The two chief Baalim or "Lords" of Khana were the Sun-god and the West-Semitic deity, Dagon. The latter is constantly referred to in the documents under the Babylonian form of his name, Dagan. He stood beside Shamash on the royal seal and in the local oath-formulæ, and is associated in the latter with Iturmer, who may well have been the old local god of Tirka, deposed after the invasion of the Semites. His temple in Tirka, which we know survived until the ninth century,[22] was probably the chief shrine of the city, and the great part he played in the national life is attested by the constant occurrence of his title as a component part of personal names.[23] Later evidence proves that Dagon was peculiarly the god of Ashdod, and the princely writer of two of the letters from Tell el-Amarna, who bore the name Dagan-takala, must have ruled some district of northern or central Canaan. The Khana documents prove that already at the time of the First Dynasty his cult was established on the Euphrates, and, in view of this fact, the occurrence of two early kings of the Babylonian Dynasty of Nîsin with the names of Idin-Dagan and Ishme-Dagan is certainly significant. We know, too, that the original home of Ishbi-Ura, the founder of the Dynasty of Nîsin, was Mari, a city and district on the middle Euphrates.[24] We may conclude, then, that the Dynasties of Nîsin and Babylon, and probably that of Larsa, were products of the same great racial movement, and that, more than a century before Sumu-abum established his throne at Babylon, Western Semites had descended the Euphrates and had penetrated into the southern districts of the country.