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Rh north-eastward over Sumeria and all Mesopotamia, producing the Akkadians, later called Babylonians. As the Semitic invaders intermarried with their predecessors on the Euphrates and Tigris, they learned to build and live in houses, to plant and irrigate the soil and to read and write. Subsequent migrations, which went north-westward into Syria and hence will be considered at greater length, included the Amorites and Canaanites about 2500 B.C., the Aramaeans and Hebrews between 1500 and 1200 B.C., the Nabataeans about 500 B.C., and finally—between A.D. 630 and 650—the Moslem Arabians, who spread the religion and culture of Islam west across North Africa to Spain and east across Persia to India and Central Asia. The modern Arabians retain the purest Semitic traits, just as Arabic has preserved the closest kinship to the mother Semitic speech, of which all the Semitic languages were once dialects.

The first major Semitic people to settle in the Syrian area was a group whose name for themselves is not known, but who were called Amorites (westerners) by the Sumerians. They presumably roamed northward from Arabia with their flocks and herds about 2500 B.C., spreading out over northern Syria, the Biqa and upper Mesopotamia in the next four centuries, and making the transition from pastoral nomadism to settled farming by the start of the second millennium. It was during these centuries that Syria, exclusive of a few pockets inhabited by Hurrians and other non-Semites, was Semitized—permanently, as it turned out.

The Amorite capital Mari, on the Euphrates below the mouth of the Khabur, has been excavated, yielding a notable trove of over 20,000 cuneiform tablets, largely in Akkadian but with characteristics reflecting the Amoritic speech of those who wrote them before 1700 B.C. They are royal archives of administrative and economic purport and mention horse-drawn chariots. Palace excavations have revealed mural frescoes and bathrooms. The Amorites not only established this state, called Amurru, and overran all Syria, Rh