We hear something about the trade of Canaan in one of the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna. This is a letter from Kallimma-Sin, king of Babylonia, to the Egyptian Pharaoh urging him to conclude a treaty in accordance with which the merchants of Babylonia might trade with Egypt on condition of their paying the customs at the frontier. Gold, silver, oil, and clothing are among the objects upon which the duty was to be levied. The frontier was probably fixed at the borders of the Egyptian province of Canaan rather than at those of Egypt itself. Babylonia and the civilized lands of the East were not the only countries with which Canaanitish trade was carried on. Negro slaves were imported from the Soudan, copper and lead from Cyprus, and horses from Asia Minor, while the excavations of Mr. Bliss at Lachish have brought to light beads of Baltic amber mixed with the scarabs of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty. A large part of the trade of Phoenicia was carried on in ships. It was in this way that the logs of cedar were brought from the forests at the head of the Gulf of Antioch, and the purple murex from the coasts of the _Ægean_. Tyre, whose wealth is already celebrated in one of the Tel el-Amarna tablets, was built upon an island, and, as an Egyptian papyrus tells us, water had to be conveyed to it in boats. So, too, was Arvad, whose navy occupies an important place in the Tel el-Amarna correspondence. The ships of Canaan were, in fact, famous from an early date. Two classes of vessel known to the Egyptians were called "ships of Gebal" and "ships of Kaft," or Phoenicia, and Ebed-Tob asserts that "as long as a ship sails upon the sea, the arm (or oracle) of the Mighty King shall conquer the forces of Aram-Naharaim (Nahrima) and Babylonia." Balaam's prophecy--"Ships shall come from Chittim and shall afflict Asshur and shall afflict Eber," takes us back to the same age. The Aram-Naharaim of Scripture is the Nahrina of the hieroglyphic texts, the Mitanni of the native inscriptions. The capital city Mitanni stood on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, at no great distance from Carchemish, but the Naharaim, or "Two Rivers," more probably mean the Euphrates and Orontes, than the Euphrates and Tigris. In one of the Tel el-Amarna tablets the country is called Nahrima, but its usual name is Mitanni or Mitanna. It was the first independent kingdom of any size or power on the frontiers of the Egyptian empire in the age of the eighteenth dynasty, and the Pharaohs Thothmes IV., Amenophis III., and Amenophis IV. successively married into its royal family.