ort
distance of Jaffa** on the Mediterranean, while others had settled in
the neighbourhood of the southern Hittites in such numbers that their
name in the Hebrew Scriptures was at times employed to designate the
western mountainous region about the Dead Sea and the valley of the
Jordan. Their presence was also indicated on the table-lands bordering
the desert of Damascus, in the districts frequented by Bedouin of the
tribe of Terah, Ammon and Moab, on the rivers Yarmuk and Jabbok, and at
Edrei and Heshbon.***

* Ed. Meyer has established the fact that the term Amorite,
as well as the parallel word Canaanite, was the designation
of the inhabitants of Palestine before the arrival of the
Hebrews: the former belonged to the prevailing tradition in
the kingdom of Israel, the latter to that which was current
in Judah. This view confirms the conclusion which may be
drawn from the Egyptian monuments as to the power of
expansion and the diffusion of the people.

** These were the Amorites which the tribe of Dan at a later
period could not dislodge from the lands which had been
allotted to them.

*** This was afterwards the domain of Sihon, King of the
Amorites, and that of Og.

The fuller, indeed, our knowledge is of the condition of Syria at the
time of the Egyptian conquest, the more we are forced to recognise the
mixture of races therein, and their almost infinite subdivisions. The
mutual jealousies, however, of these elements of various origin were
not so inveterate as to put an obstacle in the way, I will not say of
political alliances, but of daily intercourse and frequent contracts.
Owing to intermarriages between the tribes, and the continual crossing
of the results of such unions, peculiar characteristics were at length
eliminated, and a uniform type of face was the result. From north
to south one special form of countenance, that which we usually call
Semitic, prevailed among them.

[Illustration: 218.jpg A CARICATURE OF THE SYRIAN TYPE]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph.

The Syrian and Egyptian monuments furnish us everywhere, under different
ethnical names, with representations of a broad-shouldered people of
high stature, slender-figured in youth, but with a fatal tendency
to obesity in old age. Their heads are large, somewhat narrow, and
artificially flattened or deformed, like those of several modern tribes
in the Lebanon. T