kefau (ibid. p. 39 sqq). •• 'TrM!.s. Soc. Bibi, A.rchalol,,' iii. 83 114q., TO THE BOOK OF JOSHUA. XXV
was dealt by Rameses II. in his expedition against the Syrians.'' Their Turanian origin cannot be said to be disproved by their adoption of the Semitio language. In whatever difficulties such a theory may involve us, we are not entitled to contradict the plain assertion of Scripture (see above). It is corroborated by the fact that traces of a Turanian occupation of Pales- tine are to be found° in Phcenician words. t Moreover, that Turanians and Semites were much intermingled in those regions is an admitted fact. Recent investigation has conclusively established the truth of the Scripture statement, that Babylon wa.s originally inha.bited by a, Tura.nia.n ra.ce,t and tha.t this race was afterwards subjuga.ted by a, Semitic one.§ Instances of na.tions a.bandoning their la.ngua.ge a.nd adopting another are not unknown. The Bulgaria.ns and the Northmen a.re cases in point. [I Lenormant 'IT thinks tha.t though their language can scarcely be distinguished from Hebrew, it was not necessarily confined to the Semitic races, a.nd he remarks on similar phenomena, as they appear to him, in the languages of ancient Babylonia. Movers, who inclines on the whole to regard them as the primitive inhabi- tants of the land, in spite of the Greek tra.ditions which speak of their ha.ving emigrated from the shores of the Red Sea, notices tha.t they were not con- nected together by any very close genealogical ties.':'* He rema.rks tt that the fact tha.t the Israelites, while they speak of the B'ney, or sons of Israel, Moab, Ammon, always, with one remarkable exception, speak of the inhabi- tants of the land as the Canaanite, Amorite, Jebusite, &c. The one exception is the B'ney Khet, or Heth, which is in accordance with what we know from other sources, that they were a powerful people beyond the borders of Palestine. This view is confirmed, he believes, by the thirty-one kingly cities which are mentioned in eh. ii. 9-24, as having been taken by Joshua. • See note on eh. i. 4, and' Records of the Past,' ii. 65 sqq.; iv. 25. Ca.rchemish was finally conquered by Sargon I., and it afterwards became the great mercantile emporium of the East. t Tomkin's 'Studies on the Time of Abraham,' p. 95. ! Gen. x. 6-10. § The early language of Babylon, the Accadian, was a Turanian one. See Smith's 'Notes on the Early History of Assyria,' pp. 3-16 ; Sayce, 'Babylonian Literature,' p. 6 'Trans. Soc. Bibi. Archmol.,' i. 298. II See Freeman's 'lfist. of the Norm. Conq.,' i. 196; Gibbon's 'Decline and Foll,' eh. xiii., and Smith's notes on eh. Iv. 'IT 'Manual of the Ancient History of the East,' i. 72. •• Lenornumt, on the contrary, thinks that they were preceded by the Horites, Repbaim, and others. But Movers remarks on the uncertainty of the Greek traditions which may (1) have originated from a misapprehension of the origin of the word Phoinix, and (2) may have been founded on (a) thelsmelitish, (b) the Philistine, or (c) the Assyrian (see 2 Kings xvii. 24) inhabitants of Canaan. Moreover, he shows from Deut. ii. 20-23, that tho Mo11.bites, Ammonites, Edomites, o.nd Philistines were later invaclers of Canaan, but there is no trace of any conflict between the Canaanitcs or Hittites and the aborigines. The Babylonian myths represent the Phamicinus to bo.ve hacl their origin in Mcsopoto.mia, the ero.<llo of the humun race. tt 'Die Phtinizier,' II. i. 3. INTRODUCTION