The loss of Canaan and the fall of the Babylonian empire seem to have been due to the conquest of Babylon by a tribe of Elamite mountaineers.
The Babylonians of Abraham's age were Semites, and the language they spoke was not more dissimilar from Canaanitish or Hebrew than Italian is from Spanish.

But the population of the country had not always been of the Semitic stock.

Its first settlers--those who had founded its cities, who had invented the cuneiform system of writing and originated its culture--were of a wholly different race, and spoke an agglutinative language which had no resemblance to that of the Semites.

They had, however, been conquered and their culture absorbed by the Semitic Babylonians and Assyrians of later history, and the civilisation and culture which had spread throughout western Asia was a Semitic modification and development of the older culture of Chaldaea.

Its elements, indeed, were foreign, but long before it had been communicated to the nations of the west it had become almost completely Semitic in character.