nicia had been famous from a remote antiquity. It
was one of the chief objects of the trade which was carried on by the
Canaanites with Egypt on the one side and Babylonia on the other. It was
doubtless in exchange for the purple that the "goodly Babylonish
garment" of which we are told in the Book of Joshua (vii. 21) made its
way to the city of Jericho, for Babylonia was as celebrated for its
embroidered robes as Canaan was for its purple dye.

We hear something about the trade of Canaan in one of the cuneiform
tablets of Tel el-Amarna. This is a letter from Kallimma-Sin, king of
Babylonia, to the Egyptian Pharaoh urging him to conclude a treaty in
accordance with which the merchants of Babylonia might trade with Egypt
on condition of their paying the customs at the frontier. Gold, silver,
oil, and clothing are among the objects upon which the duty was to be
levied. The frontier was probably fixed at the borders of the Egyptian
province of Canaan rather than at those of Egypt itself.

Babylonia and the civilized lands of the East were not the only
countries with which Canaanitish trade was carried on. Negro slaves were
imported from the Soudan, copper and lead from Cyprus, and horses from
Asia Minor, while the excavations of Mr. Bliss at Lachish have brought
to light beads of Baltic amber mixed with the scarabs of the eighteenth
Egyptian dynasty.

A large part of the trade of Phoenicia was carried on in ships. It was
in this way that the logs of cedar were brought from the forests at the
head of the Gulf of Antioch, and the purple murex from the coasts of the
_AEgean_. Tyre, whose wealth is already celebrated in one of the Tel
el-Amarna tablets, was built upon an island, and, as an Egyptian papyrus
tells us, water had to be conveyed to it in boats. So, too, was Arvad,
whose navy occupies an important place in the Tel el-Amarna
correspondence. The ships of Canaan were, in fact, famous from an early
date. Two classes of vessel known to the Egyptians were called "ships of
Gebal" and "ships of Kaft," or Phoenicia, and Ebed-Tob asserts that "as
long as a ship sails upon the sea, the arm (or oracle) of the Mighty
King shall conquer the forces of Aram-Naharaim (Nahrima) and Babylonia."
Balaam's prophecy--"Ships shall come from Chittim and shall afflict
Asshur and shall afflict Eber," takes us back to the same age.

The Aram-Naharaim of Scripture is the Nahrina of the hieroglyphic texts,
the Mitanni of the native inscriptio