The kingdom of Sihon was one of the results of this ending of Egyptian rule.  The Amorites became a power once more.  A few years later Egypt was again attacked by armed invaders from the north.  The assailants poured into it both by sea and land.  Fleets of ships filled with Philistines and Achaeans and other northern tribes entered the mouths of the Nile, while a vast army simultaneously attacked it by land.  The army, we are told, had encamped in “the land of the Amorites,” and they carried with them on their farther march recruits from the countries through which they passed.  The Amorite “chief” himself was among those who followed the barbarians to Egypt, eager for the spoils of the wealthiest country in the ancient world.

Ramses iii. of the Twentieth dynasty was now on the throne.  He succeeded in rolling back the wave of invasion, in gaining a decisive victory over the combined military and naval forces of the enemy, and in pursuing them to the frontiers of Asia itself.  Gaza, the key to the military road which ran along the sea-board of Palestine, fell once more into Egyptian hands; and the Egyptian troops overran the future Judah, occupying the districts of Jerusalem and Hebron, and even crossing the Jordan.  But no permanent conquest was effected; Ramses retired again to Egypt, and for more than two centuries no more Egyptian armies found their way into Canaan.  Gaza and the neighbouring cities became the strongholds of the Philistine pirates, and effectually barred the road to Asia.

The campaign of Ramses iii. in southern Palestine must have taken place when the Israelites were still in the desert.  Between the two invasions of Egypt by the barbarians of the north, there was no great interval of time.  The Exodus, which had been due in part to the pressure of the first of them in the reign of Meneptah, was separated by only a few years from the capture of Hebron by Caleb, which must have occurred after its evacuation by the Egyptian troops.  The great movement which brought the populations of Asia Minor and the Greek islands upon Canaan and the Nile, and which began in the age of the Exodus, was over before the children of Israel had emerged from the wilds of the desert.

In the Old Testament the Amorites are constantly associated with another people, the Hittites.  When Ezekiel ascribes an Amorite parentage to Jerusalem, he ascribes to it at the same time a Hittite parentage as well.  The same interlocking of Amorite and Hittite that meets us in the Bible, meets us also on the monuments of Egypt.  Here, too, we are told that Kadesh on the Orontes, the Hittite capital, was “in the land of the Amorites.”  It was, in fact, on the shores of the Lake of Homs, in the midst of the district over which the Amorites claimed rule.