BABYLONIAN THE LINGUA FRANCA 353 
the IVth or Vth Dynasties there were overland relations 
between Egypt and Chaldea.! 
(5) Petrie 2 places the beginning of the invasion of Egypt 
by the Semites about 3400 B.c. When referring to a painting 
of one of these Princes of the Desert named Absha coming 
into Egypt, he writes that “‘ though rooo years before Abram ”’ 
(whom he himself dates about 2100 B.c.) “ he was one of the 
same race: it is therefore invaluable as an historical type of 
the great Semitic invasion.’’ Evidence from Egyptian sources 
seems to show that before and after the conquest by the 
Hyksos, Semitic invasions occurred after the VIth Dynasty 
and again c. 2250 B.C. 
Petrie, on the strength of the cylinder of Khendy and the 
tablet of Khenzerm—two Babylonians “who rose to the 
throne of Egypt ’’—concludes that an invasion from Syro- 
Mesopotamia took place in the XIVth Dynasty, say 2800 B.c. 
(c) It is not, however, till the XVIIIth Dynasty, c. 1400 B.c., 
that we reach firm ground for fixing the first point of direct 
historical contact between Babylonia and Egypt. 
Authority for this dating is found in the famous tablets 
brought to light in 1887 at Tel-el-Amarna, which include 
letters from the rulers of Babylonia and Assyria to Amenhotep 
III. and his son Akhenaton. Apart from the historical value 
of their presumptive indication of an earlier intercourse, the 
discovery discloses three points of great interest. 
First, the fact that these were written in Babylonian 
shows that this language had already become the lingua franca 
of the civilised world. Second, a more human personal note, 
the probability from the red dots (still visible) made by some 
Egyptian with a reed for the purpose of marking the divisions 
of the foreign words, that the acquisition of this lingua franca 
was advisable, perhaps necessary, to qualification for a clerkship 
or an embassy. Third, that Babylonian literature had found 
its way among the nations which used its language. 
Of this we have conclusive evidence in two documents. 
> Egyptian Archeology (1902), p. 366. 
___® Historical Studies (London, 1910), II. p. 22. Others would make the 
invasion about 2466, 
