mat and Amat of the Assyrian texts, it
was already a leading city in the days of the eighteenth Egyptian
dynasty. Thothmes III. includes it among his Syrian conquests under the
name of Amatu, as also does Ramses III. The Hittite inscriptions
discovered there go to show that, like Kadesh on the Orontes, it fell at
one time into Hittite hands.

Such then was the ethnographical map of Palestine in the Patriarchal
Age. Canaanites in the lowlands, Amorites and Hittites in the highlands
contended for the mastery. In the desert of the south were the Amalekite
Beduin, ever ready to raid and murder their settled neighbours. The
mountains of Seir were occupied by the Horites, while prehistoric
tribes, who probably belonged to the Amorite race, inhabited the plateau
east of the Jordan.

This was the Palestine to which Abraham migrated, but it was a Palestine
which his migration was destined eventually to change. Before many
generations had passed Moab and Ammon, the children of his nephew, took
the place of the older population of the eastern table-land, while Edom
settled in Mount Seir. A few generations more, and Israel too entered
into its inheritance in Canaan itself. The Amorites were extirpated or
became tributary, and the valleys of the Jordan and Kishon were seized
by the invading tribes. The cities of the extreme south had already
become Philistine, and the strangers from Caphtor had supplanted in them
the Avim of an earlier epoch.

Meanwhile the waves of foreign conquest had spread more than once across
the country. Canaan had been made subject to Babylonia, and had received
in exchange for its independence the gift of Babylonian culture. Next it
was Egypt which entered upon its career of Asiatic conquest, and Canaan
for a while was an Egyptian province. But the Egyptian dominion in its
turn passed away, and Palestine was left the prey of other assailants,
of the Hittites and the Beduin, of the people of Aram Naharaim and the
northern hordes. Egyptians and Babylonians, Hittites and Mesopotamians
mingled with the earlier races of the country and obliterated the older
landmarks. Before the Patriarchal Age came to an end, the ethnographical
map of Canaan had undergone a profound change.

CHAPTER III

THE BABYLONIANS IN CANAAN AND THE EGYPTIAN CONQUEST

It is in the cuneiform records of Babylonia that we catch the first
glimpse of the early history of Canaan. Babylonia was not yet united
under a single head. F