describe to me both the sign and the fact. As to your daughter, we know the one, Salmisa, who is in the city of Rabbah, and if she grows up, you must give her to the prince; she is in truth fit for a lord.”[126] These Taanach letters are a final proof, if any were needed, of the completely Babylonian nature of Canaanitish civilization in the century before the Exodus. When we find the petty shêkhs of obscure Canaanite towns corresponding with one another on the trivial matters of every-day life in the foreign language and syllabary of Babylonia, it is evident that Babylonian influence was still as strong in Palestine as it had been in the days when “the land of the Amorites” was a Babylonian province. It is also evident that there must have been plenty of schools in which the foreign language and syllabary could be taught and studied, and that the clay literature of Babylonia had been carried to the West. Indeed the Tel el-Amarna collection contains proof of this latter fact. Along with the letters are fragments of Babylonian literary works, one of which has been interpunctuated in order to facilitate its reading by the Egyptian scholar. On the other hand, apart from the cuneiform tablets the more strictly archæological evidence of Babylonian influence upon Canaan is extraordinarily scanty. Naturally we should discover no traces of “the goodly Babylonish garments” which, as we learn from the Book of Joshua, were imported into the country, the climate of Palestine not being favourable to their preservation; but it is certainly strange that so few seal-cylinders or similar objects have been disinterred, either at Gezer and Lachish in the south, or at Taanach and Megiddo in the north. What makes it the stranger is that Mr. Macalister has opened a long series of graves, beginning with the neolithic race and coming down to Græco-Roman times, and that while the influence of Egypt is sufficiently visible in them, that of Babylonia is almost entirely absent. It is true that a few seal-cylinders have been met with in the excavations on the city sites, but with the exception of one found at Taanach[127] I do not know of any that can be said to be of purely Babylonian manufacture; most of them are of Syrian make, and represent a Syrian modification of the Babylonian type. And yet there are seal-cylinders from the Lebanon, now in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, which are purely Babylonian in origin, and belong to the period of Khammu-rabi.[128]--There are also two seal-cylinders of later pattern in M. de Clercq’s collection, on which are representations of the Egyptian gods Set and Horus--similar to those found on scarabs from the Delta of the time of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth dynasties--as well as of the Canaanite god Reshef, accompanied by cuneiform inscriptions which on palæographic grounds must be assigned to the age of the Tel el-Amarna tablets. As the inscriptions record the names of Hadad-sum