ilization was in touch with the ancient
civilization of Egypt. One must not infer from this, however, that the
two civilizations met on anything like an equality. Indeed, in the
wonderful Tel-el-Amarna collection there is a suggestive absence of
literary documents from the Aegean that demands a word of notice. The
Tel el-Amarna collection, it will be recalled, consists of the royal
archives of King Amenophis IV. of the XVIIIth Egyptian dynasty, who in
the latter years of his reign chose to be known as Akhenaton, "the glory
of the solar disk." This monarch had retired from Thebes and established
his court on the site now known as Tel el-Amarna, where he founded the
city which existed only during the brief period of thirty years ending
with the death of the monarch about 1370 B.C. The date of the documents
found in the royal library is, therefore, fixed within very narrow
limits. The documents in question consist chiefly of letters, and
constitute one of the most important of archaeological finds. These
letters came to the king from almost every part of western Asia,
including Palestine and Phoenicia, Babylonia and Asia Minor. Strangely
enough, all the letters are written in the Babylonian character, and
most of them are in the Babylonian language. They afford, therefore,
most striking evidence of a widespread diffusion of Babylonian culture.
Incidentally they prove, to the utter confusion of a certain school of
Bible critics, that the art of writing was familiarly known in Canaan,
and that Egypt and western Asia were in full literary connexion with one
another, long before the time of the Exodus. Hence all the elaborate
arguments based on the supposition that Moses probably could not write
fall to the ground. On the other hand, the absence of letters from
Mycenae among the tablets of Tel el-Amarna must be regarded as at least
suggestive. Seemingly the widespread Babylonian culture had not reached
the Aegean peoples; yet these peoples cannot have been wholly ignorant
of things with which commercial intercourse brought them in contact. The
point is of no very great significance, however, since no one has
pretended that the Western civilization compared with the Eastern in
point of antiquity; and in any event, no amount of negative evidence
weighs a grain in the balance against the positive evidence of the
Cretan inscriptions.

The researches of the archaeologist are, in short, tending to
reconstruct the primitive classical