The excavations undertaken by the Palestine Exploration Fund at Lachish, Gezer and other sites in Southern Canaan have made it clear that throughout the Hyksos period Egypt and that part of Palestine were closely connected with one another. How much further eastward the government or influence of the Hyksos may have extended we do not know; the figure of a lion inscribed with the name of a Hyksos Pharaoh has been discovered in Babylonia, but this may have been brought from elsewhere. At any rate, so far as Palestine is concerned, we may say that the Hyksos period in Egypt coincides with the disappearance of Babylonian rule in Canaan. From that time onward Canaan looks towards Egypt, and not towards Babylonia. But even before the beginning of the Hyksos period Canaan--or at all events Southern Canaan--is Egyptian rather than Babylonian. That has been abundantly proved by Mr. Macalister’s excavations at Gezer. Objects of the age of the Twelfth dynasty have been disinterred there, and of such a character as to make it evident that the country was already subject to Egyptian influence long before the appearance of the Hyksos. An Egyptian of that age was buried within the precincts of the consecrated “high place,” and a stela commemorating him erected on the spot. Both at Gezer and at Lachish it has been possible to trace the archæological chronology of the sites by the successive cities which arose upon them. Gezer was the older settlement of the two; its history goes back to the neolithic age, when it was inhabited by a race of short stature who lived in caves and burned their dead, and whose pottery was of the roughest description. Some of it was ornamented with streaks of red or black on a yellow or red wash, like coarse pottery of the age of the Third Egyptian dynasty which I have found in so-called “prehistoric” graves at El-Kab. Two settlements of the neolithic population can be made out, one resting upon the other; in the second there was a distinct advance in civilization, and the place became a town surrounded by a wall. The neolithic race was succeeded by a taller race with Semitic characteristics, to whom the name of Amorite has been given; they buried the dead in a contracted position, and were acquainted with the use of copper and later of bronze. The city was now defended by a solid wall of stone, intersected with brick towers; as Mr. Macalister observes, in a country where stone is the natural building material the employment of brick must be due to foreign influence. He thinks the influence was Egyptian; this is very possible; but considering that building with brick was a salient feature in Babylonian civilization, the influence may have come rather from the side of Babylonia.