The Aram-Naharaim of Scripture is the Nahrina of the hieroglyphic texts, the Mitanni of the native inscriptions.  The capital city Mitanni stood on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, at no great distance from Carchemish, but the Naharaim, or “Two Rivers,” more probably mean the Euphrates and Orontes, than the Euphrates and Tigris.  In one of the Tel el-Amarna tablets the country is called Nahrima, but its usual name is Mitanni or Mitanna.  It was the first independent kingdom of any size or power on the frontiers of the Egyptian empire in the age of the eighteenth dynasty, and the Pharaohs Thothmes IV., Amenophis III., and Amenophis IV. successively married into its royal family.

The language of Mitanni has been revealed to us by the cuneiform correspondence from Tel el-Amarna.  It was highly agglutinative, and unlike any other form of speech, ancient or modern, with which we are acquainted.  Perhaps the speakers of it, like the Hittites, had descended from the north, and occupied territory which had originally belonged to Aramaic tribes.  Perhaps, on the other hand, they represented the older population of the country which was overpowered and displaced by Semitic invaders.  Which of these views is the more correct we shall probably never know.

Along with their own language the people of Mitanni had also their own theology.  Tessupas was god of the atmosphere, the Hadad of the Semites, Sausbe was identified with the Phoenician Ashteroth, and Sekhrus, Zizanu, and Zannukhu are mentioned among the other deities.  But many of the divinities of Assyria were also borrowed—­Sin the Moon-god, whose temple stood in the city of Harran, Ea the god of the waters, Bel, the Baal of the Canaanites, and Istar, “the lady of Nineveh.”  Even Amon the god of Thebes was adopted into the pantheon in the days of Egyptian influence.

How far back the interference of Aram-Naharaim in the affairs of Canaan may have reached it is impossible to say.  But the kingdom lay on the high-road from Babylonia and Assyria to the West, and its rise may possibly have had something to do with the decline of Babylonian supremacy in Palestine.  The district in which it grew up was called Suru or Suri by the Sumerian inhabitants of Chaldaea—­a name which may be the origin of the modern “Syria,” rather than Assyria, as is usually supposed, and the Semitic Babylonians gave it the title of Subari or Subartu.  The conquest of Suri was the work of the last campaign of Sargon of Accad, and laid all northern Mesopotamia at his feet.

We gather from the letters of Tel el-Amarna that the Babylonians were still intriguing in Canaan in the century before the Exodus, though they acknowledged that it was an Egyptian province and subject to Egyptian laws.  But the memory of the power they had once exercised there still survived, and the influence of their culture continued undiminished.  When their rule actually ceased we do not yet know.  It cannot have been very long, however, before the