But neither Tarkhu nor Nakhur is Aramaic in the usual sense of the term. Both seem to belong to that mixed dialect which has been revealed to us by German excavation at Sinjerli, north of the Gulf of Antioch, and about which scholars have disputed whether to call it Hebraised Aramaic or Aramaised Hebrew. At any rate, it is a dialect which, though Aramaic in origin, has been profoundly influenced by ‘the language of Canaan.’ It bears witness to the existence of a Hebrew-speaking population in that part of the world. It would be rash to affirm that this population already existed there in patriarchal days, though words which seem to be of Hebrew origin are met with in the Cappadocian tablets. But we now know that Northern Syria was once the meeting-place of the northern Semitic languages; that here they mingled with one another and with other languages which were not Semitic in type, and that here alone, outside the pages of the Old Testament, are the names of Terah and Nahor to be found.[26] Nahor remained in Harran, but Abram moved on still further to the West. The road was well known to his contemporaries, and probably followed the later line of march which led past Carchemish, now Jerablûs, Aleppo, and Hamath. From Hamath southward the land was in the possession of the Amorites. Their chief seat was immediately to the north of the Palestine of later days, but they had already occupied large portions of the territory to the south of them as far as the Dead Sea and the limits of the cultivated land. They had been for many centuries the dominant people of the West. Already in the time of Sargon of Akkad they had given their name among the Babylonians to Central Syria and Canaan. The name, indeed, goes back to the pre-Semitic days of Babylonian history. What the Semites called the land of the Amurrâ or Amorites, the Sumerians had termed Martu. And the two names, Amurrâ and Martu, continued to designate Syria and Palestine almost to the latest epoch of Babylonian political life.