The city of Sidon, we are further told, was the first-born of Canaan. It
claimed to be the oldest of the Phoenician cities in the "lowlands" of
the coast. It had grown out of an assemblage of "fishermen's" huts, and
Said the god of the fishermen continued to preside over it to the last.
The fishermen became in time sailors and merchant-princes, and the fish
for which they sought was the murex with its precious purple dye. Tyre,
the city of the "rock," which in later days disputed the supremacy over
Phoenicia with Sidon, was of younger foundation. Herodotus was told that
the great temple of Baal Melkarth, "the city's king," which he saw
there, had been built twenty-three centuries before his visit. But Sidon
was still older, older even than Gebal, the sacred city of the goddess
Baaltis.

The wider extension of the name of Canaan brought with it other
geographical relationships besides those of the sea-coast. Hittites and
Amorites, Jebusites and Girgashites, Hivites and the peoples of the
southern Lebanon, were all settled within the limits of the larger
Canaan, and were therefore accounted his sons. Even Hamath claimed the
right to be included in the brotherhood. It is said with truth that
"afterwards were the families of the Canaanites spread abroad."

Hittites and Amorites were interlocked both in the north and in the
south. Kadesh, on the Orontes, the southern stronghold of the Hittite
kingdom of the north, was, as the Egyptian records tell us, in the land
of the Amorites; while in the south Hittites and Amorites were mingled
together at Hebron, and Ezekiel (xvi. 3) declares that Jerusalem had a
double parentage: its birth was in the land of Canaan, but its father
was an Amorite and its mother a Hittite. Modern research, however, has
shown that Hittites and Amorites were races widely separated in