If the older inhabitants of the country were Amorite by race, the kingdom of Sihon will have represented an Amorite reaction against the descendants of Lot. But we must remember that the Babylonians had given the name of ‘Amorite’ to all the populations of Palestine and the adjoining districts, whether they were Amorites in blood or not. The old Babylonian usage is followed in several passages of the Pentateuch, and points to their origin in those pre-Mosaic days when Babylonian influence was still dominant in Western Asia. Thus in Gen. xv. 16, God declares to Abraham that ‘the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full,’ and Jacob reminded his sons (Gen. xlviii. 22) that he had wrested Shechem ‘out of the hand of the Amorite’ with his sword and bow. Perhaps the emphatic statement that ‘the Canaanite was then in the land,’ which we read in Gen. xii. 6, is due to the previous mention of the terebinth of Moreh’ or Martu, Martu being the primitive Babylonian equivalent of the later ‘Amorite.’ The terebinth, indeed, was in the country of the Amorites, but the country was already inhabited by Canaanitish tribes.[59] We cannot, then, be certain that the aboriginal peoples of Moab and Ammon were actually of the Amorite race. They were, it is true, included by the Babylonians under the common name of ‘Amorites,’ but this was because all the rest of the population of Southern Syria was known under the same title. The fact, however, that the Hebrew writers have described them as tall, like the Anakim, and that popular tradition should have spoken of them as Rephaim or giants, is in favour of their having been really of Amorite descent. In this case we may see in them the easternmost representatives of the blond race, and the builders of the cromlechs with which the hillsides of Moab are covered.