sea-port, and its ships were used for war as well as for commerce. As
for Hamath (now Hamah), the Khamat 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