For more than two thousand years, therefore, Western Asia was more or less closely attached to Babylonia. At times it was as much a part of the dominions of the Babylonian king as the cities of Babylonia itself, and it is consequently not surprising that it should have become thoroughly interpenetrated with Babylonian culture. There was an excellent postal service connecting Canaan with Babylonia which went back to the days of Naram-Sin, and some of the clay _bullæ_ which served as stamps for the official correspondence at that period are now in the Museum of the Louvre.[122] On the other hand, a clay docket has been found in the Lebanon, dated in the reign of the son of Khammu-rabi, which contains one of the notices sent by the Babylonian Government to its officials at the beginning of each year, in order that they might know what was its official title and date.[123] When this close connection between Babylonia and its Syrian provinces was broken off we do not as yet know. Perhaps it did not take place until the conquest of Babylonia by a horde of half-civilized mountaineers from Elam about B.C. 1800. At any rate, from this time forward, though the influence of Babylonian culture continued, Babylonian rule in the West was at an end. From the Tel el-Amarna correspondence we learn that the Babylonian Government was still inclined to intrigue in Palestine; the memories of its ancient empire were not altogether obliterated, and just as the English sovereigns called themselves kings of France long after they had ceased to possess an inch of French ground, so the Babylonian kings doubtless persuaded themselves that they were still by right the rulers of Canaan. The wild mountaineers from the Kossæan highlands who had conquered Babylon soon passed under the spell of Babylonian culture, and became themselves Babylonian in habits, if not in name. They founded a dynasty which lasted for five hundred and seventy-six years and nine months. It is a curious coincidence that Egypt also was governed about the same time by foreign conquerors, whose primitive wildness had been tamed by the influences of Egyptian civilization, which they had adopted as the Kossæan mountaineers adopted that of Babylonia, and whose rule also lasted for more than five hundred years. The Hyksos who conquered Egypt have been convincingly shown by recent discoveries to have been Semites, speaking a language of the West Semitic type.[124] They came from Canaan, and their conquest of Egypt made of it a dependency of Canaan. Hence they fixed their head-quarters in the northern part of their Egyptian territories, where they could easily keep up communication with Asia.