Mr. ROUSE. And who was the gentleman who discovered that that meant Apollo of Alasiya?

Mr. PINCHES.-It was a suggestion of Mr. Offord's.

Mr. ROUSE. Those who have not yet read the full translation into English of the Tell-Amarna tablets made by Colonel Conder should not fail to do so at the earliest opportunity. Among the fascinating letters in that compilation are several written by a king of Alasiya, a country hitherto unheard of in secular history, but bearing a name very like that of a group of islands mentioned by the prophet Ezekiel (xxvii, 7), namely, Elishah, and being like them a maritime region, for only ships are mentioned as the means of conveying the products exchanged between it and Egypt, and a region within or near to the Greek settlements of Asia Minor, for its neighbours were the northern Hittites and the Lukki-i.e., either the Lycians or the Ligyans. Again, the name Elishah occurs only once besides in the Bible, namely, in Genesis x, where it is given to one of the sons of Javan the son of Japheth; and wherever Greece is mentioned throughout the sacred volume it is by the name Javan, as, for instance, where it is stated (in Daniel viii and xi) to be an empire that is to overthrow that of Persia.

Now the Greeks fixed as their earliest ancestor one Japetos, a son of Heaven and Earth, whose name is evidently only a modification of Japheth. Again, as Gladstone tells us, the two names under which Homer groups the rank and file of the Greek army at Troy were Argeioi and Jaones (Homer, pp. 101 and 103); and as the awkwardly concurring vowel sounds in Argeioi had once been severed by the digamma (for the Latins wrote it Argivi), so in all likelihood had they been in Jaones-an unstable form, which drifted into Iones, but must originally have been Javones; and we learn from Eschylus, in his dramas The Persians (lines 178, 563) that this nation knew the Greeks at large as Jaones-that is, Javones. It would not therefore be surprising to discover that the Greeks drew one of the titles of their ancient and favourite god Apollo from Alasiyah, or Elishah, which, taking its name from the head of one of their earliest tribes, must have been one of their earliest settlements. In the flourishing days of Tyre's commerce we had read in the book of Ezekiel that the land of Elishah exported to that city fine fabrics in blue and purple. And now we read on the Tell-Amarna tablets

that, eight or nine centuries earlier, Elishah (or Alasiyah) exported copper and bronze to Egypt.

As regards the 'Abiri* and their invasion of Canaan recounted in the Tell-Amarna letters from Jerusalem and probably in some from other southern towns also, I am convinced that they were really the Hebrews. They are, as Conder points out, called a “tribe” and a “race” (Tell-Amarna Tab., pp. 144 and 147), and so could not have been merely confederates, as was at first thought. They are stated to have completely overrun the southern hill country and among other captures to have taken and destroyed the Ajalon of Joshua x (pp. 145 and 149). Addressing the King of Egypt as suzerain of Southern Canaan, the King of Jerusalem laments, "The land of the king my lord has been ruined, and all the rulers have been slain within this same year" (p. 147); and again, "The lands of the city of Jerusalem are deserted," and no man is my subject" (pp. 149 and 147). And finally he writes, "We are leaving the city of Jerusalem-the chiefs of the garrison have left, without an order-through the wastings of this fellow whom I fear" (p. 151). Moreover, as this letter is written on a different kind of clay from the rest, it was almost certainly written during the flight, and perhaps in that last refuge which the divine record tells of the cave of Makkedah (p. 150; and Josh. x, 16).

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This king also writes that the city Beth Baalatn had rebelled to the chief of the 'Abiri (p. 143); and we know that Baalah or Baale, otherwise called Kirjath-Jearim, was one of the four cities of the Gibeonites, the only ones that voluntarily submitted to Joshua (cf. Josh. ix, 17, and xv, 60; 1 Sam. vii, 1; 2 Sam. vi, 2; and 1 Chron. xiii, 5, 6). The only general of the 'Abiri clearly mentioned on the tablets bears a Hebrew name-Ilimelec. He was doubtless one of Joshua's captains in charge of a special raid; for the great Hebrew leader did not always command in person. (see Josh. x, 15-18). And, lastly, a contemporary letter from Suardata, of Keilah, states that his enemy has put to shame thirty temples of the gods (p. 155), a deed which superstition would have prevented all but the worshippers of Jehovah from performing.

* The name, says Conder, always begins, not with h, but with the guttural ain (p. 141).

As for the objection that the Exodus is usually assigned to the reign of Meneptabı, 150 years later than that of Amenophis IV, to whom these letters were written, an inscription of Meneptah proves that the Israelites were already in his time settled in Canaan; for, speaking of an expedition that he made along the Canaanite coast, he says, "Ashkelon has been led away captive, Gezer has been taken, Inoam has been annihilated, and Isri'il has been laid waste and its seed destroyed" (Hommel, Hebrew Traditim, p. 266). It is remarkable that from the time of the division of the kingdom of Israel the tribe of Dan is not once named in its history; but, on the other hand, Ezekiel speaks of a certain Dan as trading in the fairs of Tyre in company with Javan, as though these were kindred peoples (xxvii, 19).* Again, in the times of Jonathan and Simon Maccabeus messages passed between the Jews and the Lacedæmonians, or Spartans, stating that they were brethren, being equally descended from Abraham. The letters that bore them were full of the friendliest expressions; and the first sent by the Jews says that since they discovered it they had not ceased to remember them at their festivals, in their sacrifices and in their prayers, as they would hardly have done if the Spartans had been related to them only as closely as the Midianites or the Edomites; therefore we may conclude that the Spartans were children of Jacob also-part or all of a banished tribe of Israel which had settled in the land of Javan (1 Macc. xii and xiv; cf. Josephus Ant. xii, 10, and xiii, 8).

Now Greek tradition tells us that certain descendants of Hercules, with the help of the Dorians, about two generations after the Trojan War, conquered the Peloponnesus, establishing the dynasties and predominances there found in the earliest times. of regular history, which begins with the first Olympiad in B.C. 776. Again, besides the Grecian Hercules there was an Egyptian, an Indian, and a Phoenician Hercules; and it must be from the last-named that the two mighty rocks which guard the Straits of Gibraltar took their appellation, since to the Greeks in Homer's time, about 800 B.C., the region beyond Italy was all

*The Hebrew v'Dan v'Javan and Dan and Javan, is rendered by the R.V., Vedan and Javan; but the name of no tribe in the least resembling Vedan is on record east of Liguria.

misty and fabulous, whereas the Phoenicians were familiar with those straits 1,000 years before our era. Again, Samson the Danite, by his gigantic strength, his rending of a lion with his mere hands, and his pulling down by the sheer force of his shoulders the pillars that upheld the Philistine theatre, was the prototype of the Phoenician and the Greek Hercules combined. What then more likely than that if the Danites went to settle in Greece they should bring the story of their hero with them and call themselves his children, suffering him then or thereafter to take a Grecian name and to have his feats augmented by many a Grecian fable. That they did settle there is confirmed by Homer, who applies the term Danaoi sometimes to the Greek army at large, sometimes to the inhabitants of Argolis, a state just north of Lacedæmon in the Peloponnesus, and having the brother of the King of Sparta for its ruler.

There is another proof that the story of Samson had spread round the Mediterranean in the annual custom of sending foxes into the circus at Rome with torches tied to their backs, a custom which Ovid can explain only by saying that an obscure country boy had once set corn-fields on fire in a somewhat similar way (Fasti IV, 681 et seq.).

The Rev. F. A. WALKER, D.D.-I think it will be agreed by all present that so many religions have been touched on, and so many centuries referred to, and so many different nations, that we scarcely know which to remark on first, Mr. Pinches' paper has been so prolific of interest in every respect.

With regard to the last subject, I think Mr. Pinches is quite right in saying that Dan disappeared almost altogether after the time of Solomon. It is a notable fact that in the Book of the Revelation, when all the sons of the patriarch Jacob have been named, apparently the name of Dan nowhere occurs.

Then the last speaker referred to some relation between the Spartans and the Maccabees. There is some mysterious connection between the Spartans and the Eastern Nations. Croesus, King of Lydia, was in the habit of consulting the oracles of Greece that were held in best repute. The Dorian Hexapolis, situate on the coast of Western Asia, would further facilitate intercourse between the Spartan and Oriental, and perhaps we are only partially acquainted with the various points of contact. As an instance, when visiting the ruins of Sardis, I learned that a part of

the ancient citadel was termed Gerousia (assembly of elders). Now the Spartans were the only people of Greece that possessed a representative body of that name.

Mr. Pinches touched on bas-reliefs in connection with oriental religions in Western Europe. A very curious circumstance fell under my notice thirty years ago, showing how orientalism had been introduced into the west of the Roman Empire. I was in a subterranean portion of an old castle in Newcastle-on-Tyne, where I noticed a bas-relief enclosing an effigy of the Persian god, Mithral leaning against a column; and it could only have been placed there through some Roman legionary, having served at the two opposite ends of the empire, first towards the rising, and subsequently towards the setting sun, at the then boundary of the Roman power between England and Scotland.

It is very remarkable how far the Roman Empire extended and how far the soldiers were affected by Eastern religions. The old man who showed me round the dungeon made the remark, "The Romans were never at a loss for the want of a god or two."

Then as to the mixture of Mosaic ritual together with the Eucharist and the Armenian churches practising sacrifice in their worship. I can readily believe that, as I have been told of the modern star worshippers of Babylon practising an amalgamation (1) of heathen rites along with (2) the Mosaic ordinance of dipping the live bird in the blood of the slain and letting it go free, and (3) of Christian Holy Communion.

About Babism, the modern sect of the Persians, I may, perhaps, direct your attention to a work on the subject of religious sects in Persia including views on Babism, written, I think, by Brown in Persia. Our Lord is said by one authority to have borrowed the principles of His gospel from Essenism. I cannot, while not holding with that, accept the suggestion that Essenism is allied with the principles of the Pharisees; for the Essenes were religious and simple in their lives. At any rate, they were never objects of our Lord's blame, while the Pharisees and Sadducees

were.

Then as to the question of the identification of deities, two volumes were published by a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford,

*Cults of the Greek States.

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