ORIENTAL SCHOLARSHIP DURING THE PRESENT CENTURY. 695 



for having- secured these treasures for the British Museum, and to 

 Dr. Bezold and .Afr. Budge for having translated and published them. 



To us this correspondence is of the greatest importance, as showing 

 once more the existence of a literary and intellectual intercourse between 

 western Asia and Egypt, of which historians had formerly no suspi- 

 cion. If we can once point to such an open channel as that through 

 which cuneiform tablets travelled from Babylonia and Syria to P]gpyt, 

 we shall be better prepared to understand the presence in Egypt of 

 products of artistic workmanship also from western Asia, nay, from 

 Cyprus, and even from Mycente. I possessed potsherds sent to me by 

 Schliemann from Mycen;ie, which might have been broken oft' from the 

 same vessels of which fragments have been found at lalysos, and lately 

 in Egypt by Mr. Flinders Petrie. I have sent these potsherds to the 

 British ]\ruseum to be placed by the side of the pottery from lalysos, 

 and to our TTniversity Museum at Oxford. Mr. Flinders Petrie in the 

 Am/7^>»^, June 25, 1892, writes: ''Mykenrean vase-types are found in 

 Egypt with scarabs, etc., of the Eighteenth Dynasty, and conversely 

 objects of the Eighteenth Dynasty, including a royal scarab, are found 

 at Mykeine. And again, hundreds ot pieces of pottery, purely Myke- 

 na^n in style, have been found in various dateable discoveries in Egypt, 

 and without excej^tion every datum for such, lies between laOO and 1100 

 B. c. and earlier rather than later in that range.'' I do not mean to say 

 that this tixes the date of the Myken;ean pottery, nor do I wish to rely 

 on evidence Avhich is contested by some of the best Egy])tian scholars; 

 otherwise, 1 should gladly have appealed to the names of the Mysians, 

 Lycians, Carians, lonians, and Dardanians, discovered in the epic of 

 Pantaur about 1400 b. C, in the reign of Rameses II ; and to the name 

 of Acha»ans, read by certain Egyptian scholars in an inscription at 

 Karnak, ascribed to the time of Meneptah, the son of Bameses II. 

 What we shall have to learn more and more is that the people of antiq- 

 uity, even though they spoke different languages and used different 

 alphabets, knew far more of each other, even at the time of Amenophis 

 III, or 1400 B. o., than was supposed by even the best historians. The 

 ancient world was not so large and wide as it seemed, and the number 

 of representative men was evidently very small. The intiuence of 

 Babylon extended far and wide. We know that several of the strange 

 gods worshiped by the Jews, such as Rimmon, Nebo, and Sin, came 

 from Babylon. The authority of Egypt also was felt in Palestine, in 

 Syria, and likewise in Babylon. The authenticity of the cuneitorm 

 dispatches found at Tel-el-Amarna in Egypt has lately received an 

 unexpected confirmation from tablets found at Tel-el-Hesy, probably 

 the ancient Lachish. Here a letter has been found addressed to Zim- 

 rida, who in the Tel-el-Amarna tablets was mentioned as governor of 

 Lachish, where he was murdered by his people.* In the same place 

 cylindeis were found of Babylonian manufacture, between 2000 and 



* Academy, July 9, 1892. 



