Critics have raised the question who these Hittites of Southern Palestine may have been. It has been asserted that they are the invention of a later Hebrew writer, and that the Hittites of Northern Syria were never settled in the south of Canaan. On the other hand, the veracity of the Hebrew record has been admitted, but the identity of ‘the sons of Heth’ with the great Hittite tribes of the north has been denied. The critics, however, have no grounds for their scepticism. The book of Genesis does not stand alone in testifying to the existence of Hittites in Southern Palestine. The prophet Ezekiel does the same. He too tells us that the origin of Jerusalem was partly Amorite, partly Hittite. Indeed, throughout the Pentateuch it is assumed that Hittites and Amorites were mingled together in the mountainous parts of the country. ‘The Hittites and the Jebusites and the Amorites,’ it is said in the book of Numbers (xiii. 29), ‘dwell in the mountains,’ and the same combination of names in the same order is found in the geographical table of Genesis (x. 15, 16). Between these Hittites and the Hittites of the north no distinction is made in the Old Testament. ‘The land of the Hittites,’ mentioned in Judg. i. 26, into which the Canaanite betrayer of Beth-el made his way, was in the north, like the Hittite kingdoms whose princes are referred to in 2 Kings vii. 6. Thanks to archæological discovery, we now know a good deal about these Hittites of Northern Syria. Their name is found on the monuments of Egypt, of Assyria, and of Armenia, and they are mentioned in Babylonian tablets which go back to the age of Abraham. Cappadocia was their earliest home; from hence they descended on the possessions of the Aramæans and established their power as far south as the Lake of Homs. The cuneiform inscriptions of Armenia in the ninth century B.C. describe them as on the Upper Euphrates in the neighbourhood of Malatiyeh, and the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser I. (B.C. 1100) tells us that Carchemish was one of their capitals. In the Tel el-Amarna tablets we hear of their growing power on the northern frontier of the Egyptian empire, of their intrigues with the Amorites and the people of Canaan, and of their steady advance to the south. Ramses II., the Pharaoh of the Oppression, after twenty years of warfare, was glad to conclude peace on equal terms with ‘the great king of the Hittites.’ The Hittite capital was already so near the northern border of Palestine as Kadesh on the Orontes ‘in the land of the Amorites.’ Here the Hittite monarch gathered together his vassals and allies from Syria and Asia Minor; even the distant Lycians and Dardanians came at his call.