Such literary contact naturally left its impress on the language of Canaan.  Words which the Semites of Babylonia had borrowed from the older Sumerian population of the country were handed on to the peoples of Palestine.  The “city” had been a Sumerian creation; until brought under the influence of Sumerian culture, the Semite had been contented to live in tents.  Indeed in Babylonian or Assyrian—­the language of the Semitic inhabitants of Babylonia and Assyria—­the word which signified “tent” was adopted to express the idea of “city” when the tent had been exchanged for city-life.  In Canaan, on the other hand, the Sumerian word itself was adopted in a Semitic form, ’Ir, ’ar, or uru, “city,” was originally the Sumerian eri.

The Canaanitish hekal, “a palace,” again, came from a Sumerian source.  This was e-gal, or “great house.”  But it had passed to the West through the Semitic Babylonians, who had first borrowed the compound word under the form of ekallu.  Like the city, the palace also was unknown to the primitive Semitic nomads.  It belonged to the civilization of which the Sumerians of Chaldaea, with their agglutinative language, were the pioneers.

The borrowing, however, was not altogether one-sided.  Palestine enriched the literary language of Babylonia with certain words, though these do not seem to have made their way into the language of the people.  Thus we find words like bin-bini, “grandson,” and inu, “wine,” recorded in the lexical tablets of Babylonia and Assyria.  Doubtless there were writers on the banks of the Euphrates who were as anxious to exhibit their knowledge of the language of Canaan as were the Egyptian scribes of the nineteenth dynasty, though their literary works have not yet been discovered.

The adoption of the Babylonian system of writing must have worked powerfully on the side of tincturing the Canaanitish language with Babylonian words.  In the age of the Tel el-Amarna tablets there is no sign that any other system was known in the West.  It is true that the letters sent to the Pharaoh from Palestine were written in the Babylonian language as well as in the Babylonian script, but we have evidence that the cuneiform characters were also used for the native language of the country.  M. de Clercq possesses two seal-cylinders of the same date as the Tel el-Amarna correspondence, on one of which is the cuneiform inscription—­“Hadad-sum, the citizen of Sidon, the crown of the gods,” while on the other is “Anniy, the son of Hadad-sum, the citizen of Sidon.”  On the first, Hadad-sum is represented standing with his hands uplifted before the Egyptian god Set, while behind him is the god Resheph with a helmet on his head, a shield in one hand and a battle-axe in the other.  On the seal of Anniy, Set and Resheph again make their appearance, but instead of the owner of the cylinder it is the god Horus who stands between them.