the age of Thothmes III.

At that period, however, Canaan already had behind it a long civilized
past. The country was filled with schools and libraries, with
richly-furnished palaces, and the workshops of the artisans. The cities
on the coast had their fleets partly of merchantmen, partly of warships,
and an active trade was carried on with all parts of the known world.
The result was that the wealth of Palestine was enormous; the amount
carried away by Thothmes is alone sufficient to prove it. Apart from the
natural productions of the country--corn, wine, and oil, or the slaves
which it had to furnish--immense quantities of gold, silver, and
precious stones, sometimes in their native state, sometimes manufactured
into artistic forms, were transported into Egypt. And in spite of this
drain upon its resources, the supply seems never to have failed.

The reciprocal influence of the civilizations of Canaan and Egypt one
upon the other, in the days when Canaan was an Egyptian province, is
reflected in the languages of the two countries. On the one hand the
Canaanite borrowed from Egypt words like _tebah_ "ark," _hin_ "a
measure," and _ebyon_ "poor," while Canaan in return copiously enriched
the vocabulary of its conquerors. As the _Travels of a Mohar_ have shown
us, under the nineteenth dynasty there was a mania for using Canaanitish
words and phrases, similar to that which has more than once visited
English society in respect to French. But before the rise of the
nineteenth dynasty the Egyptian lexicon was already full of Semitic
words. Frequently they denoted objects which had been imported from
Syria. Thus a "chariot" was called a _merkabut_, a "waggon" being
_agolta_; _hurpu_, "a sword," was the Canaanitish _khereb_, just as
_aspata_, "a quiver," was _ashpah_. The Canaanitish _kinnor_, "a lyre,"
was similarly naturalized in Egypt, like the names of certain varieties
of "Syrian bread." The Egyptian words for "incense" (_qadaruta_), "oxen"
(_abiri_), and "sea" (_yum_) were taken from the same source, though it
is possible that the last-mentioned word, like _qamhu_, "wheat," had
been introduced from Syria in the earliest days of Egyptian history. As
might have been expected, several kinds of sea-going vessels brought
with them their native names from the Phoenician coast. Already in the
time of the thirteenth dynasty the larger ships were termed _Kabanitu_,
or "Gebalite"; we read also of "boats" called _Za_, the Canaanite