and Canaan were called, or accomplished some other achievement; and a
cadastral survey of the district in which Telloh was situated, made for
the purpose of taxation, incidentally refers to "the governor" who was
appointed over "the Amorites."

Perhaps, however, the discovery which above all others has
revolutionised our conceptions of early Oriental history, and reversed
the critical judgments which had prevailed in regard to it, was that of
the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna. The discovery was made in 1887
at Tel el-Amarna on the eastern bank of the Nile, midway between the
modern towns of Minia and Siût. Here is the site of the city built by
Khu-n-Aten, the "Heretic" Pharaoh, when the dissensions between himself
and the Theban priesthood became too acute to allow him to remain any
longer in the capital of his fathers. He migrated northward,
accordingly, with his court and the adherents of the new creed which he
sought to impose upon his subjects, carrying with him the archives of
the kingdom and the foreign correspondence of the empire. It was this
foreign correspondence which was embodied in the cuneiform tablets. They
make it clear that even under Egyptian rule the Babylonian language and
the Babylonian system of writing continued to be the official language
and script of western Asia, and that the Egyptian government itself was
forced to keep Babylonian secretaries who understood them. The fact
proves the long and permanent influence of Babylonian culture from the
banks of the Euphrates to the shores of the Mediterranean, and is
intelligible only in the light of the further fact that the empire of
Sargon of Akkad had been founded more than two thousand years before.
Nothing but a prodigiously long lapse of time could explain the firm
hold thus obtained by a foreign language, and a system of writing the
most complex and difficult to learn that has ever been invented.