The Byzantine Emperor, Theophilus, in war with the Saracens, took and destroyed, with peculiar animosity, the town of Zapetra or Sozopetra, in Syria, which happened to be the birthplace of the reigning caliph, Motassem, son of Haroun Alraschid. The caliph had condescended to intercede for the place, and his enemy's conduct was personally insulting to him, as well as atrociously inhumane. To avenge the outrage he invaded Asia Minor, A. D. 838, at the head of an enormous army, with the special purpose of destroying the birthplace of Theophilus. The unfortunate town which suffered that distinction was Amorinm in Phrygia,--whence the ensuing war was called the Amorian War. Attempting to defend Amorinm in the field, the Byzantines were hopelessly defeated, and the doomed city was left to its fate. It made an heroic resistance for fifty-five days, and the siege is said to have cost the caliph 70,000 men. But he entered the place at last with a merciless sword, and left a heap of ruins for the monument of his revenge. _E. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chapter 52. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25717_ AMORITES, The. "The Hittites and Amorites were ... mingled together in the mountains of Palestine like the two races which ethnologists tell us go to form the modern Kelt. But the Egyptian monuments teach us that they were of very different origin and character. The Hittites were a people with yellow skins and 'Mongoloid' features, whose receding foreheads, oblique eyes, and protruding upper jaws, are represented as faithfully on their own monuments as they are on those of Egypt, so that we cannot accuse the Egyptian artists of caricaturing their enemies. If the Egyptians have made the Hittites ugly, it was because they were so in reality. The Amorites, on the contrary, were a tall and handsome people. They are depicted with white skins, blue eyes, and reddish hair, all the characteristics, in fact, of the white race. Mr. Petrie points out their resemblance to the Dardanians of Asia Minor, who form an intermediate link between the white-skinned tribes of the Greek seas and the fair-complexioned Libyans of Northern Africa. The latter are still found in large numbers in the mountainous regions which stretch eastward from Morocco, and are usually known among the French under the name of Kabyles. The traveller who first meets with them in Algeria cannot fail to be struck by their likeness to a certain part of the population in the British Isles. Their clear-white freckled skins, their blue eyes, their golden-red hair and tall stature, remind him of the fair Kelts of an Irish village; and when we find that their skulls, which are of the so-called dolichocephalic or 'long-headed' type, are the same as the skulls discovered in the prehistoric cromlechs of the country