that he is forwarding some _almehs_ or maidens as a present along with
his "dragoman." At this point the correspondence breaks off.

Malchiel and Tagi also write to the Pharaoh. According to Tagi the roads
between Southern Palestine and Egypt were under the supervision and
protection of his brother; while Malchiel begs for cavalry to pursue and
capture the enemy who had made war upon Su-yardata and himself, had
seized "the country of the king," and threatened to slay his servants.
He also complains of the conduct of Yankhamu, the High Commissioner, who
had been ordered to inquire into the conduct of the governors in
Palestine. Yankhamu, it seems, had seized Malchiel's property and
carried off his wives and children. It was doubtless to this act of
injustice that Labai alludes in his letter of exculpation.

The territory of which Jerusalem was the capital extended southward as
far as Carmel of Judah, Gath-Carmel as it is called by Ebed-Tob, as well
as in the geographical lists of Thothmes III., while on the west it
reached to Keilah, Kabbah, and Mount Seir. No mention is made of Hebron
either in the Tel el-Amarna letters or in the Egyptian geographical
lists, which are earlier than the rise of the nineteenth dynasty. The
town must therefore have existed under some other name, or have been in
the hands of a power hostile to Egypt.

The name of Hebron has the same origin as that of the Khabiri, who
appear in Ebed-Tob's letters by the side of Labai, Babylonia, and
Naharaim as the assailants of Jerusalem and its territory. The word
means "Confederates," and occurs in the Assyrian texts; among other
passages in a hymn published by Dr. Brünnow, where we read, _istu pan
khabiri-ya iptarsanni_, "from the face of my associates he has cut me
off." The word, however, is not Assyrian, as in that case it would have