A large part of the trade of Phoenicia was carried on in ships. It was
in this way that the logs of cedar were brought from the forests at the
head of the Gulf of Antioch, and the purple murex from the coasts of the
_Ægean_. Tyre, whose wealth is already celebrated in one of the Tel
el-Amarna tablets, was built upon an island, and, as an Egyptian papyrus
tells us, water had to be conveyed to it in boats. So, too, was Arvad,
whose navy occupies an important place in the Tel el-Amarna
correspondence. The ships of Canaan were, in fact, famous from an early
date. Two classes of vessel known to the Egyptians were called "ships of
Gebal" and "ships of Kaft," or Phoenicia, and Ebed-Tob asserts that "as
long as a ship sails upon the sea, the arm (or oracle) of the Mighty
King shall conquer the forces of Aram-Naharaim (Nahrima) and Babylonia."
Balaam's prophecy--"Ships shall come from Chittim and shall afflict
Asshur and shall afflict Eber," takes us back to the same age.

The Aram-Naharaim of Scripture is the Nahrina of the hieroglyphic texts,
the Mitanni of the native inscriptions. The capital city Mitanni stood
on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, at no great distance from
Carchemish, but the Naharaim, or "Two Rivers," more probably mean the
Euphrates and Orontes, than the Euphrates and Tigris. In one of the Tel
el-Amarna tablets the country is called Nahrima, but its usual name is
Mitanni or Mitanna. It was the first independent kingdom of any size or
power on the frontiers of the Egyptian empire in the age of the
eighteenth dynasty, and the Pharaohs Thothmes IV., Amenophis III., and
Amenophis IV. successively married into its royal family.

The language of Mitanni has been revealed to us by the cuneiform
correspondence from Tel el-Amarna. It was highly agglutinative, and
unlike any other form of speech, ancient or modern, with which we are