was coasted by the fleets, or
traversed by the armies of Egypt, as they passed to and fro between
Syria and the banks of the Nile. This region had been ravaged by Ahmosis
during his raid upon Sharuhana, the year after the fall of Avaris. To
the south-east of Zahi lay Kharu; it included the greater part of Mount
Seir, whose wadys, thinly dotted over with oases, were inhabited by
tribes of more or less stationary habits. The approaches to it were
protected by a few towns, or rather fortified villages, built in the
neighbourhood of springs, and surrounded by cultivated fields and
poverty-stricken gardens; but the bulk of the people lived in tents
or in caves on the mountain-sides. The Egyptians constantly confounded
those Khauri, whom the Hebrews in after-times found scattered among
the children of Edom, with the other tribes of Bedouin marauders, and
designated them vaguely as Shausu. Lotanu lay beyond, to the north of
Kharu and to the north-east of Zahi, among the hills which separate the
"Shephelah" from the Jordan.*

* The name of Lotanu or Rotanu has been assigned by Brugsch
to the Assyrians, but subsequently, by connecting it, more
ingeniously than plausibly, with the Assyrian _iltanu_, he
extended it to all the peoples of the north; we now know
that in the texts it denotes the whole of Syria, and, more
generally, all the peoples dwelling in the basins of the
Orontes and the Euphrates. The attempt to connect the name
Rotanu or Lotanu with that of the Edomite tribe of Lotan
(Gen. xxxvi. 20, 22) was first made by P. de Saulcy; it was
afterwards taken up by Haigh and adopted by Renan.

As it was more remote from the isthmus, and formed the Egyptian horizon
in that direction, all the new countries with which the Egyptians became
acquainted beyond its northern limits were by degrees included under the
one name of Lotanu, and this term was extended to comprise successively
the entire valley of the Jordan, then that of the Orontes, and finally
even that of the Euphrates. Lotanu became thenceforth a vague and
fluctuating term, which the Egyptians applied indiscriminately to widely
differing Asiatic nations, and to which they added another indefinite
epithet when they desired to use it in a more limited sense: that part
of Syria nearest to Egypt being in this case qualified as Upper Lotanu,
while the towns and kingdoms further north were described as being in
Lower Lotanu.