Discoveries recently made in Northern Syria by the German explorer, Dr. von Luschan, have thrown some light on the matter. At Sinjerli, twenty-five miles north-east of the Gulf of Antioch, and nearly midway between Yarpuz and Aintab, he has excavated the ruins of the capital of the ancient kingdom of Samâla, and found monuments which make mention of the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser.[48] Most of them, in fact, were erected by a prince who acknowledged the supremacy of the Assyrian monarch, and whose father’s name is met with in the annals of the latter sovereign. The inscriptions on them are in an Aramaic dialect; but the dialect is so largely mixed with Hebrew words and idioms as to have made scholars doubt at first whether it was not an Aramaised form of Hebrew rather than an Hebraised form of Aramaic. In any case, it is plain that the dialect was in close contact with a population which spoke ‘the language of Canaan.’ Far away to the north, therefore, in the heart of an Aramaic country, there must have been speakers of Hebrew or Canaanite. Nor is this all. Two or three miles from the ruins of Samâla are the ruins of another ancient town, the modern name of which is Girshin. Here, too, the German excavators have found an inscription of the same age as those of Samâla, and we may gather from it that Girshin stands on the site of a city which was the capital of the land of ‘Ya’di.’ In the Tel el-Amarna tablets, written in the century before the Exodus, Yaudâ are mentioned as living in the same part of the world.[49] Now Yaudâ is also the Assyrian mode of spelling the name of the Jews, and it would accordingly seem that a tribe which bore a name similar to that of Judah existed in Northern Syria as far back as the Patriarchal age.[50] All this is in singular harmony with the Scriptural narrative which tells us that a part of Terah’s family lingered at Harran, and that the wives of both Isaac and Jacob came from their Aramæan kindred in the north. There were Hebrews in Northern Syria as well as in Canaan, and Scripture and archæology are alike in agreement in testifying to the fact. Even in Babylonia it may be that Abraham had been educated in ‘the language of Canaan.’ There were colonies of Amorite (or, as we should say, Canaanitish) merchants in Chaldæa who had special districts and privileges assigned to them by the Babylonian kings. Reference is not unfrequently made to them in the contracts of the Abrahamic age. The proper names, which sometimes make their appearance in deeds of sale or lease, or in legal suits in which the foreign merchants were involved, are Canaanitish and not Babylonian. Thus we find names like Ishmael and Abdiel, Jacob-el (Ya’qub-il), and Joseph-el (Yasup-il), and we even read of ‘the Amorite the son of Abi-ramu’ or Abram, who appears as a witness to a deed dated in the reign of the grandfather of Amraphel.