It would be a difficult task to define with any approach to accuracy the distribution of the Canaanites, Amorites, and Aramaeans, and to indicate the precise points where they came into contact with their rivals of non-Semitic stock.  Frontiers between races and languages can never be very easily determined, and this is especially true of the peoples of Syria.  They are so broken up and mixed in this region, that even in neighbourhoods where one predominant tribe is concentrated, it is easy to find at every step representatives of all the others.  Four or five townships, singled out at random from the middle of a province, would often be found to belong to as many different races, and their respective inhabitants, while living within a distance of a mile or two, would be as great strangers to each other as if they were separated by the breadth of a continent.

[Illustration:  216.jpg MIXTURE OF SYRIAN RACES]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph.

It would appear that the breaking up of these populations had not been carried so far in ancient as in modern times, but the confusion must already have been great if we are to judge from the number of different sites where we encounter evidences of people of the same language and blood.  The bulk of the Khati had not yet departed from the Taurus region, but some stray bands of them, carried away by the movement which led to the invasion of the Hyksos, had settled around Hebron, where the rugged nature of the country served to protect them from their neighbours.*

* In very early times they are described as dwelling near Hebron or in the mountains of Judah.  Since we have learned from the Egyptian and Assyrian monuments that the Khati dwelt in Northern Syria, the majority of commentators have been indisposed to admit the existence of southern Hittites; this name, it is alleged, having been introduced into the Biblical around text through a misconception of the original documents, where the term Hittite was the equivalent of Canaanite.

The Amorites* had their head-quarters Qodshul in Coele-Syria, but one section of them had taken up a position on the shores of the Lake of Tiberias in Galilee, others had established themselves within a short distance of Jaffa** on the Mediterranean, while others had settled in the neighbourhood of the southern Hittites in such numbers that their name in the Hebrew Scriptures was at times employed to designate the western mountainous region about the Dead Sea and the valley of the Jordan.  Their presence was also indicated on the table-lands bordering the desert of Damascus, in the districts frequented by Bedouin of the tribe of Terah, Ammon and Moab, on the rivers Yarmuk and Jabbok, and at Edrei and Heshbon.***