Assyriologist would dispute for a moment that from beginning to end it is the work of one author. Archæology has already shown us that we are right in believing that the Pentateuch also has been compiled out of earlier materials. The story of the campaign of Chedor-laomer must have been derived from a cuneiform tablet; the story of Joseph seems to have been taken from a hieratic papyrus. The account of the Deluge has made its way from Babylonia to Canaan in the days when the culture of Chaldæa extended to the Mediterranean. We thus have narratives which presuppose an acquaintance not only with Babylon and Egypt, but also with Babylonian and Egyptian documents. So, too, the list of Edomite kings contained in the thirty-sixth chapter of Genesis must have been extracted from the official annals of Edom. It is a proof that such annals existed, that the Edomites, like the rest of their neighbours, were acquainted with the art of writing, and that their official records were accessible to a Hebrew scribe. We cannot doubt the authenticity of the list, even though the ancient territory of Edom has not yet been explored, and no Edomite inscriptions consequently have as yet been found to verify it. The list, therefore, does not yet stand in the same fortunate position as the account of Chedor-laomer and his allies, which has been verified by archæological discovery. Here even the names of the foreign kings have been preserved in the Hebrew text with marvellously little corruption. The whole account must have come from a cuneiform document coeval with the event it narrates. That is to say, we can here trace one of the Pentateuchal narratives not only to a written source, but to a written source which is at the same time a contemporaneous record. We may conclude, then, that the Pentateuch has been compiled from older documents—some Babylonian, some Egyptian, some Edomite; others, as we may gather from the nature of their contents, Canaanite and Aramæan—and that many of these documents belong to the periods to which they refer. This, however, is not all. In certain cases we can approximately fix the latest date at which they could have been employed and combined in the form in which we now find them. Thus in the geographical chart of Genesis (x. 6), Canaan is made the brother of Cush and Mizraim. This takes us back to the time when Canaan was a province of the Egyptian empire; when that empire came to an end the description ceased to be possible. After the epoch of the nineteenth dynasty and the Hebrew Exodus, Canaan and Egypt were cut off from one another geographically and politically, and Canaan could never again have been called in Semitic idiom the brother of Mizraim. It became instead the brother of Aram and Assur.