estranged from thee. Shem-Hadad, having cut off the feet of one of my
men, has detained him with him; and as for another man, Sutatna of Acre
made him stand upon his head and then stood upon his face."

There are three letters in the Tel el-Amarna collection from Sutatna, or
Zid-atna ("the god Zid has given") as he writes his name, in one of
which he compares Akku or Acre with "the city of Migdol in Egypt."
Doubtless satisfaction was given to the Babylonian king for the wrong
that had been done to his subjects, though whether the actual culprits
were punished may be questioned. There is another letter from
Burna-buryas, in which reference is again made to the Canaanites. He
there asserts that in the time of his father, Kurigalzu, they had sent
to the Babylonian sovereign, saying: "Go down against Qannisat and let
us rebel." Kuri-galzu, however, had refused to listen to them, telling
them that if they wanted to break away from the Egyptian king and ally
themselves "with another," they must find some one else to assist them.
Burna-buryas goes on to declare that he was like-minded with his father,
and had accordingly despatched an Assyrian vassal to assure the Pharaoh
that he would carry on no intrigues with disaffected Canaanites. As the
first part of his letter is filled with requests for gold for the
adornment of a temple he was building at Babylon, such an assurance was
very necessary. The despatches of Rib-Hadad and Ebed-Tob, however, go to
show that in spite of his professions of friendship, the Babylonian
monarch was ready to afford secret help to the insurgents in Palestine.
The Babylonians were not likely to forget that they had once been
masters of the country, or to regard the Egyptian empire in Asia with
other than jealous eyes.

The Tel el-Amarna correspondence breaks off suddenly in the midst of a
falling empire, with its governors in Canaan fighting and intriguing one