Hittites and Amorites were interlocked both in the north and in the south.  Kadesh, on the Orontes, the southern stronghold of the Hittite kingdom of the north, was, as the Egyptian records tell us, in the land of the Amorites; while in the south Hittites and Amorites were mingled together at Hebron, and Ezekiel (xvi. 3) declares that Jerusalem had a double parentage:  its birth was in the land of Canaan, but its father was an Amorite and its mother a Hittite.  Modern research, however, has shown that Hittites and Amorites were races widely separated in character and origin.  About the Hittites we hear a good deal both in the hieroglyphic and in the cuneiform inscriptions.  The Khata of the Egyptian texts were the most formidable power of Western Asia with whom the Egyptians of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties had to deal.  They were tribes of mountaineers from the ranges of the Taurus who had descended on the plains of Syria and established themselves there in the midst of an Aramaic population.  Carchemish on the Euphrates became one of their Syrian capitals, commanding the high-road of commerce and war from east to west.  Thothmes iii., the conqueror of Western Asia, boasts of the gifts he received from “the land of Khata the greater,” so called, it would seem, to distinguish it from another and lesser land of Khata—­that of the Hittites of the south.

The cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna, in the closing days of the eighteenth dynasty, represent the Hittites as advancing steadily southward and menacing the Syrian possessions of the Pharaoh.  Disaffected Amorites and Canaanites looked to them for help, and eventually “the land of the Amorites” to the north of Palestine fell into their possession.  When the first Pharaohs of the nineteenth dynasty attempted to recover the Egyptian empire in Asia, they found themselves confronted by the most formidable of antagonists.  Against Kadesh and “the great king of the Hittites” the Egyptian forces were driven in vain, and after twenty years of warfare Ramses ii., the Pharaoh of the Oppression, was fain to consent to peace.  A treaty of alliance, offensive and defensive, was drawn up between the two rivals, and Egypt was henceforth compelled to treat with the Hittites on equal terms.  The Khatta or Khata of the Assyrian inscriptions are already a decaying power.  They are broken into a number of separate states or kingdoms, of which Carchemish is the richest and most important.  They are in fact in retreat towards those mountains of Asia Minor from which they had originally issued forth.  But they still hold their ground in Syria for a long while.  There were Hittites at Kadesh in the reign of David.  Hittite kings could lend their services to Israel in the age of Elisha (2 Kings vii. 6), and it was not till B.C. 717 that Carchemish was captured by Sargon of Assyria, and the trade which passed through it diverted to Nineveh.  But when the Assyrians first became acquainted with the coastland