The valleys of the Amanus and the southern slopes of the Taurus included within them some half-dozen badly defined principalities—­Samalla on the Kara-Su,* Gurgum** around Marqasi, the Qui*** and Khilakku**** in the classical Cilicia, and the Kasku^ and Kummukh^^ in a bend of the Euphrates to the north and north-east of the Khati.

     * The country of Samalla, in Egyptian Samalua, extended
     around the Tell of Zinjirli, at the foot of the Amanus, in
     the valley of Marash of the Arab historians.

** The name has been read Gamgumu, Gaugum, and connected by Tom-kins with the Egyptian Augama, which he reads Gagama, in the lists of Thutmosis III.  The Aramaean inscription on the statue of King Panammu shows that it must be read Gurgumu, and Sachau has identified this new name with that of Jurjum, which was the name by which the province of the Amanus, lying between Baias and the lake of Antioch, was known in the Byzantine period; the ancient Gurgum stretches further towards the north, around the town of Marqasi, which Tomkins and Sachau have identified with Marash.

*** The site of the country of Qui was determined by Schrader; it was that part of the Cilician plain which stretches from the Amanus to the mountains of the Ketis, and takes in the great town of Tarsus.  F. Lenor-mant has pointed out that this country is mentioned twice in the Scriptures (1 Kings x, 28 and 2 Chron. i. 16), in the time of Solomon.  The designation of the country, transformed into the appellation of an eponymous god, is found in the name Qauisaru, “Qaui is king.”

     **** Khilakku, the name of which is possibly the same as the
     Egyptian Khalakka, is the Cilicia Trachsea of classical
     geographers.

^ The country of Kashku, which has been connected with Kashkisha, which takes the place of Karkisha in an Egyptian text, was still a dependency of the Hittites in the time of Tiglath-pileser.  It was in the neighbourhood of the Urumu, whose capital seems to have been Urum, the Ourima of Ptolemy, near the bend of the Euphrates between Sumeisat and Birejik; it extended into the Commagene of classical times, on the borders of Melitene and the Tubal.

^^ Kummukh lay on both sides of the Euphrates and of the Upper Tigris; it became gradually restricted, until at length it was conterminous with the Commagene of classical geographers.

The ancient Mitanni to the east of Carchemish, which was so active in the time of the later Amenothes, had now ceased to exist, and there was but a vague remembrance of its farmer prowess.  It had foundered probably in the great cataclysm which engulfed the Hittite empire, although its name appears inscribed once more among those of the vassals of Egypt on the triumphal lists of Ramses III.  Its chief tribes had probably migrated towards the regions which were afterwards described by the Greek geographers as the home of the Matieni on the Halys and in the neighbourhood of Lake Urmiah.  Aramaean kingdoms, of which the greatest was that of Bit-Adini,* had succeeded them, and bordered the Euphrates on each side as far as the Chalus and Balikh respectively; the ancient Harran belonged also to them, and their frontier stretched as far as Hamath, and to that of the Patinu on the Orontes.