The name of Kas is met with in the Tel el-Amarna tablets, where it has hitherto been misunderstood. The kings of the Hittites, of Mitanni and of Kas are associated together as supporting the enemies of the Egyptian Pharaoh or attacking his cities in Syria, Hitherto we have supposed that Kas signified Babylonia, though the supposition had but little in its favour, and a different name is given to Babylonia in passages where there is no doubt as to what country is meant. Now, however, all becomes clear: in the age of the tablets there were still four Hittite kingdoms in the north: Kas in Asia Minor, the Hittites proper, east and south of the Taurus, Mitanni in Mesopotamia, and Naharaim on the Orontes. Shortly afterwards they were all swallowed up in the empire of the “great king” of the Hittites, whose southern capital was at Kadesh. Some Kasians had found their way to Jerusalem, where the king Ebed-Kheba--whose name is compounded with that of a Mitannian deity--writes to the Egyptian Government to excuse his conduct in regard to them. They had been accused of plundering the Pharaoh’s territory and murdering his servants; he assures the court that nothing of the sort is true. They are still in his house, where it would seem they formed his bodyguard. But, on the other hand, there were other Hittites in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem who were really enemies to the king and threatened Jerusalem itself. These he calls Khabiri, or “Confederates,” a name in which, despite history and probability, certain writers have insisted upon seeing the Hebrews of the Old Testament. But Dr. Knudtzon’s fresh collation of the Tel el-Amarna texts has at last dispelled the mystery. The Khabiri turn out to have been bands of Hittite condottieri, who sold their military services to the highest bidder and carved out principalities for themselves in the south of Canaan. The Egyptian Government found them useful in escorting and protecting the trading caravans to Asia Minor and the Taurus region, and as long as their leaders professed themselves the devoted servants of the Pharaoh it was quite willing to overlook such little accidents as their capture and sack of a Canaanitish town or the murder of a Canaanitish prince. One of these Hittite leaders, Aita-gama by name, had possessed himself of the city of Kadesh on the Orontes, which in the following century was to become the capital of a Hittite empire. In a letter to the Egyptian court he has the audacity to assert that he was merely claiming his patrimony, the whole district having belonged to his father. If there is any truth in this it can only mean that his father had already led a troop of Hittite raiders into this portion of the Egyptian territory.