CHEDEK (kedek). See THORNS. CHEDORLAOMER (laRl'or Ifi'o-mer or ki:d'or la-Wmer), (Itch. ked•or-law-o'nter), king of Elam, and leader of the four kings who invad ed Canaan in the tune of Abraham (Gen. xiv.4).
We thus know that Abraham came 01 Ur of the Chaldees, and by way of I laran finally reached Palestine, where he cared for his flocks and herds, and also recaptured the booty which hail been taken from the cities of the plain. We learn from Genesis that Chedorlaomer, who led the invaders, was king of Elam, but that is all Any further light on the subject must come from the recovered monuments of the East.
(1) Primitive Peoples. At the time when Torah and his son Abraham left Southern Ilal % Ionia, it was inhabited by various races. the original race being probably of the negrite type— very dark and small and no match for the larger and stronger races which followed. They formed the original basis of the population of both liabylonia and Elam to the cast. \Vial them, and dominant over them, were two other rival and generally hostile races, inhabiting Babylonia. one of which we may call Mongolian, which came from the cast or northeast, by way of Elam, while the other was Semitic. and came front the west, from Arabia Abraham belonged to this Semitic stock, which had succeeded Nlon gol invasion and had conquered the country.
(2) Mongolian Invasions. Somewhere about 230o B. C. occurred one of the most important and revolutionary events in the history of the early world, and one whose full extent only now begins to be understood. It was nothing less than the bursting out of a great flood of Mongol people, which overran all that was then knwvn of the civilized East or West. Such a horde of conquerors had subdued the negrite population of Babylonia and Elam before the beginning of history, and now came another such inva sion.
This horde, of about 230o B. C., the first of which we have historical knowledge, divided, as it seems, into two streams. One of these crossed the upper Tigris and Euphrates, reached the Med iterranean coast, and proceeded southward, until it at last reached Egypt, and leaving kindred people behind it, there founded the dynasty of the hated Shepherd or Hyksos kings, which over threw the fourteenth regular dynasty. All of
this took time, and must be considered in rela tion to an already considerably Mongolianized Phoenicia.
The other division of the Mongolian invasion passed down east of the Tigris, over the territory which was afterward Persia, into the southern Persiar territory of Elam, where it found a kindred population in control, and then crossed the Tigris into Babylonia, where the Semites were the ruling people. This great invasion, of which we have pretty definite knowledge, and which we call Elamite, was substantially con current with the conquest of Egypt, by the in vasion of the Canaanite or Phoenician, the old Mongolian nomads, who founded Avaris and the Hyksos dynasty. (DEMONSTRATIONS, page 47o.) The most distinguished of these Mongolian or Elamite conquerors of Babylonia was Kudur Nahunta, whose name means "the servant of the god Nahunta." This Elamite conquest probably covered all of Southern Babylonia, although the farthest extent of it known to us was the plunder in the year 2285 B. C., of the city of Erech, and the capture of the image of Nana, which was carried to Susa, and was recovered by Assur-bani-pal, king of Assyria, 1800 years later.
From Erech to Ur of the Chaldees was not a long distance. At this time there must have been a great emigration of the Semites, who fled from this irresistible invasion. They went north and formed a homogeneous Semitic population farther up the valleys of the two rivers, the basis of the later Assyrian empire.
(3) Departure of Terah. About this time Terah and his family left their ancestral home for the North, and we may conjecture, with great probability, that the Elamite invasion explains in part their departure; we may believe that they were the representatives of the dispossessed aris tocracy which went to the northern plain of Haran, carrying, as we know, with them, the worship of Sin, the moon god of Ur.