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At one time it was the Hittites who poured down the slopes of Mount Taurus and occupied the fertile plains and cities of northern Syria. At another time a kindred people from the highlands of Armenia established a kingdom in Mesopotamia known as that of Mitanni to its own subjects, as that of Aram-Naharaim to the Hebrews.
It was only the criminal to whom the right of asylum in the dominions of the other was denied. In the war they had waged with Egypt the Hittite princes of Kadesh had summoned their vassal allies from the distant coasts of Asia Minor. Lycians and Dardanians had come from the far west; and were joined by the troops of Aram-Naharaim from the east.
North of the Belikh came the powerful kingdom of Mitanni, Aram-Naharaim as it is called in the Old Testament, which was never subdued by the Egyptian arms, and whose royal family intermarried with the successors of Thothmes. Mitanni, the capital, stood nearly opposite Carchemish, which thus protected the Egyptian frontier on the east. Southward of the Belikh the frontier was formed by the desert.
The eighteenth dynasty was founded, and Ahmes entered on that career of Asiatic conquest which converted Canaan into an Egyptian province. At first the war was one of revenge; but it soon became one of conquest, and the war of independence was followed by the rise of the Egyptian empire. Thothmes II., the grandson of Ahmes, led his forces as far as the Euphrates and the land of Aram-Naharaim.
His marriage with Gilu-khipa, the daughter of Sutarna, king of Aram-Naharaim, was celebrated on a scarab, where it is further related that she was accompanied to Egypt by three hundred and seventeen "maids of honour." Besides allying himself in marriage to the royal houses of Asia, Amenophis III. passed a good deal of his time in Syria and Mesopotamia, amusing himself with hunting lions.
Balaam's prophecy "Ships shall come from Chittim and shall afflict Asshur and shall afflict Eber," takes us back to the same age. The Aram-Naharaim of Scripture is the Nahrina of the hieroglyphic texts, the Mitanni of the native inscriptions.
Known to the Jews as Aram-Naharaim, or "Syria of the two rivers;" to the Greeks and Romans as Mesopotamia, or "the between-river country;" to the Arabs as Al-Jezireh, or "the island," this district has always taken its name from the streams, which constitute its most striking feature, and to which, in fact, it owes its existence.
Then spake one of them, Job of the land of Uz, which is in Aram-naharaim, as follows: "The plan which the king invented, of putting a great burden of work upon the Israelites, was good in its time, and it should be executed henceforth, too, but to secure us against the fear that, if a war should come to pass, they may overwhelm us by reason of their numbers, and chase us forth out of the land, let the king issue a decree, that every male child of the Israelites shall be killed at his birth.
Known to the Jews as Aram-Naharaim, or 'Syria of the two rivers'; to the Greeks and Romans as Mesopotamia, or 'the between-river country'; to the Arabs as Al-Jezireh, or 'the island, this district has always taken its name from the streams which constitute its most striking feature, and to which, in fact, it owes its existence.
Its real name was Petor, after the son of Aram, but it is better known as Aram-naharaim. The descendants of Kesed, another nephew of Abraham, a son of his brother Nahor, established themselves opposite to Shinar, where they founded the city of Kesed, the city whence the Chaldees are called Kasdim.
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