strength—­Zuzim; as having a buzzing and indistinct manner of speech—­Zamzummim; as formidable monsters**—­Emim or Anakim, before whom other nations appeared as grasshoppers;*** as the Horim who were encamped on the confines of the Sinaitic desert, and as the Amalekites who ranged over the mountains to the west of the Dead Sea.  Kudur-lagamar defeated them one after another—­the Rephaim near to Ashtaroth-Karnaim, the Zuzim near Ham,**** the Amim at Shaveh-Kiriathaim, and the Horim on the spurs of Mount Seir as far as El-Paran; then retracing his footsteps, he entered the country of the Amalekites by way of En-mishpat, and pillaged the Amorites of Hazazon-Tamar.

     * Ellasar has been identified with Larsa since the
     researches of Rawlin-son and Norris; the Goim, over whom
     Tidal was king, with the Guti.

** Sayce considers Zuzim and Zamzummim to be two readings of the same word Zamzum, written in cuneiform characters on the original document.  The sounds represented, in the Hebrew alphabet, by the letters m and w, are expressed in the Chaldaean syllabary by the same character, and a Hebrew or Babylonian scribe, who had no other means of telling the true pronunciation of a race-name mentioned in the story of this campaign, would have been quite as much at a loss as any modern scholar to say whether he ought to transcribe the word as Z-m-z-m or as Z-w-z-vo; some scribes read it Zuzim, others preferred Zamzummim.

     *** Numb. xiii. 33.

**** In Deut. ii. 20 it is stated that the Zamzummim lived in the country of Ammon.  Sayce points out that we often find the variant Am for the character usually read Ham or Kham—­the name Khammurabi, for instance, is often found written Ammurabi; the Ham in the narrative of Genesis would, therefore, be identical with the land of Ammon in Deuteronomy, and the difference between the spelling of the two would be due to the fact that the document reproduced in the XIVIIth chapter of Genesis had been originally copied from a cuneiform tablet in which the name of the place was expressed by the sign Ham-Am.

In the mean time, the kings of the five towns had concentrated their troops in the vale of Siddim, and were there resolutely awaiting Kudur-lagamar.  They were, however, completely routed, some of the fugitives being swallowed up in the pits of bitumen with which the soil abounded, while others with difficulty reached the mountains.  Kudur-lagamar sacked Sodom and Gomorrah, re-established his dominion on all sides, and returned laden with booty, Hebrew tradition adding that he was overtaken near the sources of the Jordan by the patriarch Abraham.*