Egyptian monuments depict the people with a strongly marked Semitic physiognomy, and that physical resemblance to the modern native which the discovery of skeletons has since endorsed. We can mark their dark olive complexion; the men with pointed beards and with thick bushy hair, which is sometimes anointed, and the women with tresses waving loosely over their shoulders. The slender maidens were admired and sought after by the Egyptians, and later (in the Nineteenth Dynasty) we find the men in request as gardeners and artisans, and some even hold high positions in the administration of Egypt. The script and language of Babylonia were still in use in the fifteenth century, although the supremacy of that land belonged to the past; they were used in correspondence between Western Asia and Egypt, also among the Hittites, and even between the chieftains of Palestine. Apart from the tablets found at Lachish and Taanach, several were unearthed at Jericho, uninscribed and ready for use. But the native language in Palestine and Syria was one which stands in the closest relation to the classical Hebrew of the {11} Old Testament, and it differed only dialectically from the Moabite inscription of Mesha (about 850 B.C.), the somewhat later Hamathite record of Ben-hadad's defeat, and the Phoenician inscriptions. The general stock of ideas, too, was wholly in accord with Semitic, or rather, Oriental thought, and the people naturally shared the paradoxical characteristics of the old Oriental world:--a simplicity and narrowness of thought, intensity, fanaticism, and even ferocity.[2] To these must be added a keen imagination, necessarily quickened by the wonderful variety of Palestinian scenery, which ranges from rugged and forbidding deserts to enchanting valleys and forests. The life of the people depended upon the soil and the agricultural wealth, and these depended upon a climate of marked contrasts, which is found in some parts (_e.g._ the lower Jordan valley) to be productive of physical and moral enervation. In a word, the land is one whose religion cannot be understood without an attentive regard to those factors which were unalterable, and to those specific external influences which were focussed upon it in the entire course of the Second {12} Millennium B.C. We touch the land at a particular period in the course of its very lengthy history; it is not the beginnings of its religion, but the stage it had reached, which concerns us. [2] See Th. Nöldeke, _Sketches from Eastern History_ (London, 1892), chap. i., 'Some Characteristics of the Semitic Race.' {13} CHAPTER II SACRED SITES