THE PREHISTORIC EAST 167 



Recent discoveries in Egypt take us still farther 

 back. We now find that the * Hanebu/ who invaded 

 Egypt in the days of the Hebrew patriarchs, were 

 prehistoric Greeks, already civilised, and probably 

 possessing letters ages before the date of the Trojan 

 War. So it is with the Bible history, when we see 

 the contemporary pictures of the Egyptian slaves 

 toiling at their bricks, or when we stand in the 

 presence of the mummy of Rameses II. and know 

 that we look on the face of the Pharaoh who en- 

 slaved the Hebrews, and from whose presence Moses 

 fled. 



Such discoveries give reality to history, and 

 similar discoveries are daily carrying us back to old 

 events, and to nations of whom there was no history 

 whatever, and are making them like our daily friends 

 and companions. A notable case is that of the 

 children of Heth, known to us only incidentally by 

 a few members of the nation who came in contact 

 with the early Hebrews. Suddenly we found that 

 these people were the great and formidable Kheta, 

 or Khatti, who contended on equal terms with the 

 Egyptians and Assyrians for the empire of Western 

 Asia ; and when we began to look for their remains, 

 there appeared, one after another, stone monuments, 

 seals, and engraved objects, recording their form and 

 their greatness, till the tables have quite been turned, 

 and there is danger that we may attach too much im- 

 portance to their agency in times of which we have 

 scarcely any written history. Thus, just as the 



