And as for Babylon itself, there can be little doubt that at this time it was in the midst of troubles. It was pressed upon thus, as we see, by the growing power of Egypt on the west. Then on the eastern side it was continually being troubled by that powerful nation, the Elamites, whose capital was Susa. I do not want to bother you much about these Elamites, though their power was great and their civilisation an old civilisation. They were important enough to Babylon, because they were constantly giving trouble, very much as the stronger African tribes gave trouble to the Egyptians. But apart from this they do not occupy any very big part in the great story. They were not exactly what we should call world-makers, and it is only the world-makers that we are taking as the actors {88} in our story. They came rather near being world-makers in the great sense, for there was a moment when they seriously threatened to subjugate Babylonia, but the Babylonians just succeeded in defeating them. And then, of course, there were the Assyrians in the north, already quite independent in reality, though Babylon still claimed a suzerainty over them. So now continually, for hundreds of years, the story goes on repeating itself in the same way over and over again. The Assyrians begin to get more and more power in the east and they are constantly coming into conflict with the Egyptians who are constantly fighting to retain their hold on that Syria which the wars of the two Thothmes had made an Egyptian province. Syria lies north of Palestine: and Palestine, being nearer to Egypt, was still more insistently claimed by the Egyptians as theirs. You may realise how difficult the position was for these Semitic tribes in Syria and Palestine, between the two empires. The tribes were not united among themselves, so that we can easily imagine (and we know that it actually did so happen) that they tried to save themselves by making alliances with, or admitting themselves as subject to, now one of the big empires and now the other. That is the way the story went for hundreds of years there. The Children of Israel, as you know, were not in the Palestine story at the moment. It was about 1500 B.C. that the very great Pharaoh Thothmes III. came to the throne, at the time when the Israelites were in the land of Goshen. It was not until two or three hundred years later that Moses led them (in Exodus) into the wilderness. Let us give the date of 1250 B.C. to the Exodus. It will then be about the year 1200, or a little before, {89} that the Israelites must have made their way, conquering, across Jordan and into the land of Canaan. Now, how did it happen that a people thus still called the Children of Israel could have become so numerous and so powerful as to be able to win these victories? [Sidenote: The promised land]