Southward of the Belikh the frontier was formed by the desert. Syria, Bashan, Ammon, and Moab were all included in the Pharaoh's empire. But there it came to an end. Mount Seir was never conquered by the Egyptians. The "city" of Edom appears in one of the Tel el-Amarna tablets as a foreign state whose inhabitants wage war against the Egyptian territory. The conquest of the Edomites in their mountain fastnesses would have been a matter of difficulty, nor would anything have been gained by it. Edom was rich neither agriculturally nor commercially; it was, in fact, a land of barren mountains, and the trade which afterwards passed through the Arabah to Elath and Ezion-geber in the Gulf of Aqabah was already secured to the Egyptians through their possession of the Gulf of Suez. The first and last of the Pharaohs, so far as we know, who ventured on a campaign against the wild tribes of Mount Seir, was Ramses III. of the twentieth dynasty, and his campaign was merely a punitive one. No attempt to incorporate the "Red Land" into his dominions was ever made by an Egyptian king. The Sinaitic peninsula, the province of Mafkat or "Malachite," as it was called, had been in the possession of the Egyptians since the time of Zosir of the third dynasty, and it continued to be regarded as part of the Egyptian kingdom up to the age of the Ptolemies. The earliest of Egyptian rock-sculptures is engraved in the peninsula, and represents Snefru, the founder of the fourth dynasty, slaughtering the Beduin who inhabited it. Its possession was valued on account of its mines of copper and malachite. These were worked by the Egyptian kings with the help of convict labour. Garrisons were established to protect them and the roads which led to them, colonies of officials grew up at their side, and temples were built dedicated to the deities of Egypt. Even as late as the reign of Ramses III. the amount of minerals produced by the mines was enormous. They existed for the most part on the western side of the peninsula, opposite the Egyptian coast; but Ramses III. also opened copper mines in the land of 'Ataka further east, and the name of the goddess Hathor in hieroglyphics has been found by Dr. Friedmann on the shores of Midian.