territory, kept up the struggle a little longer as a freebooter, was taken captive at Megiddo, escaped again on the eve of being shipped to Egypt, and fell in battle or died a natural death after at length meeting apparently with some success in Judæa. Jerusalem was under a royal “Uweu,” a term perhaps best rendered “captain,” named Abdikheba. A neighbouring prefect, Shuwardata, asserted occasionally that he had entered into conspiracies with Labaya, and Abdikheba in fact complained of hostilities on all sides. Milki-El and his father-in-law Tagi, chiefs in the Philistian plain near Gath, were his principal opponents. They recruited troops from among the Habiri in the hope that Abdikheba, finding himself practically blockaded, would weary of the struggle and abandon the field. He was evidently very nearly driven to this when he wrote: “Infamous things have been wrought against me. To see it would draw tears from the eyes of the king, so do my foes press me. Shall the royal cities fall a prey to the Habiri? If the Pidati do not come in the course of this year, let the king send messengers to fetch me and all my brethren that we may die in the presence of the king, our lord.” By the Habiri we must here understand no other than the Hebrews, who were therefore already to be found in the “Promised Land,” but had not yet firmly established themselves there. They swarmed in the Lebanon, where Namyauza had formally enlisted one of their hordes; and yet it seems as if they already held Shechem and Mount Ephraim as free tribal property. At any rate, no letter thence to the king has been discovered, although there is one mention of the city Shakmi (Shechem). The genuinely ancient passages in the scriptural accounts of the conquest in the Book of Joshua, and still more the valuable fragments in the first chapter of Judges, are fairly in accordance with what we here learn from the tablets. Abdikheba’s letters may be considered along with those of Milki-El and Tagi, of whom Yanhamu, the powerful official, had just made an example. Their voices take up the chorus of complaint: ABDIKHEBA. “Lo! Milki-El and Tagi have done as follows.... Thus, as the king liveth, hath Milki-El committed treachery against me. Send Yanhamu that he may see what is done in the king’s land.” MILKI-EL. “The king, my lord, shall know the deed done by Yanhamu after I had been dismissed by the king. Lo, he took three thousand talents from me and said to me, ‘Give me thy wife and thy sons that I may slay them.’ May my lord, the king, remember this deed and send us chariots to bring us away.”