Beyond Naharaim, in the deep recesses of the Amanus and Taurus, there had lived, for no one knows how many centuries, the rude and warlike tribes of the Khati, related not so, much to the Semites of the Syrian plain as to the populations of doubtful race and language who occupied the upper basins of the Halys and Euphrates.* The Chaldaean conquest had barely touched them; the Egyptian campaign had not more effect, and Thutmosis III. himself, after having crossed their frontiers and sacked several of their towns, made no serious pretence to reckon them among his subjects. Their chiefs were accustomed, like their neighbours, to use, for correspondence with other countries, the cuneiform mode of writing; they had among them, therefore, for this purpose, a host of scribes, interpreters, and official registrars of events, such as we find to have accompanied the sovereigns of Assyria and Babylon.** These chiefs were accustomed to send from time to time a present to the Pharaoh, which the latter was pleased to regard as a tribute,*** or they would offer, perhaps, one of their daughters in marriage to the king at Thebes, and after the marriage show themselves anxious to maintain good faith with their son-in-law. * Halevy asserts that the Khati were Semites, and bases his assertion on materials of the Assyrian period. Thes Khati, absorbed in Syria by the Semites, with whom they were blended, appear to have been by origin a non-Semitic people. ** A letter from the King of the Khati to the Pharaoh Amenothes IV. is written in cuneiform writing and in a Semitic language. It has been thought that other documents, drawn up in a non-Semitic language and coming from Mitanni and Arzapi, contain a dialect of the Hittite speech or that language itself. A "writer of books," attached to the person of the Hittite King Khatusaru, is named amongst the dead found on the field of battle at Qodshu. *** It is thus perhaps we must understand the mention of tribute from the Khati in the _Annals of Thutmosis III._, 1. 26, in the year XXXIII., also in the year XL. One of the Tel el-Amarna letters refers to presents of this kind, which the King of Khati addresses to Amenothes IV. to celebrate his enthronement, and to ask him to maintain with himself the traditional good relations of their two families. They had, moreover, commercial relations with Egypt, and furnished it with cattle, chariots, and those splendid Cappadocian horses whose breed was celebrated down to the Greek period.* They were already, indeed, people of consideration; their territory was so extensive that the contemporaries of Thutmosis III. called them the Greater Khati; and the epithet "vile," which the chancellors of the Pharaohs added to their name, only shows by its virulence the impression which they had produced upon the mind of their adversaries.**