Before the age of the Exodus, however, the Aramæan population of Mesopotamia became the subjects of a people who seem to have come from the north. Mitanni, on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, not far from the modern Birejik, became the capital of a kingdom which extended over Naharaim on the one side, and to the neighbourhood of the Orontes on the other. The race which founded the kingdom spoke a language unlike any other with which we are acquainted; it was, however, agglutinative, and exhibits certain general resemblances to some of the languages of the Caucasus. From the sixteenth century B.C. onwards, Mitanni and Naharaim are synonymous terms, even though, at times, the Egyptian scribes still observed the old distinction between them; even though also, it may be, Naharaim had a larger meaning than Mitanni. But the kings of Mitanni were vigorous and powerful. In the age of the Tel el-Amarna correspondence we find them intriguing with the Hittites and Babylonians in the Egyptian province of Canaan, and Ramses III. of the twentieth Egyptian dynasty still counts the people of Mitanni among his enemies. At an earlier date the royal families of Egypt and Mitanni had intermarried with one another, and the marriages had introduced new ideas and a revolutionary policy into the ancient monarchy of the Nile. When the kingdom of Mitanni had been founded we do not know. There is no trace of it in the earlier records of Babylonia, and we may safely say that it arose long after the era of Khammu-rabi and Abram.[24] Terah, we are told, died in Harran, and there Nahor, his second son, remained to dwell. Terah and Nahor are names which we look for in vain elsewhere in the Old Testament or in the inscriptions of Babylonia. And yet light has been thrown upon them by the cuneiform texts. Tablets have been found in Cappadocia, written in archaic cuneiform characters and in a dialect of Assyrian, which are at least as old as the the of the Tel el-Amarna letters; according to some scholars, they are coeval with the dynasty of Khammu-rabi. In one of these tablets we find the word, or name, _Nakhur_; what its signification may be, we cannot, unfortunately, tell; all we can be sure of is that it was known to the Semitic inhabitants of eastern Cappadocia, not far from the Aramæan border.[25] The name of Terah points in the same direction, Tarkhu was a god whose name enters into the composition of Cappadocian and North-Syrian princes; he was worshipped by the Hittites, and so belongs to the same region as that in which we have found the name of Nahor.