These relations gave rise to a perpetual exchange of letters and petitions between the court of Thebes and the northern and southern provinces, in which all the petty kings of Africa and Asia, of whatever colour or race, set forth, either openly or covertly, their ambitions and their fears, imploring a favour or begging for a subsidy, revealing the real or suspected intrigues of their fellow-chiefs, and while loudly proclaiming their own loyalty, denouncing the perfidy and the secret projects of their neighbours. As the Ethiopian peoples did not, apparently, possess an alphabet of their own, half of the correspondence which concerned them was carried on in Egyptian, and written on papyrus. In Syria, however, where Babylonian civilization maintained itself in spite of its conquest by Thutmosis, cuneiform writing was still employed, and tablets of dried clay.* It had, therefore, been found necessary to establish in the Pharaoh's palace a department for this service, in which the scribes should be competent to decipher the Chaldaean character. Dictionaries and easy mythological texts had been procured for their instruction, by means of which they had learned the meaning of words and the construction of sentences. Having once mastered the mechanism of the syllabary, they set to work to translate the despatches, marking on the back of each the date and the place from whence it came, and if necessary making a draft of the reply.** In these the Pharaoh does not appear, as a rule, to have insisted on the endless titles which we find so lavishly used in his inscriptions, but the shortened protocol employed shows that the theory of his divinity was as fully acknowledged by strangers as it was by his own subjects. They greet him as their sun, the god before whom they prostrate themselves seven times seven, while they are his slaves, his dogs, and the dust beneath his feet.*** * A discovery made by the fellahin, in 1887, at Tel el- Arnarna, in the rums of the palace of Khuniaton, brought to light a portion of the correspondence between Asiatic monarchs, whether vassals or independent of Egypt, with the officers of Amenothes III. and IV., and with these Pharaohs themselves. ** Several of these registrations are still to be read on the backs of the tablets at Berlin, London, and Gizeh. ***The protocols of the letters of Abdashirti may be taken as an example, or those of Abimilki to Pharaoh, sometimes there is a development of the protocol which assumes panegyrical features similar to those met with in Egypt.