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Rh but also ruled a large part of Mesopotamia. Of the many local dynasties they set up there, the greatest was that of Babylon, to which belonged the earliest great lawgiver of antiquity, Hammurabi. It was he who conquered Amurru and destroyed Mari, but he did not overthrow the Amorite princes of Syria, at Aleppo, at Byblus, at Harran and elsewhere.

Gradually Amorite power came to focus on central Syria, and its princes made local conquests while seeking to evade or propitiate their two aggressive neighbours—the Hittites to the north and the Egyptians to the south-west. In the fourteenth century B.C. the latter—as revealed by tablets found in Egypt at Tell al-Amarnah—lost interest in Syrian affairs, and the Hittites took over all northern and central Syria, without eliminating the Semitic inhabitants. Meanwhile, the Amorites of Palestine were encountering a new group of Semitic invaders, the Aramaeans and Israelites, who found them in control of strategic sites and hilltops.

The Amorites were tall, powerful men with black beards and prominent noses. They hardened their copper spearheads and knives by hammering, then by alloying with tin to form bronze. Although they left few inscriptions, chiefly names of places and princes, there is no doubt that they worshipped a pantheon including martial and nature gods and a fertility goddess. They set up sacred poles and pillars, built megalithic high places and practised foundation sacrifice and sacrifice of the first-born. These institutions and practices were continued by their kinsmen and successors, the Canaanites or Phoenicians.

The Canaanites and Amorites belonged to the same migration, and thus were ethnically identical until the Canaanites intermarried with the natives of the Syrian littoral and the Amorites with those of the interior. Culturally, the Canaanites came under the influence of Egypt rather than of Mesopotamia, as the Amorites did. Minor differences in religion and dialect gradually developed, but the Rh