=Significance of the Great Highways.= Over these great highways across and around the eastern Mediterranean the civilization of the ancient world spread to the ends of the earth. These were the paths which the Jewish exiles followed in their western exodus. By the beginning of the Christian era Jewish colonies and groups of converts to Judaism were to be found in all the cities touched by these great arteries of commerce. Along these highways passed the armies and culture of the West to the conquest of the East, and the ideas and religions of the East to the conquest of the West. They were thus the natural bonds that bound together the human race in one common brotherhood. _PART II_ HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY X EARLY PALESTINE =The Aim and Value of Historical Geography.= Historical geography deals primarily with the background of history rather than with the detailed historical facts themselves. It aims to go back of events and movements and to study underlying forces and causes. Primitive peoples are more subject to the influences of physical environment than the more civilized races. Modern peoples are able with the aid of art and science to rise superior in many ways to natural conditions and limitations. A knowledge, therefore, of the physical forces at work in early Palestinian history is of especial value in reconstructing this important but little known chapter in the life of the race. =Sources of Information Regarding Early Palestine.= The discoveries of the past quarter century have revealed in a remarkable way the outlines, at least, of the early history of the states along the eastern Mediterranean. The meagre biblical references have been supplemented by the contemporary testimony of the Babylonian and Egyptian monuments. For this early period the Babylonian data are still incomplete, being limited to the statements of certain early conquerors, such as Lugalzaggisi and Sargon I, that they made expeditions to the West Country. Beginning, however, with about 1600 B.C., the Egyptian records furnish rich and in many cases detailed pictures of conditions in Syria and Palestine. Thotmose III, who reigned between 1479 and 1447 B.C., has given a vivid account of his many campaigns and conquests in the lands along the eastern Mediterranean. In his lists inscribed on the great temple at Karnak he gives the names of three hundred and eighty cities, of which one hundred and nineteen are in Palestine. From the reign of one of his successors, Amenhotep IV, the great reforming king of Egypt, comes the famous collection of the Tell el-Amarna letters. These were found in ruins which lie on the east side of the Nile about one hundred and seventy miles south of Cairo. Nearly three hundred of these tablets, written in the Babylonian language and script, have been recovered. They represent the correspondence of Amenhotep IV and his predecessor with the kings of Babylonia, Assyria, and Mitanni, and especially with