Joshua was buried at Timnath-serah or Timnath-heres[278] in Mount Ephraim, in a piece of ground which had become the property of himself and his family. The Israelites of a later day looked back upon his memory with gratitude and veneration; he had been the hero who had succeeded in doing what Moses had failed to accomplish, and had led his people into the Promised Land. But history judges somewhat differently. He was not a lawgiver or a leader of men like Moses, and even from a military point of view the conquest of the Amorite kingdoms of Sihon and Og was a greater achievement than securing a foothold in the mountains of central Palestine. Joshua was not the conqueror of Canaan, as the pious imagination of a later age supposed him to be: he merely opened the way to it. He taught the Israelites how to defeat the Canaanites, and he succeeded in destroying a few of their cities. But that was all; and the wholesale massacres which marked his progress, the wanton destruction of everything which could not be carried away as spoil, and the barbaric extermination of the elements of culture, find their match only in the sanguinary campaigns of some of the Assyrian kings and the Saxon invasion of Britain. Footnote 255: This passage must have been written at a time when Judah had not yet come to occupy a definite place among the tribes in Canaan, and when, as in the Song of Deborah, the territory of Benjamin was regarded as a sort of appendage of that of Ephraim, and as extending as far south as the desert of the Amalekites. (See also Josh. xv. 63.) Footnote 256: Josh. xviii. 22. Footnote 257: Colonel Watson in the _Quarterly Statement_ of the Palestine Exploration Fund, July 1895, pp. 253-261; see also Quatremère, _Histoire des Sultans Mamluks_, ii. p. 26; and Mr. Stevenson in the _Quarterly Statement_ October 1895, pp. 334-338. Footnote 258: The play is on the verb _gâlal_, ‘to roll.’ Gilgal, however, means the ‘circle’ of stones, or ‘cairn.’ Moreover, the Egyptians were circumcised, so that uncircumcision could not correctly be called ‘the reproach of Egypt.’ Some of the Israelites may have been circumcised at Gilgal, but it is incredible that none of the males born in the desert had been so. This would have been a flagrant violation of the Mosaic law (see Lev. xii. 3; Gen. xvii. 14). Footnote 259: The tongue-like wedge of gold finds its parallel in six tongue-like wedges of silver discovered by Dr. Schliemann in the ‘Third prehistoric City’ of Hissarlik or Troy, and figured by him in _Ilios_, pp. 470-472. Mr. Barclay V. Head has shown that they each represent the third of a Babylonian maneh. Footnote 260: See my _Races of the Old Testament_, pp. 75-77; _Quarterly Statement_ of the Palestine Exploration Fund, July 1876 and July 1877. Footnote 261: Gezer was similarly laid under tribute by Ephraim (Josh. xvi. 10). Footnote 262: