Zahi originally comprised that portion of the desert and of the maritime plain on the north-east of Egypt which 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.