CONriEMED BY EECENT DISCOVERIES IN PALESTINE AND THE EAST. 133 



It will be recollected that five cities of the Amoiites under 

 their respective kings joined in an attack upon the Gibeonites 

 for having made a treaty of peace with the children of Israel 

 under Joshua (Josh, x, 3-5). This was about the year B.C. 

 1451. One of these cities was Lachish under its king Japhia, 

 and of this city no trace remains at this day even in name. 

 Of the five cities of the Amorites mentioned, only Jerusalem 

 and Hebron could be identified down to the time of the 

 excavations at Tel-el-Hesi, which by a remarkable coinci- 

 dence has been determined with the utmost probability to be 

 Lachish ; thus completing the identification of three out of the 

 five Amorite towns, and it comes about in this way : — 



Amongst the remarkable series of tablets with inscriptions 

 in the cuneiform characters of Assyria, discovered at Tel-el- 

 Amarna, near Assiout, in Eg}q3t, amounting altogether to 

 two hundred and forty in number, there is one addressed 

 from a certain Zimridi, the Governor of Lachish, to Ameno- 

 phis IV, otherwise known as Khuenaten, who introduced the 

 worship of the solar disc (Rawlinson, /Sketch of Universal 

 History, Vol. i, p. 40, 1887). This was about the year 1400 

 B.C. Very recently, in 1888-9, excavations were undertaken 

 by Prof. Flinders Petrie, and afterwards by Mr. Bliss at Tel- 

 el-Hesi, in Southern Palestine, which had been conjectured 

 by Professor Sayce and others to be the possible site of 

 Lachish. As the excavations proceeded it became more and 

 more probable that the conjecture was correct. Under a 

 great mass of rubbish of more recent date the workmen came 

 upon some Egyptian beads, scarabs, and Babylonian seal- 

 cylinders. On one of the beads was the name of Queen Tere 

 (or Taia). This queen must have been very beautiful to 

 judge from her portrait discovered by Mariette at Karnak.* 

 She was the mother of Amenophis IV, to whom most of 

 the Tel-el-Amarna correspondence is addressed. But of 

 all these objects the most interesting and important was 

 that made at the very end of the operations. This con- 

 sisted of an earthenware tablet inscribed with characters 

 which, according to Professor Sayce, are identical in style 

 with the Tel-el-Amarna tablets, and containing a letter 

 addressed to Zimridi ; so that we have here, in fact, part of 

 the correspondence between the mother of Amenophis IV, 

 on the one hand, and Zimridi, the Governor of Lachish, on 

 the other, carried on in Babylonian characters, and thus 



See Perrett and Chipier's History of Ancient Egyptian Art, p. 242. 



