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These catalogues enable us to form some estimate of the degree of perfection in art and refinement which had been arrived at in Northern Palestine and Syria before the Israelitish invasion. Lists are also given of the towns conquered and the peoples made to submit. Remarking upon these, Brugsch justly says that what gives the highest importance to the catalogue is the undisputed fact that more than three hundred years before the entrance of the Jews into the land of Canaan, a great league of peoples of the same race existed in Palestine under little kings, who dwelt in the same towns and fortresses as we find stated on the monuments, and who for the greater part fell by conquest into the hands of the Jewish immigrants. Among these the King of Kadesh, on the Orontes, in the land of the Amorites—as the inscriptions expressly state—played the first part, since there obeyed him, as their chief leader, all the kings and their peoples from the water of Egypt (which is the same as the Biblical brook which flowed as the boundary of Egypt) to the rivers of Naharain, afterwards called Mesopotamia.