e. These valleys were especially
fertile and attractive in the territory later known as Galilee and
Samaria. The wide Plain of Esdraelon and its eastward extension,
the Valley of Jezreel, cut straight across the central plateau of
Palestine. The Plain of Esdraelon was the strongest centre of the
Canaanite civilization. A few outposts were established in the
Jordan valley, as for example, Laish, later known as Dan, at the
foot of Mount Hermon, and Jericho, at the southern end of the
Jordan valley. Only a few Canaanite villages were found along the
more barren hills of Southern Canaan. There the peoples and
civilization still retained the imprint of their desert origin.

Along the coast plains and across the great Plain of Esdraelon ran
the main highways that connected the three earliest and most
nourishing centres of the world's civilization: the Egyptian on the
southwest, the Amorite on the north, probably between the southern
Lebanons, and the Babylonian to the east and northeast. For
centuries the Canaanites had absorbed the ideas, institutions, and
culture of these stronger peoples. So fundamentally had the
Babylonians impressed the Canaanites that practically all of the
inscriptions coming from this early period are written in the
Babylonian script. Even in writing to their Egyptian conqueror
during the fourteenth century, the Canaanite kings of Palestine
used this same Babylonian system of writing. The Amorite
civilization had so strongly influenced the Canaanites that to-day
it is difficult for the archaeologist to distinguish between the
two. By certain of the Biblical writers the terms Canaanite and
Amorite are used interchangeably. As early as 1600 B.C. Egypt,
under the ambitious conquering kings of the Eighteenth Dynasty, had
overrun Palestine and for the next three or four centuries ruled it
as a tributary province. The nearness of Egypt made its influence
still more powerful, so that in nearly every mound and Canaanite
ruin the excavator finds hundreds of reminders of the presence of
the Egyptian civilization.

The Canaanites had long since left behind them the nomadic state
and had developed a strong agricultural and commercial
civilization. Their life centered about certain important cities
like Megiddo on the southwestern side and Bethshean on the eastern
side of the Plain of Esdraelon. Their cities were usually built on
a low-lying hill in the midst of rich encircling plains. They were