In marked contrast to the Hittites stood the Amorites.  They too are depicted on the walls of the Egyptian temples and tombs.  While the Hittite type of features is Mongoloid, that of the Amorite is European.  His nose is straight and somewhat pointed, his lips and nostrils thin, his cheek-bones high, his mouth firm and regular, his forehead expressive of intelligence.  He has a fair amount of whisker, ending in a pointed beard.  At Abu-Simbel the skin is painted a pale yellow—­the Egyptian equivalent for white—­his eyes blue, and his beard and eyebrows red.  At Medinet Habu, his skin, as Prof.  Petrie expresses it, is “rather pinker than flesh-colour,” while in a tomb of the eighteenth dynasty at Thebes it is painted white, the eyes and hair being a light red-brown.

The Amorite, it is clear, must be classed with the fair-skinned, blue-eyed Libyans of the Egyptian monuments, whose modern descendants are the Kabyles and other Berber tribes of Northern Africa.  The latter are not only European in type, they claim special affinities to the blond, “golden-haired” Kelt.  And their tall stature agrees well with what the Old Testament has to tell us about the Amorites.  They too were classed among the Rephaim or “giants,” by the side of whom the Israelite invaders were but as “grasshoppers.”

While the Canaanites inhabited the lowlands, the highlands were the seat of the Amorites (Num. xiii. 29).  This, again, is in accordance with their European affinities.  They flourished best in the colder and more bracing climate of the mountains, as do the Berber tribes of Northern Africa to-day.  The blond, blue-eyed race is better adapted to endure the cold than the heat.

Amorite tribes and kingdoms were to be found in all parts of Palestine.  Southward, as we have seen, Kadesh-barnea was in “the mountain of the Amorites,” while Chedor-laomer found them on the western shores of the Dead Sea.  When Abraham pitched his tent in the plain above Hebron, it was in the possession of three Amorite chieftains, and at the time of the Israelitish conquest, Hebron and Jerusalem, Jarmuth, Lachish and Eglon were all Amorite (Josh. x. 5).  Jacob assured Joseph the inheritance of his tribe should be in that district of Shechem which the patriarch had taken “out of the hand of the Amorite” (Gen. xlviii. 22), and on the eastern side of the Jordan were the Amorite kingdoms of Og and Sihon.  But we learn from the Egyptian inscriptions, and more especially from the Tel el-Amarna tablets, that the chief seat of Amorite power lay immediately to the north of Palestine.  Here was “the land of the Amorites,” to which frequent reference is made by the monuments, among the ranges of Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon, from Hamath southward to Hermon.  On the east it was bounded by the desert, on the west by the cities of Phoenicia.