to prophesy which, or if any one, would grow at the expense of the rest.

The great movement of peoples, to which allusion has just been made, had
been disturbing West Asia for two centuries. On the east, where the well
organized and well armed societies of Babylonia and Assyria offered a
serious obstacle to nomadic immigrants, the inflow had been pent back
beyond frontier mountains. But in the west the tide seems to have flowed
too strongly to be resisted by such force as the Hatti empire of
Cappadocia could oppose, and to have swept through Asia Minor even to
Syria and Mesopotamia. Records of Rameses III tell how a great host of
federated peoples appeared on the Asian frontier of Egypt very early in
the twelfth century. Among them marched men of the "Kheta" or Hatti, but
not as leaders. These strong foes and allies of Seti I and Rameses II,
not a century before, had now fallen from their imperial estate to
follow in the wake of newcomers, who had lately humbled them in their
Cappadocian home. The geographical order in which the scribes of Rameses
enumerated their conquests shows clearly the direction from which the
federals had come and the path they followed. In succession they had
devastated Hatti (i.e. Cappadocia), Kedi (i.e. Cilicia), Carchemish and
central Syria. Their victorious progress began, therefore, in northern
Asia Minor, and followed the great roads through the Cilician passes to
end at last on the very frontiers of Egypt. The list of these newcomers
has long interested historians; for outlandish as their names were to
Egyptians, they seem to our eyes not unfamiliar, and are possibly
travesties of some which are writ large on pages of later history. Such
are the Pulesti or Philistines, and a group hailing apparently from Asia
Minor and the Isles, Tjakaray, Shakalsha, Danaau and Washasha,
successors of Pisidian and other Anatolian allies of the Hittites in the
time of Rameses II, and of the Lycian, Achaean and Sardinian pirates
whom Egypt used sometimes to beat from her borders, sometimes to enlist