Although the Amon priests of Thebes seemed to be more firmly entrenched than ever after the accession of Horemhab, the calendar could not be pushed back completely. Egyptian art and literature retained some of the naturalism of the Amarna movement. There were effects in the religious world, too, for although Atonism was not pure monotheism, it exhibited tendencies in that direction which persisted in the Egyptian thought. God is frequently addressed in the singular, although under different names, in the hymns of the later periods of Egyptian history. X AMARNA AND THE BIBLE The Amarna texts make it clear that the inhabitants of Canaan during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries B.C. had a high degree of culture. While most people were probably illiterate, each community had its professional scribes who could write in at least one foreign language. Akkadian cuneiform, and not Canaanite, was the language of diplomatic correspondence between the city states of Canaan and the Egyptian court. Written Records The Hebrew Scriptures give evidence that Israel made use of written records before the composition of the canonical Bible. References to the _Book of the Wars of the Lord_, and the _Book of Jasher_, appear in the Pentateuch and Joshua (Num. 21:14; Josh. 10:13). While the events which they commemorate may have first been passed on by word of mouth, the word “book” (_sepher_, inscription, written document) implies that they also were recorded in written documents. By the time of the Judges, a lad whom Gideon happened to meet along the road was able to write the names of twenty-seven men who were the elders of Succoth (Judg. 8:14). The discovery of the Amarna Tablets created considerable interest in the matter of writing in ancient Canaan, and among the Israelites. Early in the twentieth century, Edouard Naville of the University of Geneva argued that the earliest documents of the Old Testament were written “in the idiom and with the characters of the Tel-el-Amarna tablets, namely Babylonian cuneiform,” or Akkadian as we call it today.[63]