Page:Buried cities and Bible countries (1891).djvu/38

 noble persons, 87 children of the hostile king and the kings allied with him, 5 marina (lords), 1596 men and maid-servants, 105 persons who gave themselves up because of famine. Besides these prisoners there were taken precious stones, golden dishes, and many utensils of this sort, a large jug with a double handle, 97 swords, 1784 lbs. of gold rings which were found in the hands of the artists, 969 lbs. of silver rings, one statue with head of gold, 6 chairs and footstools of ivory and cedar wood, 6 large tables of cedar wood inlaid with gold and precious stones, one staff of the king worked as a kind of sceptre entirely of gold, one plough inlaid with gold, many garments of the enemy, &c., &c.

These catalogues enable us to form some estimate of the degree of perfection in art and refinement which had been arrived at in Northern Palestine and Syria before the Israelitish invasion. Lists are also given of the towns conquered and the peoples made to submit. Remarking upon these, Brugsch justly says that what gives the highest importance to the catalogue is the undisputed fact that more than three hundred years before the entrance of the Jews into the land of Canaan, a great league of peoples of the same race existed in Palestine under little kings, who dwelt in the same towns and fortresses as we find stated on the monuments, and who for the greater part fell by conquest into the hands of the Jewish immigrants. Among these the King of Kadesh, on the Orontes, in the land of the Amorites—as the inscriptions expressly state—played the first part, since there obeyed him, as their chief leader, all the kings and their peoples from the water of Egypt (which is the same as the Biblical brook which flowed as the boundary of Egypt) to the rivers of Naharain, afterwards called Mesopotamia.

After the death of Thothmes III. the Hittites recovered their independence, and their importance grew from year to year, in such a way that even the Egyptian inscriptions