The country in which Harran was built formed part of the vast tract between the Tigris and Euphrates, which was known to the Babylonians in early days as Suru or Suri, a name which perhaps survived in that of the city Suru, the Suriyeh of modern geography. In Semitic times it was called Subari or Suwari by the Assyrians, sometimes also Subartu. Suru thus corresponded with our Mesopotamia, though it seems to have included a part of Northern Syria as well. But to the district in which Harran stood the Babylonians gave a more special name. It was Padan or Padin, ‘the cultivated plain,’ of which it is said in a cuneiform tablet that it lies ‘in front of the mountains of the Aramæans,’[21] while an early Babylonian sovereign entitles himself king of Padan as well as of Northern Babylonia.[22] The name bore witness to the fertility of the country to which it was applied. The Babylonian lexicographers make _padan_ a synonym of words signifying ‘field’ and ‘garden’; it was, in fact, originally the piece of ground which a yoke of oxen could plough in a given period of time. Hence it came to mean an ‘acre,’ a sense which still survives in the Arabic _feddân_. The Babylonian leases and sales of land which were drawn up in the Abrahamic age repeatedly describe the ‘feddans’ or ‘acres’ of which the property consists. The fertile plain of Mesopotamia, accordingly, was not a plain merely; it was also ‘the field’ or ‘acre’ of Aram where the Semites of the Aramæan stock ploughed and harvested their corn.[23] In Egyptian its name was Naharina. The name had been borrowed from the Aramæans, who called their country the land of Naharain, ‘the two rivers.’ In Canaan, as we know from the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna, it bore the Canaanitish form of Naharaim, Nahrima, the final nasal of the Aramaic dialects becoming _m_. Aram-Naharaim was thus the Egyptian and Canaanitish title of the country which the Babylonian spoke of as Padan Arman, ‘Padan of the Aramæans.’ Both names go back to the age before the Israelitish Exodus out of Egypt; the one belongs to Egypt and Palestine, the other to Babylonia.