The city stood on a natural eminence some forty feet in height. Close to it rises the only good spring of water in the district, which when swollen by the winter rains becomes the torrent of the Hesy. The stream ran past the eastern side of the city, and has eaten away part of the remains of the successive cities which rose upon the site, one above the ruins of the other. Fragments of the pottery used by the Amorite defenders of the city in the days of Joshua can now be seen in the rooms of the Palestine Exploration Fund. The walls of Lachish, like those of the cities of Egypt, were built of crude brick, and were nearly thirty feet in thickness. It had, in fact, long been one of the principal fortresses of Southern Palestine. Among the Tel el-Amarna tablets are letters from two of its governors Zimrida and Yabniel, the first of whom was murdered, and who is mentioned on another tablet found by Dr. Bliss among the ruins of Lachish itself. Its capture, therefore, by the Israelites was a serious blow to the Canaanites in the southern part of the country. But, though Horam king of Gezer came to its assistance, all was no avail; the strong fortress fell at last before the invaders, and ‘all the souls’ that were in it were massacred.[264] For at least a century its site lay desolate and uninhabited; and the explorers found in the soil that accumulated above the ruins of the Amorite city nothing but the ashes of the camp-fires of Bedâwin nomads. Eglon, now probably Tell Ejlân, close to Tell el-Hesy, naturally shared the fate of the neighbouring city. According to the compiler of the book of Joshua, the fall of Hebron and Debir followed immediately after that of Eglon. But this cannot be correct. Debir, as we afterwards learn, was taken at a later date by Othniel (Josh. xv. 16, 17; Judg. i. 12, 13), not by Joshua, and the error seems to have been due to the fact that Debir was the name of the king of Eglon. It was the king and not the town of that name who fell before the arms of Joshua.