Throne
A throne is the seat of state of a potentate or dignitary the seat occupied by a sovereign on state occasions. "Throne" in an abstract sense can refer to the monarchy or the Crown itself, an instance of metonymy, is used in many expressions such as "the power behind the throne". The expression "ascend the throne" takes its meaning from the steps leading up to the dais or platform, on which the throne is placed, being comprised in the word's significance; when used in a political or governmental sense, throne refers to a civilization, tribe, or other politically designated group, organized or governed under an authoritarian system. Throughout much of human history societies have been governed under authoritarian systems, in particular dictatorial or autocratic systems, resulting in a wide variety of thrones that have been used by given heads of state; these have ranged from stools in places such as a Africa to ornate chairs and bench-like designs in Europe and Asia, respectively. But not always, a throne is tied to a philosophical or religious ideology held by the nation or people in question, which serves a dual role in unifying the people under the reigning monarch and connecting the monarch upon the throne to his or her predecessors, who sat upon the throne previously.
Accordingly, many thrones are held to have been constructed or fabricated out of rare or hard to find materials that may be valuable or important to the land in question. Depending on the size of the throne in question it may be large and ornately designed as an emplaced instrument of a nation's power, or it may be a symbolic chair with little or no precious materials incorporated into the design; when used in a religious sense, throne can refer to one of two distinct uses. The first use derives from the practice in churches of having a bishop or higher-ranking religious official sit on a special chair which in church referred to by written sources as a "throne", is intended to allow such high-ranking religious officials a place to sit in their place of worship; the other use for throne refers to a belief among many of the world's monotheistic and polytheistic religions that the deity or deities that they worship are seated on a throne. Such beliefs go back to ancient times, can be seen in surviving artwork and texts which discuss the idea of ancient gods seated on thrones.
In the major Abrahamic religions of Judaism and Islam, the Throne of God is attested to in religious scriptures and teachings, although the origin and idea of the Throne of God in these religions differs according to the given religious ideology practiced. In the west, a throne is most identified as the seat upon which a person holding the title King, Emperor, or Empress sits in a nation using a monarchy political system, although there are a few exceptions, notably with regards to religious officials such as the Pope and bishops of various sects of the Christian faith. Changing geo-political tides have resulted in the collapse of several dictatorial and autocratic governments, which in turn have left a number of throne chairs empty, however the significance of a throne chair is such that many of these thrones - such as China's Dragon Throne - survive today as historic examples of nation's previous government. Thrones were found throughout the canon of ancient furniture; the depiction of monarchs and deities as seated on chairs is a common topos in the iconography of the Ancient Near East.
The word throne itself is from Greek θρόνος, "seat, chair", in origin a derivation from the PIE root *dher- "to support". Early Greek Διὸς θρόνους was a term for the "support of the heavens", i.e. the axis mundi, which term when Zeus became an anthropomorphic god was imagined as the "seat of Zeus". In Ancient Greek, a "thronos" was a specific but ordinary type of chair with a footstool, a high status object but not with any connotations of power; the Achaeans were known to place additional, empty thrones in the royal palaces and temples so that the gods could be seated when they wished to be. The most famous of these thrones was the throne of Apollo in Amyclae; the Romans had two types of thrones- one for the Emperor and one for the goddess Roma whose statues were seated upon thrones, which became centers of worship. The word "throne" in English translations of the Bible renders Hebrew כסא kissē'; the Pharaoh of the Exodus is described as sitting on a throne, but the term refers to the throne of the kingdom of Israel called the "throne of David" or "throne of Solomon".
The literal throne of Solomon is described in 1 Kings 10:18-20: "Moreover the king made a great throne of ivory, overlaid it with the best gold.. The throne had six steps, the top of the throne was round behind: and there were stays on either side on the place of the seat, two lions stood beside the stays, and twelve lions stood there on the one side and on the other upon the six steps: there was not the like made in any kingdom." In the Book of Esther, the same word refers to the throne of the king of Persia. The god of Israel himself is described as sitting on a throne, referred to outside of the Bible as the Throne of God, in the Psalms, in a vision Isaiah, notably in Isaiah 66:1, YHWH says of himself "The heaven is my throne, the earth is my footstool". In the New Testament, the angel Gabriel refers to this throne in the Gospel of Luke: "He will be great, will be called the Son of the Highest.
Habiru
Habiru is a term used in 2nd-millennium BCE texts throughout the Fertile Crescent for people variously described as rebels, raiders, bowmen, servants and laborers. The word Habiru, more properly'Apiru, occurs in hundreds of 2nd millennium BCE documents covering a 600-year period from the 18th to the 12th centuries BCE and found at sites ranging from Egypt and Syria, to Nuzi and Anatolia used interchangeably with the Sumerian SA. GAZ, a phonetic equivalent to the Akkadian word saggasu. Not all Habiru were murderers and robbers: one'Apiru, Idrimi of Alalakh, was the son of a deposed king, formed a band of'Apiru to make himself king of Alalakh. What Idrimi shared with the other'Apiru was membership of an inferior social class of outlaws and slaves leading a marginal and sometimes lawless existence on the fringes of settled society.'Apiru had no common ethnic affiliations and no common language, their personal names being most West Semitic, but many East Semitic, Hurrian or Indo-European. In the 18th century a north Syrian king named Irkabtum "made peace with Shemuba and his Habiru."
In the Amarna tablets from 14th century BCE, the petty kings of Canaan describe them sometimes as outlaws, sometimes as mercenaries, sometimes as day-labourers and servants. They are marginal, but Rib-Hadda of Byblos calls Abdi-Ashirta of Amurru and his son'Apiru, with the implication that they have rebelled against their common overlord, the Pharaoh. In "The Conquest of Joppa", an Egyptian work of historical fiction from around 1440 BCE, they appear as brigands, General Djehuty asks at one point that his horses be taken inside the city lest they be stolen by a passing'Apir; the biblical word "Hebrew", like Habiru, denotes a social category, not an ethnic group. Since the discovery of the 2nd millennium BCE inscriptions mentioning the Habiru, there have been many theories linking these to the Hebrews of the Bible, but modern scholars see the'Apiru/Habiru as only one element in an early Israel composed of many different peoples, including nomadic Shasu, the biblical Midianites and Amalekites, runaway slaves from Egypt, displaced peasants and pastoralists.
Foreign relations of Egypt during the Amarna period
Ashkelon
Ashkelon or Ashqelon known as Ascalon, is a coastal city in the Southern District of Israel on the Mediterranean coast, 50 kilometres south of Tel Aviv, 13 kilometres north of the border with the Gaza Strip. The ancient seaport of Ashkelon dates back to the Neolithic Age. In the course of its history, it has been ruled by the Ancient Egyptians, the Canaanites, the Philistines, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Phoenicians, the Hasmoneans, the Romans, the Persians, the Arabs and the Crusaders, until it was destroyed by the Mamluks in 1270; the Arab village of al-Majdal or al-Majdal Asqalan was established a few kilometres inland from the ancient site by the late 15th century, under Ottoman rule. In 1918, it became part of the British Occupied Enemy Territory Administration and in 1920 became part of Mandatory Palestine. Al-Majdal on the eve of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War had 10,000 Arab inhabitants and in October 1948, the city accommodated thousands more refugees from nearby villages.
Al-Majdal was the forward position of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force based in Gaza. The village was conquered by Israeli forces on 5 November 1948, by which time most of the Arab population had fled, leaving some 2,700 inhabitants, of which 500 were deported by Israeli soldiers in December 1948; the town was named Migdal Gaza, Migdal Gad and Migdal Ashkelon by the new Jewish inhabitants. Most of the remaining Arabs were deported by 1950. In 1953, the nearby neighborhood of Afridar was incorporated and the name "Ashkelon" was readopted to the town. By 1961, Ashkelon was ranked 18th among Israeli urban centers with a population of 24,000. In 2017 the population of Ashkelon was 137,945; the name Ashkelon is western Semitic, might be connected to the triliteral root š-q-l attesting to its importance as a center for mercantile activities. Its name appeared in Phoenician and Punic as ŠQLN and ʾŠQLN. Scallion and shallot are derived from the Latin name for Ashkelon. Ashkelon was the oldest and largest seaport in Canaan, part of the pentapolis of the Philistines, north of Gaza and south of Jaffa.
The Neolithic site of Ashkelon is located on 1.5 km north of Tel Ashkelon. It is dated by Radiocarbon dating to c. 7900 bp, to the poorly known Pre-Pottery Neolithic C phase of the Neolithic. It was excavated in 1954 by French archaeologist Jean Perrot. In 1997–1998, a large scale salvage project was conducted at the site by Yosef Garfinkel on behalf of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and nearly 1,000 square metres were examined. A final excavation report was published in 2008. In the site over a hundred fireplaces and hearths were found and numerous pits, but no solid architecture, except for one wall. Various phases of occupation were found, one atop the other, with sterile layers of sea sand between them; this indicates. The main finds were c. 20,000 flint artifacts. At Neolithic sites flints far outnumber animal bones; the bones belong to non-domesticated animals. When all aspects of this site are taken into account, it appears to have been used by pastoral nomads for meat processing; the nearby sea could supply salt necessary for the conservation of meat.
The city was built on a sandstone outcropping and has a good underground water supply. It was large as an ancient city with as many as 15,000 people living inside the walls. Ashkelon was a thriving Middle Bronze Age city of more than 150 acres, its commanding ramparts, measuring 1.5 miles long, 50 feet high and 150 feet thick, as a ruin they stand two stories high. The thickness of the walls was so great that the mudbrick city gate had a stone-lined, 8 feet wide tunnel-like barrel vault, coated with white plaster, to support the superstructure: it is the oldest such vault found. Roman and Islamic fortifications, faced with stone, followed the same footprint, a vast semicircle protecting Ashkelon on the land side. On the sea it was defended by a high natural bluff. A roadway more than 20 feet in width ascended the rampart from the harbor and entered a gate at the top. In 1991 the ruins of a small ceramic tabernacle was found a finely cast bronze statuette of a bull calf silvered, 4 inches long.
Images of calves and bulls were associated with the worship of the Canaanite gods Baal. Ashkelon is mentioned in the Egyptian Execration Texts of the 11th dynasty as "Asqanu." In the Amarna letters, there are seven letters to and from Ashkelon's king Yidya, the Egyptian pharaoh. One letter from the pharaoh to Yidya was discovered in the early 1900s; the Philistines conquered Canaanite Ashkelon about 1150 BC. Their earliest pottery, types of structures and inscriptions are similar to the early Greek urbanised centre at Mycenae in mainland Greece, adding weight to the hypothesis that the Philistines were one of the populations among the "Sea Peoples" that upset cultures throughout the eastern Mediterranean at that time. Ashkelon became one of the five Philistine cities that were warring with the Israelites and the Kingdom of Judah. According to Herodotus, its temple of Venus was the oldest of its kind, imitated in Cyprus, he mentions that this temple was pillaged by marauding Scythians during the time of their sway over the Medes.
As it
The Bible Unearthed
The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, a book published in 2001, discusses the archaeology of Israel and its relationship to the origins and content of the Hebrew Bible. The authors are Israel Finkelstein, Professor of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, Neil Asher Silberman, an archaeologist and contributing editor to Archaeology Magazine; the methodology applied by the authors is historical criticism with an emphasis on archaeology. Writing in the website of "The Bible and Interpretation", the authors describe their approach as one "in which the Bible is one of the most important artifacts and cultural achievements not the unquestioned narrative framework into which every archaeological find must be fit." Their main contention is that: On the basis of this evidence they propose As noted by a reviewer on Salon.com the approach and conclusions of The Bible Unearthed are not new. Ze'ev Herzog, professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University, wrote a cover story for Haaretz in 1999 in which he reached similar conclusions following the same methodology.
Early biblical archaeology was conducted with the presumption that the Bible must be true, finds only being considered as illustrations for the biblical narrative, interpreting evidence to fit the Bible. Some archaeologists such as Eilat Mazar continue to take this "Bible and spade" approach, or, like the journal Bible and Spade, attempt to treat archaeology as a tool for proving the Bible's accuracy, but since the 1970s most archaeologists, such as prominent Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen, have begun instead to interpret the evidence only in the light of other archaeology, treating the Bible as an artifact to be examined, rather than as an unquestioned truth; this approach has led to results both against the historicity of the old Testament. The Bible Unearthed begins by considering what it terms the'preamble' of the Bible—the Book of Genesis—and its relationship to archaeological evidence for the context in which its narratives are set. Archaeological discoveries about society and culture in the ancient Near East lead the authors to point out a number of anachronisms, suggestive that the narratives were set down in the 9th–7th centuries: Aramaeans are mentioned, but no ancient text mentions them until around 1100 BCE, they only begin to dominate Israel's northern borders after the 9th century BCE.
The text describes the early origin of the neighbouring kingdom of Edom, but Assyrian records show that Edom only came into existence after the conquest of the region by Assyria. The Joseph story refers to camel-based traders carrying gum and myrrh, unlikely prior to the first millennium, such activity only becoming common in the 8th–7th centuries BCE, when Assyrian hegemony enabled this Arabian trade to flourish into a major industry. Recent excavations in the Timna Valley discovered what may be the earliest bones of domesticated camels found in Israel or outside the Arabian peninsula, dating to around 930 BCE; this is seen as evidence that the stories of Abraham, Joseph and Esau were written after this time. The land of Goshen has a name that comes from an Arabic group who dominated the Nile Delta only in the 6th and 5th centuries; the Egyptian Pharaoh is portrayed as fearing invasion from the east though Egypt's territory stretched to the northern parts of Canaan, with its main threat being from the north, until the 7th centuryThe book comments that this corresponds with the documentary hypothesis, in which textual scholarship argues for the majority of the first five biblical books being written between the 8th and 6th centuries.
Although archaeological results, Assyrian records, suggest that the Kingdom of Israel was the greater of the two, it is the Kingdom of Judah, afforded greater prominence by Genesis, whose narratives concentrate on Abraham, Jerusalem and Hebron, more than on characters and places from the northern kingdom. The book remarks that, despite modern archaeological investigations and the meticulous ancient Egyptian records from the period of Ramesses II, there is an obvious lack of any archaeological evidence for the migration of a band of semitic people across the Sinai Peninsula, except for the Hyksos. Although the Hyksos are in some ways a good match, their main centre being at Avaris, in the heart of the region corresponding to the'land of Goshen', Manetho writing that the Hyksos founded the Temple in Jerusalem, it throws up other problems, as the Hyksos became not slaves but rulers, they were chased away rather than chased to bring them back; the book posits that the exodus narrative evolved from vague memories of the Hyksos expulsion, spun to encourage resistance to the 7th century domination of Judah by Egypt.
Finkelstein and Silberman argue that instead of the Israelites conquering Canaan after the Exodus, most of them had in fact always been there. Recent surveys of long-term se
Mercenary
A mercenary, sometimes known as a soldier of fortune, is an individual who takes part in military conflict for personal profit, is otherwise an outsider to the conflict, is not a member of any other official military. Mercenaries fight for money or other forms of payment rather than for political interests. In the last century, mercenaries have come to be seen as less entitled to protections by rules of war than non-mercenaries. Indeed, the Geneva Conventions declare that mercenaries are not recognized as legitimate combatants and do not have to be granted the same legal protections as captured soldiers of a regular army. In practice, whether or not a person is a mercenary may be a matter of degree, as financial and political interests may overlap, as was the case among Italian condottieri. Protocol Additional GC 1977 is a 1977 amendment protocol to the Geneva Conventions. Article 47 of the protocol provides the most accepted international definition of a mercenary, though not endorsed by some countries, including the United States.
The Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts, 8 June 1977 states: Art 47. Mercenaries 1. A mercenary shall not have the right to be a prisoner of war. 2. A mercenary is any person who: is recruited locally or abroad in order to fight in an armed conflict. All the criteria must be met, according to the Geneva Convention, for a combatant to be described as a mercenary. According to the GC III, a captured soldier must be treated as a lawful combatant and, therefore, as a protected person with prisoner-of-war status until facing a competent tribunal; that tribunal, using criteria in APGC77 or some equivalent domestic law, may decide that the soldier is a mercenary. At that juncture, the mercenary soldier becomes an unlawful combatant but still must be "treated with humanity and, in case of trial, shall not be deprived of the rights of fair and regular trial", being still covered by GC IV Art 5; the only possible exception to GC IV Art 5 is when he is a national of the authority imprisoning him, in which case he would not be a mercenary soldier as defined in APGC77 Art 47.d.
If, after a regular trial, a captured soldier is found to be a mercenary he can expect treatment as a common criminal and may face execution. As mercenary soldiers may not qualify as PoWs, they cannot expect repatriation at war's end; the best known post-World War II example of this was on 28 June 1976 when, at the end of the Luanda Trial, an Angolan court sentenced three Britons and an American to death and nine other mercenaries to prison terms ranging from 16 to 30 years. The four mercenaries sentenced to death were shot by a firing squad on 10 July 1976; the legal status of civilian contractors depends upon the nature of their work and their nationalities with respect to that of the combatants. If they have not "in fact, taken a direct part in the hostilities", they are not mercenaries but civilians who have non-combat support roles and are entitled to protection under the Third Geneva Convention. On 4 December 1989, the United Nations passed resolution 44/34, the International Convention against the Recruitment, Use and Training of Mercenaries.
It entered into force on 20 October 2001 and is known as the UN Mercenary Convention. Article 1 contains the definition of a mercenary. Article 1.1 is similar to Article 47 of Protocol I, however Article 1.2 broadens the definition to include a non-national recruited to overthrow a "Government or otherwise undermining the constitutional order of a State. Critics have argued that APGC77 Art. 47 are designed to cover the activities of mercenaries in post-colonial Africa and do not address adequately the use of private military companies by sovereign states. The situation during the Iraq War and the continuing occupation of Iraq after the United Nations Security Council-sanctioned hand-over of power to the Iraqi government shows the difficulty of defining a mercenary soldier. While the United States governed Iraq, no U. S. citizen working as an armed guard could be classified as a mercenary because he was a national of a Party to the conflict. With the hand-over of power to the Iraqi government, if one does not consider the coalition forces to be continuing parties to the conflict in Iraq, but that their soldiers are "sent by a State, not a Party to the conflict on official duty as a member of its armed forces" unless U.
S. citizens working as armed guards are lawfully certified residents of Iraq, i.e. "a resident of territory controlled by a Party to the conflict", they are involved with
Keilah
Keilah, meaning Citadel, was a city in the lowlands of Judah. It is now a ruin, known as Kh. Qeila, near the modern village of Qila. According to the biblical narrative in the first Book of Samuel, the Philistines had made an inroad eastward as far as Keilah, had begun to appropriate the country for themselves, until David prevented them, he discerned in prayer that the inhabitants would prove unfaithful to him, in that they had offered to deliver him up to King Saul. He and his 600 men "departed from Keilah, went whithersoever they could go”, they fled to the woods in the wilderness of Ziph. "And David was in the wilderness of Ziph, in a wood". Here his friend Jonathan sought him out, "and strengthened his hand in God": this was the last meeting between David and Jonathan. Keilah is mentioned in the Book of Joshua as one of the cities of the Shephelah. Benjamin of Tudela identified Kâkôn as ancient Keilah in 1160. Conder and Kitchener, identified the biblical site with the ruin Kila, "seven English-miles from Beit Jibrin," and 11 km northwest of Hebron.
Victor Guérin, who visited Palestine between the years 1852–1888 identified Keilah with the same ruin, Khirbet Kila, near the modern village by that name, a place situated a few kilometers south of Adullam and west of Kharas. This view has been adopted by the Israel Antiquities Authority; the ruin, Khirbet Kila, lies on the north side of the village Kila. Guérin found here a subterranean and circular vault ancient; the town is mentioned in the Amarna tablets under the corruption Ḳilta. The town's present residents are Bedouins who were expelled during Israel's War of Independence from areas around Beer Sheba; this article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Matthew George. "article name needed". Easton's Bible Dictionary. T. Nelson and Sons. Survey of Western Palestine, Map 21: IAA, Wikimedia commons
Canaan
Canaan was a Semitic-speaking region in the Ancient Near East during the late 2nd millennium BC. The name Canaan appears throughout the Bible, where it corresponds to the Levant, in particular to the areas of the Southern Levant that provide the main setting of the narrative of the Bible: Phoenicia, Philistia and other nations; the word Canaanites serves as an ethnic catch-all term covering various indigenous populations—both settled and nomadic-pastoral groups—throughout the regions of the southern Levant or Canaan. It is by far the most used ethnic term in the Bible. In the Book of Joshua, Canaanites are included in a list of nations to exterminate, described as a group which the Israelites had annihilated. Biblical scholar Mark Smith notes that archaeological data suggests "that the Israelite culture overlapped with and derived from Canaanite culture... In short, Israelite culture was Canaanite in nature; the name "Canaanites" is attested, many centuries as the endonym of the people known to the Ancient Greeks from c. 500 BC as Phoenicians, following the emigration of Canaanite-speakers to Carthage, was used as a self-designation by the Punics of North Africa during Late Antiquity.
Canaan had significant geopolitical importance in the Late Bronze Age Amarna period as the area where the spheres of interest of the Egyptian, Hittite and Assyrian Empires converged. Much of modern knowledge about Canaan stems from archaeological excavation in this area at sites such as Tel Hazor, Tel Megiddo, Gezer; the English term Canaan comes via Greek Χαναάν Khanaan and Latin Canaan. It appears as in the Amarna letters, knʿn is found on coins from Phoenicia in the last half of the 1st millennium, it first occurs in Greek in the writings of Hecataeus as Khna. Scholars connect the name Canaan with knʿn, Kana'an, the general Northwest Semitic name for this region; the etymology is uncertain. An early explanation derives the term from the Semitic root knʿ "to be low, subjugated"; some scholars have suggested that this implies an original meaning of "lowlands", in contrast with Aram, which would mean "highlands", whereas others have suggested it meant "the subjugated" as the name of Egypt's province in the Levant, evolved into the proper name in a similar fashion to Provincia Nostra.
An alternative suggestion put forward by Ephraim Avigdor Speiser in 1936 derives the term from Hurrian Kinahhu, purportedly referring to the colour purple, so that Canaan and Phoenicia would be synonyms. Tablets found in the Hurrian city of Nuzi in the early 20th century appear to use the term Kinahnu as a synonym for red or purple dye, laboriously produced by the Kassite rulers of Babylon from murex shells as early as 1600 BC, on the Mediterranean coast by the Phoenicians from a byproduct of glassmaking. Purple cloth became a renowned Canaanite export commodity, mentioned in Exodus; the dyes may have been named after their place of origin. The name'Phoenicia' is connected with the Greek word for "purple" referring to the same product, but it is difficult to state with certainty whether the Greek word came from the name, or vice versa; the purple cloth of Tyre in Phoenicia was well known far and wide and was associated by the Romans with nobility and royalty. However, according to Robert Drews, Speiser's proposal has been abandoned.
Canaanite culture developed in situ from the earlier Ghassulian chalcolithic culture, which pioneered the Mediterranean agricultural system typical of the Canaanite region, which comprised intensive subsistence horticulture, extensive grain growing, commercial wine and olive cultivation and transhumance pastoralism. Ghassulian itself developed from the Circum-Arabian Nomadic Pastoral Complex, which in turn developed from a fusion of their ancestral Natufian and Harifian cultures with Pre-Pottery Neolithic B farming cultures, practicing animal domestication, during the 6200 BC climatic crisis which led to the Agricultural Revolution/Neolithic Revolution in the Levant; the Late Bronze Age state of Ugarit is considered quintessentially Canaanite archaeologically though its Ugaritic language does not belong to the Canaanite language group proper. A disputed reference to Lord of ga-na-na in the Semitic Ebla tablets from the archive of Tell Mardikh has been interpreted by some scholars to mention the deity Dagon by the title "Lord of Canaan" If correct, this would suggest that Eblaites were conscious of Canaan as an entity by 2500 BC.
Jonathan Tubb states that the term ga-na-na "may provide a third-millennium reference to Canaanite", while at the same time stating that the first certain reference is in the 18th century BC. See Ebla-Biblical controversy for further details. A letter from Mut-bisir to Shamshi-Adad I of the Old Assyrian Empire has been translated: "It is in Rahisum that the brigands and the Canaanites are situated", it was found in 1973 in the ruins of an Assyrian outpost at that time in Syria. Additional unpublished references to Kinahnum in the Mari letters refer to the same episode. Whether the term Kinahnum refers to people from a specific region or rather people of "foreign origin" has been disputed, such that Robert Drews states that the "first certain cuneiform reference" to Canaan is found on the Alalakh statue of King Idrim
