In answer to the first question we may say that it was very many years since the coming of Abraham from Chaldæa--more than a thousand years. That gives time for a very large increase in numbers. Then those years of desert wandering might very likely have made them hardy. They had, too, as we know, deep faith in their "god of battles"--the Jehovah--and in the divine promise that they should win this land. And, finally, just at the moment when they came up out of the desert and began their campaign against the peoples of Canaan the great empires happened, as it seems, to have become rather exhausted by their continual strife together, and the tribes of Palestine themselves had been so crushed between the two that perhaps they had not much power of resistance left. And since there was all this perpetual fighting, it is interesting to see in what manner and with what weapons the fighters fought. The inscriptions tell us a great deal about them. The people from the east seem to have learnt the use and value of horses in battle earlier than the Egyptians, and fighting from chariots seems to have been an earlier custom than fighting on horseback. It is said that there are no pictures or carvings of an earlier date than the Hyksos showing any of the Egyptians riding on horses, but in the eighteenth dynasty they had their cavalry--that is to say, their {90} mounted soldiers on horseback--as well as their fighters in chariots. The chariots were not very elaborate. They were two-wheeled. The boarding came up fairly high in front, to the height of a man's elbows or thereabouts as he stood upright, but sloped away at the sides towards the back; and the back was often quite open. We see a pair of horses or even three abreast in some of the gravings of the chariots. The men in them, as I say, stood upright. Often there were two, of whom one was for the driving and the other for the shooting, which was nearly always with the bow and arrow. I suppose we may say that the bow and arrow was their great weapon. Slings were used, as you will know from the story of David and Goliath, but the disadvantage of the sling, as compared with the bow and arrow, except for skirmishing troops, is quite obvious. The slinging requires the twirling of the sling, with the stone in it, round the head, before the stone can be sent frying out; it requires plenty of room, or else, in the twirling, you may easily break the next man's head! So it is only of value to troops in "open formation," that is, with spacious room between one man and the next. It does not do for close formation. The bow and arrow is a far more convenient weapon for this kind of fighting. [Sidenote: Weapons and armour]