So far as we can judge from the evidence of proper names, the Hittites belonged to a race which was spread from the Halys in Asia Minor to the shores of Lake Urumiyeh.  The early inhabitants of Armenia, who have left us inscriptions in the cuneiform character, also belonged to it.  So also did the people of Comagene, and it seems probable that the ruling class in northern Mesopotamia did the same.  Here there existed a kingdom which at one time exercised a considerable amount of power, and whose princesses were married to the Pharaohs of the Eighteenth dynasty.  This was the kingdom of Aram Naharaim, called Naharina in the Egyptian texts, Mitanni by its own inhabitants.  The language of Mitanni was of a very peculiar type, as we learn from the tablets of Tel el-Amarna, one or two of which are written in it.  Like the Hittites in Syria, the Mitannians appear to have descended from the north upon the cities of the Semites, and to have established themselves in them.  Mitanni was at the height of its influence in the sixteenth and fifteenth centuries before our era; its armies made their way even into Canaan, and the Canaanite princes intrigued from time to time against their Egyptian masters, not only with the Babylonians and Hittites, but also with the kings of Mitanni.

Before the time of David the power and almost the name of Mitanni had passed away.  The Hittite empire also had been broken up, and henceforth we hear only of “the kings of the Hittites” who ruled over a number of small states.  The Semites of Syria had succeeded in rolling back the wave of Hittite conquest, and in absorbing their Hittite conquerors.  The capture of Carchemish by Sargon of Assyria in B.C. 717 marks the end of Hittite dominion south of the Taurus.

But the Hittite invasion had produced lasting results.  It had severed the Semites of Assyria and Babylonia from those of the West, and planted the barrier of a foreign population on the highroad that ran from Nineveh to the Mediterranean.  The tradition of Babylonian culture in western Asia was broken; new influences began to work there, and the cuneiform system of writing to be disused.  Room was given for the introduction of a new form of script, and the Phoenician alphabet, in which the books of the Old Testament were written, made its way into Canaan.  When Joshua crosses the Jordan there is no longer any trace in Palestine of either Babylonian or Egyptian domination.

Like the Amorites and the Amorite tribe of Jebusites at Jerusalem, the Hittites were mountaineers.[2] The hot river-valleys and the sea-coast were inhabited by Canaanites.  Canaan is supposed to mean “the lowlands” of the Mediterranean shore; here the Canaanites had built their cities, and ventured in trading ships on the sea.  But they had also settled in the inland plains, and more especially in the valley of the Jordan.  The plain of Jezreel formed, as it were, the centre of the Canaanitish kingdoms.

The Canaanites were Semites in speech, if not in blood.  The language of Canaan is what we term Hebrew, and must have been adopted either by the Israelites or by the patriarchs their forefathers.  Between the dialect of the Phoenician inscriptions and that of the Old Testament the difference is but slight, and the tablets of Tel el-Amarna carry back the record of this Canaanitish speech to the century before the Exodus.