Chapter I: The First Chaldæan Empire and the Hyksôs in Egypt (2)

*** The name of this king has been the theme of heated
discussions: it was at first pronounced Aradsin, Ardusin, or
Zikarsin; it is now read in several different ways--Rimsin,
or Eriaku, Riaku, Rimagu. Others have made a distinction
between the two forms, and have made out of them the names
of two different kings. They are all variants of the same
name. I have adopted the form Rimsin, which is preferred by
a few Assyriologists. [The tablets recently discovered by
Mr. Pinches, referring to Kudur-lagamar and Tudkhula, which
he has published in a Paper road before the Victoria
Institute, Jan. 20, 1896, have shown that the true reading
is Eri-Aku. The Elamite name Eri-Aku, servant of the moon-
god, was changed by some of his subjects into the
Babylonian Rim-Sin, Have mercy, O Moon-god! just as
Abêsukh, the Hebrew Absihua (the father of welfare) was
transformed into the Babylonian Ebisum (the actor).--Ed.]

It was not the first time that Elam had audaciously interfered in the affairs of her neighbours. In fabulous times, one of her mythical kings--Khumbaba the Ferocious--had oppressed. Uruk, and Gilgames with all his valour was barely able to deliver the town. Sargon the Elder is credited with having subdued Elam; the kings and vicegerents of Lagash, as well as those of Uru and. Larsam, had measured forces with Anshan, but with no decisive issue. From time to time they obtained an advantage, and we find recorded in the annals victories gained by Gudea, Inê-sin, or Bursin, but to be followed only by fresh reverses; at the close of such campaigns, and in order to seal the ensuing peace, à princess of Susa would be sent as a bride to one of the Chaldæan cities, or a Chaldæan lady of royal birth would enter the harem of a king of Anshân. Elam was protected along the course of the Tigris and on the shores of the Nâr-Marratum by a wide marshy region, impassable except at a few fixed and easily defended places. The alluvial plain extending behind the marshes was as rich and fertile as that of Chaldæa. Wheat and barley ordinarily yielded an hundred and at times two hundredfold; the towns were surrounded by a shadeless belt of palms; the almond, fig, acacia, poplar, and willow extended in narrow belts along the rivers edge. The climate closely resembles that of Chaldaja: if the midday heat in summer is more pitiless, it is at least tempered by more frequent east winds. The ground, however, soon begins to rise, ascending gradually towards the north-east. The distant and uniform line of mountain-peaks grows loftier on the approach of the traveller, and the hills begin to appear one behind another, clothed halfway up with thick forests, but bare on their summits, or scantily covered with meagre vegetation. They comprise, in fact, six or seven parallel ranges, resembling natural ramparts piled up between the country of the Tigris and the table-land of Iran. The intervening valleys were formerly lakes, having had for the most part no communication with each other and no outlet into the sea. In the course of centuries they had dried up, leaving a thick deposit of mud in the hollows of their ancient beds, from which sprang luxurious and abundant harvests. The rivers--the Uknu,* the Ididi,** and the Ulaî***--which water this region are, on reaching more level ground, connected by canals, and are constantly shifting their beds in the light soil of the Susian plain: they soon attain a width equal to that of the Euphrates, but after a short time lose half their volume in swamps, and empty themselves at the present day into the Shatt-el-Arab. They flowed formerly into that part of the Persian Gulf which extended as far as Kornah, and the sea thus formed the southern frontier of the kingdom.

* The Uknu is the Kerkhah of the present day, the Choaspes
of the Greeks.

** The Ididi was at first identified with the ancient
Pasitigris, which scholars then desired to distinguish from
the Eulseos: it is now known to be the arm of the Karun
which runs to Dizful, the Koprates of classical times, which
has sometimes been confounded with the Eulaws.

*** The Ulaî, mentioned in the Hebrew texts (Ban. viii. 2,
16), the Euloos of classical writers, also called
Pasitigris. It is the Karun of the present day, until its
confluence with the Shaûr, and subsequently the Shaûr
itself, which waters the foot of the Susian hills.

From earliest times this country was inhabited by three distinct peoples, whose descendants may still be distinguished at the present day, and although they have dwindled in numbers and become mixed with elements of more recent origin, the resemblance to their forefathers is still very remarkable. There were, in the first place, the short and robust people of well-knit figure, with brown skins, black hair and eyes, who belonged to that negritic race which inhabited a considerable part of Asia in prehistoric times.*

* The connection of the negroid type of Susians with the
negritic races of India and Oceania, has been proved, in the
course of M. Dieulafoys expedition to the Susian plains and
the ancient provinces of Elam.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a bas-relief of Sargon II. in
the Louvre.

These prevailed in the lowlands and the valleys, where the warm, damp climate favoured their development; but they also spread into the mountain region, and had pushed their outposts as far as the first slopes of the Iranian table-land. They there contact with white-skinned of medium height, who were probably allied to the nations of Northern and Central Asia--to the Scythians,* for instance, if it is permissible to use a vague term employed by the Ancients.

* This last-mentioned people is, by some authors, for
reasons which, so far, can hardly be considered conclusive,
connected with the so-called Sumerian race, which we find
settled in Chaldæa. They are said to have been the first to
employ horses and chariots in warfare.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph furnished by
Marcel Dieulafoy.

Semites of the same stock as those of Chaldæa pushed forward as far as the east bank of the Tigris, and settling mainly among the marshes led a precarious life by fishing and pillaging.* The country of the plain was called Anzân, or Anshân,** and the mountain region Numma, or Ilamma, the high lands: these two names were subsequently used to denote the whole country, and Ilamma has survived in the Hebrew word Elam.*** Susa, the most important and flourishing town in the kingdom, was situated between the Ulaî and the Ididi, some twenty-five or thirty miles from the nearest of the mountain ranges.

* From the earliest times we meet beyond the Tigris with
names like that of Durilu, a fact which proves the existence
of races speaking a Semitic dialect in the countries under
the suzerainty of the King of Elam: in the last days of the
Chaldæan empire they had assumed such importance that the
Hebrews made out Elam to be one of the sons of Shem (_Gen._
x. 22).

** Anzân, Anshân, and, by assimilation of the nasal with the
sibilant, Ashshân. This name has already been mentioned in
the inscriptions of the kings and vicegerents of Lagash and
in the _Book of Prophecies_ of the ancient Chaldæan
astronomers; it also occurs in the royal preamble of Cyrus
and his ancestors, who like him were styled kings of
Anshân. It had been applied to the whole country of Elam,
and afterwards to Persia. Some are of opinion that it was
the name of a part of Elam, viz. that inhabited by the
Turanian Medes who spoke the second language of the
Achæmenian inscriptions, the eastern half, bounded by the
Tigris and the Persian Gulf, consisting of a flat and swampy
land. These differences of opinion gave rise to a heated
controversy; it is now, however, pretty generally admitted
that Anzân-Anshân was really the plain of Elam, from the
mountains to the sea, and one set of authorities affirms
that the word Anzân may have meant plain in the language
of the country, while others hesitate as yet to pronounce
definitely on this point.

*** The meaning of Nunima, Ilamma, Ilamtu, in the
group of words used to indicate Elam, had been recognised
even by the earliest Assyriologists; the name originally
referred to the hilly country on the north and east of Susa.
To the Hebrews, Elam was one of the sons of Shem (Gen. x.
22). The Greek form of the name is Elymais, and some of the
classical geographers were well enough acquainted with the
meaning of the word to be able to distinguish the region to
which it referred from Susiana proper.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, after a plate in Chesney.

Its fortress and palace were raised upon the slopes of a mound which overlooked the surrounding country:* at its base, to the eastward, stretched the town, with its houses of sun-dried bricks.**

* Susa, in the language of the country, was called Shushun;
this name was transliterated into Chaldæo-Assyrian, by
Shushan, Shushi.

** Strabo tells us, on the authority of Polycletus, that the
town had no walls in the time of Alexander, and extended
over a space two hundred stadia in length; in the
VIII century B.C. it was enclosed by walls with bastions,
which are shown on a bas-relief of Assurbanipal, but it was
surrounded by unfortified suburbs.

Further up the course of the Uknu, lay the following cities: Madaktu, the Badaca of classical authors,* rivalling Susa in strength and importance; Naditu,** Til-Khumba,*** Dur-Undash,**** Khaidalu.^--all large walled towns, most of which assumed the title of royal cities. Elam in reality constituted a kind of feudal empire, composed of several tribes--the Habardip, the Khushshi, the Umliyash, the people of Yamutbal and of Yatbur^^--all independent of each other, but often united under the authority of one sovereign, who as a rule chose Susa as the seat of government.

* Madaktu, Mataktu, the Badaka of Diodorus, situated on the
Eulaaos, between Susa and Ecbatana, has been placed by
Rawlinson near the bifurcation of the Kerkhah, either at
Paipul or near Aiwân-i-Kherkah, where there are some rather
important and ancient ruins; Billerbeck prefers to put it at
the mouth of the valley of Zal-fer, on the site at present
occupied by the citadel of Kala-i-Riza.

** Naditu is identified by Finzi with the village of
Natanzah, near Ispahan; it ought rather to be looked for in
the neighbourhood of Sarna.

*** Til-Khumba, the Mound of Khumba, so named after one of
the principal Elamite gods, was, perhaps, situated among the
ruins of Budbar, towards the confluence of the Ab-i-Kirind
and Kerkhah, or possibly higher up in the mountain, in the
vicinity of Asmanabad.

**** Dur-Undash, Dur-Undasi, has been identified, without
absolutely conclusive reason, with the fortress of Kala-i-
Dis on the Disful-Rud.

^ Khaidalu, Khidalu, is perhaps the present fortress of Dis-
Malkan.

^^ The countries of Yatbur and Yamutbal extended into the
plain between the marshes of the Tigris and the mountain;
the town of Durilu was near the Yamutbal region, if not in
that country itself. Umliyash lay between the Uknu and the
Tigris.

The language is not represented by any idioms now spoken, and its affinities with the Sumerian which some writers have attempted to establish, are too uncertain to make it safe to base any theory upon them.*

* A great part of the Susian inscriptions have been
collected by Fr. Lenormant. An attempt has been made to
identify the language in which they are written with the
Sumero-accadian, and authorities now generally agree in
considering the Arcæmenian inscriptions of the second type
as representative of its modern form. Hommel connects it
with Georgian, and includes it in a great linguistic family,
which comprises, besides these two idioms, the Hittite, the
Cappadocian, the Armenian of the Van inscriptions, and the
Cosstean. Oppert claims to have discovered on a tablet in
the British Museum a list of words belonging to one of the
idioms (probably Semitic) of Susiana, which differs alike
from the Suso-Medic and the Assyrian.

The little that we know of Elamite religion reveals to us a mysterious world, full of strange names and vague forms. Over their hierarchy there presided a deity who was called Shushinak (the Susian), Dimesh or Samesh, Dagbag, As-siga, Adaene, and possibly Khumba and Æmmân, whom the Chaldæns identified with their god Ninip; his statue was concealed in a sanctuary inaccessible to the profane, but it was dragged from thence by Assurbanipal of Nineveh in the VIIth century B.C.* This deity was associated with six others of the first rank, who were divided into two triads--Shumudu, Lagamaru, Partikira; Ammankasibar, Uduran, and Sapak: of these names, the least repellent, Ammankasibar, may possibly be the Memnon of the Greeks. The dwelling of these divinities was near Susa, in the depths of a sacred forest to which the priests and kings alone had access: their images were brought out on certain days to receive solemn homage, and were afterwards carried back to their shrine accompanied by a devout and reverent multitude. These deities received a tenth of the spoil after any successful campaign--the offerings comprising statues of the enemies gods, valuable vases, ingots of gold and silver, furniture, and stuffs. The Elamite armies were well organized, and under a skilful general became irresistible. In other respects the Elamites closely resembled the Chaldæans, pursuing the same industries and having the same agricultural and commercial instincts. In the absence of any bas-reliefs and inscriptions peculiar to this people, we may glean from the monuments of Lagash and Babylon a fair idea of the extent of their civilization in its earliest stages.

* _Shushinak_ is an adjective derived from the name of the
town of Susa. The real name of the god was probably kept
secret and rarely uttered. The names which appear by the
side of Shushinak in the text published by H. Rawlinson, as
equivalents of the Babylonian Ninip, perhaps represent
different deities; we may well ask whether the deity may not
be the Khumba, Umma, Ummân, who recurs so frequently in the
names of men and places, and who has hitherto never been met
with alone in any formula or dedicatory tablet.

The cities of the Euphrates, therefore, could have been sensible of but little change, when the chances of war transferred them from the rule of their native princes to that of an Elamite. The struggle once over, and the resulting evils repaired as far as practicable, the people of these towns resumed their usual ways, hardly conscious of the presence of their foreign ruler. The victors, for their part, became assimilated so rapidly with the vanquished, that at the close of a generation or so the conquering dynasty was regarded legitimate and national one, loyally attached to the traditions and religion of its adopted country. In the year 2285 B.C., towards the close of the reign of Nurrammân, or in the earlier part of that of Siniddinam, a King of Elam, by name Kudur-nakhunta, triumphantly marched through Chaldæa from end to end, devastating the country and sparing neither town nor temple: Uruk lost its statue of Nana, which was carried off as a trophy and placed in the sanctuary of Susa. The inhabitants long mourned the detention of their goddess, and a hymn of lamentation, probably composed for the occasion by one of their priests, kept the remembrance of the disaster fresh in their memories. Until when, oh lady, shall the impious enemy ravage the country!--In thy queen-city, Uruk, the destruction is accomplished,--in Eulbar, the temple of thy oracle, blood has flowed like water,--upon the whole of thy lands has he poured out flame, and it is spread abroad like smoke.--Oh, lady, verily it is hard for me to bend under the yoke of misfortune!--? Oh, lady, thou hast wrapped me about, thou hast plunged me, in sorrow!--The impious mighty one has broken me in pieces like a reèd,--and I know not what to resolve, I trust not in myself,--like a bed of reeds I sigh day and night!--I, thy servant, I bow myself before thee! It would appear that the whole of Chaldæa, including Babylon itself, was forced to acknowledge the supremacy of the invader;* a Susian empire thus absorbed Chaldæa, reducing its states to feudal provinces, and its princes to humble vassals. Kudur-nakhunta having departed, the people of Larsa exerted themselves to the utmost to repair the harm that he had done, and they succeeded but too well, since their very prosperity was the cause only a short time after of the outburst of another storm. Siniddinam, perhaps, desired to shake off the Elamite yoke. Simtishilkhak, one of the successors of Kudur-nakhunta, had conceded the principality of Yamutbal as a fief to Kudur-mabug, one of his sons. Kudur-mabug appears to have been a conqueror of no mean ability, for he claims, in his inscriptions, the possession of the whole of Syria.**

* The submission of Babylon is evident from the title Adda
Martu, sovereign of the West, assumed by several of the
Elamite princes (of. p. 65 of the present work): in order to
extend his authority beyond the Euphrates, it was necessary
for the King of Elam to be first of all master of Babylon.
In the early days of Assyriology it was supposed that this
period of Elamite supremacy coincided with the Median
dynasty of Berosus.

** His preamble contains the titles _adda Martu,_ prince of
Syria; _adda lamutbal_, prince of Yamutbal. The word
_adda_ seems properly to mean lather, and the literal
translation of the full title would probably be father of
Syria, _father_ of Yamutbal, whence the secondary
meanings master, lord, prince, which have been
provisionally accepted by most Assyriologists. Tiele, and
Winckler after him, have suggested that Martu is here
equivalent to Yamutbal, and that it was merely used to
indicate the western part of Elam; Winckler afterwards
rejected this hypothesis, and has come round to the general
opinion.

He obtained a victory over Siniddinam, and having dethroned him, placed the administration of the kingdom in the hands of his own son Eimsin. This prince, who was at first a feudatory, afterwards associated in the government with his father, and finally sole monarch after the latters death, married a princess of Chaldæan blood, and by this means legitimatized his usurpation in the eyes of his subjects. His domain, which lay on both sides of the Tigris and of the Euphrates, comprised, besides the principality of Yamutbal, all the towns dependent on Sumer and Accad--Uru, Larsa, Uruk, and Nippur, He acquitted himself as a good sovereign in the sight of gods and men: he repaired the brickwork in the temple of Nannar at Uru; he embellished the temple of Shamash at Larsa, and caused two statues of copper to be cast in honour of the god; he also rebuilt Lagash and Grirsu. The city of Uruk had been left a heap of ruins after the withdrawal of Kudur-nakhunta: he set about the work of restoration, constructed a sanctuary to Papsukal, raised the ziggurât of Nana, and consecrated to the goddess an entire set of temple furniture to replace that carried off by the Elamites. He won the adhesion of the priests by piously augmenting their revenues, and throughout his reign displayed remarkable energy. Documents exist which attribute to him the reduction of Durilu, on the borders of Elam and the Chaldæan states; others contain discreet allusions to a perverse enemy who disturbed his peace in the north, and whom he successfully repulsed. He drove Sinmuballit out of Ishin, and this victory so forcibly impressed his contemporaries, that they made it the starting-point of a new semi-official era; twenty-eight years after the event, private contracts still continued to be dated by reference to the taking of Ishin. Sinmuballits son, Khammurabi, was more fortunate. Eimsin vainly appealed for help against him to his relative and suzerain Kudur-lagamar, who had succeeded Simtishilkhak at Susa. Eimsin was defeated, and disappeared from the scene of action, leaving no trace behind him, though we may infer that he took refuge in his fief of Yamutbal. The conquest by Khammurabi was by no means achieved at one blow, the enemy offering an obstinate resistance. He was forced to destroy several fortresses, the inhabitants of which had either risen against him or had refused to do him homage, among them being those of Meîr* and Malgu. When the last revolt had been put down, all the countries speaking the language of Chaldæa and sharing its civilization were finally united into a single kingdom, of which Khammurabi proclaimed himself the head. Other princes who had preceded him had enjoyed the same opportunities, but their efforts had never been successful in establishing an empire of any duration; the various elements had been bound together for a moment, merely to be dispersed again after a short interval. The work of Khammurabi, on the contrary, was placed on a solid foundation, and remained unimpaired under his successors. Not only did he hold sway without a rival in the south as in the north, but the titles indicating the rights he had acquired over Sumer and Accad were inserted in his Protocol after those denoting his hereditary possessions,--the city of Bel and the four houses of the world. Khammurabis victory marks the close of those long centuries of gradual evolution during which the peoples of the Lower Euphrates passed from division to unity. Before his reign there had been as many states as cities, and as many dynasties as there were states; after him there was but one kingdom under one line of kings.

* Maîru, Meîr, has been identified with Shurippak; but it
is, rather, the town of Mar, now Tell-Id. A and Lagamal, the
Elamite Lagamar, were worshipped there. It was the seat of a
linen manufacture, and possessed large shipping.

Khammurabis long reign of fifty-five years has hitherto yielded us but a small number of monuments--seals, heads of sceptres, alabaster vases, and pompous inscriptions, scarcely any of them being of historical interest. He was famous for the number of his campaigns, no details of which, however, have come to light, but the dedication of one of his statues celebrates his good fortune on the battlefield. Bel has lent thee sovereign majesty: thou, what awaitest thou?--Sin has lent thee royalty: thou, what awaitest thou?--Ninip has lent thee his supreme weapon: thou, what awaitest thou?--The goddess of light, Ishtar, has lent thee the shock of arms and the fray: thou, what awaitest thou?--Shamash and Bamman are thy varlets: thou, what awaitest thou?--It is Khammurabi, the king, the powerful chieftain--who cuts the enemies in pieces,--the whirlwind of battle--who overthrows the country of the rebels--who stays combats, who crushes rebellions,--who destroys the stubborn like images of clay,--who overcomes the obstacles of inaccessible mountains. The majority of these expeditions were, no doubt, consequent on the victory which destroyed the power of Kimsin. It would not have sufficed merely to drive back the Elamites beyond the Tigris; it was necessary to strike a blow within their own territory to avoid a recurrence of hostilities, which might have endangered the still recent work of conquest. Here, again, Khammurabi seems to have met with his habitual success.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a rapid sketch made at the
British Museum.

Ashnunak was a border district, and shared the fate of all the provinces on the eastern bank of the Tigris, being held sometimes by Elam and sometimes by Chaldæa; properly speaking, it was a country of Semitic speech, and was governed by viceroys owning allegiance, now to Babylon, now to Susa.* Khammurabi seized this province, and permanently secured its frontier by building along the river a line of fortresses surrounded by earthworks. Following the example of his predecessors, he set himself to restore and enrich the temples.

* Pognon discovered inscriptions of four of the vicegerents
of Ashnunak, which he assigns, with some hesitation, to the
time of Khammurabi, rather than to that of the kings of
Telloh. Three of these names are Semitic, the fourth
Sumerian; the language of the inscriptions bears a
resemblance to the Semitic dialect of Chaldæa.

The house of Zamama and Ninni, at Kish, was out of repair, and the ziggurât threatened to fall; he pulled it down and rebuilt it, carrying it to such a height that its summit reached the heavens. Merodach had delegated to him the government of the faithful, and had raised him to the rank of supreme ruler over the whole of Chaldæa. At Babylon, close to the great lake which served as a reservoir for the overflow of the Euphrates, the king restored the sanctuary of Esagilla, the dimensions of which did not appear to him to be proportionate to the growing importance of the city. He completed this divine dwelling with great joy and delight, he raised the summit to the firmament, and then enthroned Merodach and his spouse, Zarpanit, within it, amid great festivities. He provided for the ever-recurring requirements of the national religion by frequent gifts; the tradition has come down to us of the granary for wheat which he built at Babylon, the sight of which alone rejoiced the heart of the god. While surrounding Sippar with a great wall and a fosse, to protect its earthly inhabitants, he did not forget Shamash and Malkatu, the celestial patrons of the town. He enlarged in their honour the mysterious Ebarra, the sacred seat of their worship, and that which no king from the earliest times had known how to build for his divine master, that did he generously for Shamash his master. He restored Ezida, the eternal dwelling of Merodach, at Borsippa; Eturka-lamma, the temple of Anu, Ninni, and Nana, the suzerains of Kish; and also Ezikalamma, the house of the goddess Ninna, in the village of Zarilab. In the southern provinces, but recently added to the crown,--at Larsa, Uruk, and Uru,--he displayed similar activity.

He had, doubtless, a political as well as a religious motive in all he did; for if he succeeded in winning the allegiance of the priests by the prodigality of his pious gifts, he could count on their gratitude in securing for him the peoples obedience, and thus prevent the outbreak of a revolt. He had, indeed, before him a difficult task in attempting to allay the ills which had been growing during centuries of civil discord and foreign conquest. The irrigation of the country demanded constant attention, and from earliest times its sovereigns had directed the work with real solicitude; but owing to the breaking up of the country into small states, their respective resources could not be combined in such general operations as were needed for controlling the inundations and effectually remedying the excess or the scarcity of water. Khammurabi witnessed the damage done to the whole province of Umliyash by one of those terrible floods which still sometimes ravage the regions of the Lower Tigris,* and possibly it may have been to prevent the recurrence of such a disaster that he undertook the work of canalization.

* Contracts dated the year of an inundation which laid waste
Umliyash; cf. in our own time, the inundation of April 10,
1831, which in a single night destroyed half the city of
Bagdad, and in which fifteen thousand persons lost their
lives either by drowning or by the collapse of their houses.

He was the first that we know of who attempted to organize and reduce to a single system the complicated network of ditches and channels which intersected the territory belonging to the great cities between Babylon and the sea. Already, more than half a century previously, Siniddinam had enlarged the canal on which Larsa was situated, while Bimsin had provided an outlet for the River of the Gods into the Persian Gulf:* by the junction of the two a navigable channel was formed between the Euphrates and the marshes, and an outlet was thus made for the surplus waters of the inundation. Khammurabi informs us how Anu and Bel, having confided to him the government of Sumer and Accad, and having placed in his hands the reins of power, he dug the Nâr-Khammurabi, the source of wealth to the people, which brings abundance of water to the country of Sumir and Accad. I turned both its banks into cultivated ground, I heaped up mounds of grain and I furnished perpetual water for the people of Sumir and Accad. The country of Sumer and Accad, I gathered together its nations who were scattered, I gave them pasture and drink, I ruled over them in riches and abundance, I caused them to inhabit a peaceful dwelling-place. Then it was that Khammurabi, the powerful king, the favourite of the great gods, I myself, according to the prodigious strength with which Merodach had endued me, I constructed a high fortress, upon mounds of earth; its summit rises to the height of the mountains, at the head of the Nâr-Khammurabi, the source of wealth to the people. This fortress I called Dur-Sinmuballit-abim-uâlidiya, the Fortress of Sinmuballit, the father who begat me, so that the name of Sinmuballit, the father who begat me, may endure in the habitations of the world.

* Contract dated the year the Tigris, river of the gods,
was canalized down to the sea; i.e. as far as the point to
which the sea then penetrated in the environs of Kornah.

This canal of Khammurabi ran from a little south of Babylon, joining those of Siniddinam and Rimsin, and probably cutting the alluvial plain in its entire length.* It drained the stagnant marshes on either side along its course, and by its fertilising effects, the dwellers on its banks were enabled to reap full harvests from the lands which previously had been useless for purposes of cultivation. A ditch of minor importance pierced the isthmus which separates the Tigris and the Euphrates in the neighbourhood of Sippar.** Khammurabi did not rest contented with these; a system of secondary canals doubtless completed the whole scheme of irrigation which he had planned after the achievement of his conquest, and his successors had merely to keep up his work in order to ensure an unrivalled prosperity to the empire.

* Delattre is of opinion that the canal dug by Khammurabi is
the Arakhtu of later epochs which began at Babylon and
extended as far as the Larsa canal. It must therefore be
approximately identified with the Shatt-en-Nil of the
present day, which joins Shatt-el-Kaher, the canal of
Siniddinam.

** The canal which Khammurabi caused to be dug or dredged
may be the Nâr-Malkâ, or royal canal, which ran from the
Tigris to the Euphrates, passing Sippar on the way. The
digging of this canal is mentioned in a contract.

Their efforts in this direction were not unsuccessful. Samsuîluna, the son of Khammurabi, added to the existing system two or three fresh canals, one at least of which still bore his name nearly fifteen centuries later; it is mentioned in the documents of the second Assyrian empire in the time of Assurbanipal, and it is possible that traces of it may still be found at the present day. Abiêshukh,* Ammisatana,** Ammizadugga,*** and Samsusatana,**** all either continued to elaborate the network planned by their ancestors, or applied themselves to the better distribution of the overflow in those districts where cultivation was still open to improvement.

* Abîshukh (the Hebrew Abishua) is the form of the name
which we find in contemporary contracts. The official lists
contain the variant Ebishu, Ebîshum.

** Ammiditana is only a possible reading: others prefer
Ammisatana. The Nâr-Ammisatana is mentioned in a Sippar
contract. Another contract is dated the year in which
Ammisatana, the king, repaired the canal of Samsuîluna.

*** This was, at first, read Ammididugga. Ammizadugga is
mentioned in the date of a contract as having executed
certain works--of what nature it is not easy to say--on the
banks of the Tigris; another contract is dated the year in
which Ammizadugga, the king, by supreme command of Sha-mash,
his master, [dug] the Ndr-Ammizadugga-nulchus-nishi (canal
of Ammizadugga), prosperity of men. In the Minæan
inscriptions of Southern Arabia the name is found under the
form of Ammi-Zaduq.

**** Sometimes erroneously read Samdiusatana; but, as a
matter of fact, we have contracts of that time, in which a
royal name is plainly written as Samsusatana.

We should know nothing of these kings had not the scribes of those times been in the habit of dating the contracts of private individuals by reference to important national events. They appear to have chosen by preference incidents in the religious life of the country; as, for instance, the restoration of a temple, the annual enthronisation of one of the great divinities, such as Shamash, Merodach, Ishtar, or Nana, as the eponymous god of the current year, the celebration of a solemn festival, or the consecration of a statue; while a few scattered allusions to works of fortification show that meanwhile the defence of the country was jealously watched over.* These sovereigns appear to have enjoyed long reigns, the shortest extending over a period of five and twenty years; and when at length the death of any king occurred, he was immediately replaced by his son, the notaries acts and the judicial documents which have come down to us betraying no confusion or abnormal delay in the course of affairs. We may, therefore, conclude that the last century and a half of the dynasty was a period of peace and of material prosperity. Chaldæa was thus enabled to fully reap the advantage of being united under the rule of one individual. It is quite possible that those cities--Uru, Larsa, Ishin, Uruk, and Nippur--which had played so important a part in the preceding centuries, suffered from the loss of their prestige, and from the blow dealt to their traditional pretensions.

* Samsuîluna repaired the five fortresses which his ancestor
Sumulaîlu had built. Contract dated the year in which
Ammisatana, the king, built Dur-Ammisatana, near the Sin
river, and the year in which Ammisatana, the king, gave
its name to Dur-Iskunsin, near the canal of
Ammisatana. Contract dated the year in which the King
Ammisatana repaired Dur-Iskunsin. Contract dated the year in
which Samsuîluna caused the wall of Uru and Uruk to be
built.

Up to this time they had claimed the privilege of controlling the history of their country, and they had bravely striven among themselves for the supremacy over the southern states; but the revolutions which had raised each in turn to the zenith of power, had never exalted any one of them to such an eminence as to deprive its rivals of all hope of supplanting it and of enjoying the highest place. The rise of Babylon destroyed the last chance which any of them had of ever becoming the capital; the new city was so favourably situated, and possessed so much wealth and so many soldiers, while its kings displayed such tenacious energy, that its neighbours were forced to bow before it and resign themselves to the subordinate position of leading provincial towns. They gave a loyal obedience to the officers sent them from the north, and sank gradually into obscurity, the loss of their political supremacy being somewhat compensated for by the religious respect in which they were always held. Their ancient divinities--Nana, Sin, Anu, and Ra--were adopted, if we may use the term, by the Babylonians, who claimed the protection of these gods as fully as they did that of Merodach or of Nebo, and prided themselves on amply supplying all their needs. As the inhabitants of Babylon had considerable resources at their disposal, their appeal to these deities might be regarded as productive of more substantial results than the appeal of a merely local kinglet. The increase of the national wealth and the concentration, under one head, of armies hitherto owning several chiefs, enabled the rulers, not of Babylon or Larsa alone, but of the whole of Chaldæa, to offer an invincible resistance to foreign enemies, and to establish their dominion in countries where their ancestors had enjoyed merely a precarious sovereignty. Hostilities never completely ceased between Elam and Babylon; if arrested for a time, they broke out again in some frontier disturbance, at times speedily suppressed, but at others entailing violent consequences and ending in a regular war. No document furnishes us with any detailed account of these outbreaks, but it would appear that the balance of power was maintained on the whole with tolerable regularity, both kingdoms at the close of each generation finding themselves in much the same position as they had occupied at its commencement. The two empires were separated from south to north by the sea and the Tigris, the frontier leaving the river near the present village of Amara and running in the direction of the mountains. Durîlu probably fell ordinarily under Chaldæan jurisdiction. Umliyash was included in the original domain of Kham-murabi, and there is no reason to believe that it was evacuated by his descendants. There is every probability that they possessed the plain east of the Tigris, comprising Nineveh and Arbela, and that the majority of the civilized peoples scattered over the lower slopes of the Kurdish mountains rendered them homage. They kept the Mesopotamian table-land under their suzerainty, and we may affirm, without exaggeration, that their power extended northwards as far as Mount Masios, and westwards to the middle course of the Euphrates.

At what period the Chaldæans first crossed that river is as yet unknown. Many of their rulers in their inscriptions claim the title of suzerains over Syria, and we have no evidence for denying their pretensions. Kudur-mabug proclaims himself adda of Martu, Lord of the countries of the West, and we are in the possession of several facts which suggest the idea of a great Blamite empire, with a dominion extending for some period over Western Asia, the existence of which was vaguely hinted at by the Greeks, who attributed its glory to the fabulous Memnon.* Contemporary records are still wanting which might show whether Kudur-mabug inherited these distant possessions from one of his predecessors--such as Kudur-nakhunta, for instance--or whether he won them himself at the point of the sword; but a fragment of an old chronicle, inserted in the Hebrew Scriptures, speaks distinctly of another Elamite, who made war in person almost up to the Egyptian frontier.** This is the Kudur-lagamar (Chedorlaomer) who helped Eimsin against Hammurabi, but was unable to prevent his overthrow.

* We know that to Herodotus (v. 55) Susa was the city of
Memnon, and that Strabo attributes its foundation to
Tithonus, father of Memnon. According to Oppert, the word
Memnon is the equivalent of the Susian Umman-anîn, the
house of the king: Weissbach declares that anin does not
mean king, and contradicts Opperts view, though he does not
venture to suggest a new explanation of the name.

** _Gen._ xiv. Prom the outset Assyriologists have never
doubted the historical accuracy of this chapter, and they
have connected the facts which it contains with those which
seem to be revealed by the Assyrian monuments. The two
Rawlinsons intercalate Kudur-lagamar between Kudur-nakhunta
and Kudur-mabug, and Oppert places him about the same
period. Fr. Lenormant regards him as one of the successors
of Kudur-mabug, possibly his immediate successor. G. Smith
does not hesitate to declare positively that the Kudur-mabug
and Kudur-nakhunta of the inscriptions are one and the same
with the Kudur-lagamar (Chedor-laomer) of the Bible.
Finally, Schrader, while he repudiates Smiths view, agrees
in the main fact with the other Assyriologists. On the other
hand, the majority of modern Biblical critics have
absolutely refused to credit the story in Genesis. Sayce
thinks that the Bible story rests on an historic basis, and
his view is strongly confirmed by Pinchesdiscovery of a
Chaldæan document which mentions Kudur-lagamar and two of
his allies. The Hebrew historiographer reproduced an
authentic fact from the chronicles of Babylon, and connected
it with one of the events in the life of Abraham. The very
late date generally assigned to Gen. xiv. in no way
diminishes the intrinsic probability of the facts narrated
by the Chaldæan document which is preserved to us in the
pages of the Hebrew book.

In the thirteenth year of his reign over the East, the cities of the Dead Sea--Sodom, Gomorrah, Adamah, Zeboîm, and Belâ--revolted against him: he immediately convoked his great vassals, Amraphel of Chaldæa, Ariôch of Ellasar,* Tidalo the Guti, and marched with them to the confines of his dominions. Tradition has invested many of the tribes then inhabiting Southern Syria with semi-mythical names and attributes. They are represented as being giants--Rephalm; men of prodigious strength--Zuzîm; as having a buzzing and indistinct manner of speech--Zamzummîm; as formidable monsters**--Emîm or Anakîm, before whom other nations appeared as grasshoppers;*** as the Horîm who were encamped on the confines of the Sinaitic desert, and as the Amalekites who ranged over the mountains to the west of the Dead Sea. Kudur-lagamar defeated them one after another--the Rephaîm near to Ashtaroth-Karnaîm, the Zuzîm near Ham,**** the Amîm at Shaveh-Kiriathaim, and the Horîm on the spurs of Mount Seir as far as El-Paran; then retracing his footsteps, he entered the country of the Amalekites by way of En-mishpat, and pillaged the Amorites of Hazazôn-Tamar.

* Ellasar has been identified with Larsa since the
researches of Rawlin-son and Norris; the Goîm, over whom
Tidal was king, with the Guti.

** Sayce considers Zuzîm and Zamzummîm to be two readings of
the same word Zamzum, written in cuneiform characters on the
original document. The sounds represented, in the Hebrew
alphabet, by the letters m and w, are expressed in the
Chaldæan syllabary by the same character, and a Hebrew or
Babylonian scribe, who had no other means of telling the
true pronunciation of a race-name mentioned in the story of
this campaign, would have been quite as much at a loss as
any modern scholar to say whether he ought to transcribe the
word as Z-m-z-m or as Z-w-z-vo; some scribes read it
_Zuzîm,_ others preferred _Zamzummîm._

*** _Numb._ xiii. 33.

**** In Deut. ii. 20 it is stated that the Zamzummîm lived
in the country of Ammon. Sayce points out that we often find
the variant Am for the character usually read _Ham_ or
_Kham_--the name Khammurabi, for instance, is often found
written Ammurabi; the Ham in the narrative of Genesis would,
therefore, be identical with the land of Ammon in
Deuteronomy, and the difference between the spelling of the
two would be due to the fact that the document reproduced in
the XIVIIth chapter of Genesis had been originally copied from
a cuneiform tablet in which the name of the place was
expressed by the sign _Ham-Am._

In the mean time, the kings of the five towns had concentrated their troops in the vale of Siddîm, and were there resolutely awaiting Kudur-lagamar. They were, however, completely routed, some of the fugitives being swallowed up in the pits of bitumen with which the soil abounded, while others with difficulty reached the mountains. Kudur-lagamar sacked Sodom and Gomorrah, re-established his dominion on all sides, and returned laden with booty, Hebrew tradition adding that he was overtaken near the sources of the Jordan by the patriarch Abraham.*

* An attempt has been made to identify the three vassals of
Kudur-lagamar with kings mentioned on the Chaldæan
monuments. Tidcal, or, if we adopt the Septuagint variant,
Thorgal, has been considered by some as the bearer of a
Sumorian name, Turgal= great chief, great son, while
others put him on one side as not having been a Babylonian;
Pinches, Sayce, and Hommel identify him with Tudkhula, an
ally of Kudur-lagamar against Khammurabi. Schrader was the
first to suggest that Amraphel was really Khammurabi, and
emended the Amraphel of the biblical text into Amraphi or
Amrabi, in order to support this identification. Halévy,
while on the whole accepting this theory, derives the name
from the pronunciation Kimtarapashtum or Kimtarapaltum,
which he attributes to the name generally read Khammurabi,
and in this he is partly supported by Hommel, who reads
Khammurapaltu.

After his victory over Kudur-lagamar, Khammurabi assumed the title of King of Martu,* which we find still borne by Ammisatana sixty years later.** We see repeated here almost exactly what took place in Ethiopia at the time of its conquest by Egypt: merchants had prepared the way for military occupation, and the civilization of Babylon had taken hold on the people long before its kings had become sufficiently powerful to claim them as vassals. The empire may be said to have been virtually established from the day when the states of the Middle and Lower Euphrates formed but one kingdom in the hands of a single ruler. We must not, however, imagine it to have been a compact territory, divided into provinces under military occupation, ruled by a uniform code of laws and statutes, and administered throughout by functionaries of various grades, who received their orders from Babylon or Susa, according as the chances of war favoured the ascendency of Chaldæa or Elam. It was in reality a motley assemblage of tribes and principalities, whose sole bond of union was subjection to a common yoke.

* It is, indeed, the sole title which he attributes to
himself on a stone tablet now in the British Museum.

** In an inscription by this prince, copied probably about
the time of Nabonidus by the scribe Belushallîm, he is
called king of the vast land of Martu.

They were under obligation to pay tribute, and furnish military contingents and show other external marks of obedience, but their particular constitution, customs, and religion were alike respected: they had to purchase, at the cost of a periodical ransom, the right to live in their own country after their own fashion, and the head of the empire forbore all interference in their affairs, except in cases where the internecine quarrels and dissensions threatened the security of his suzerainty. Their subordination lasted as best it could, sometimes for a year or for ten years, at the end of which period they would neglect the obligations of their vassalage, or openly refuse to fulfil them: a revolt would then break out at one point or another, and it was necessary to suppress it without delay to prevent the bad example from spreading far and wide. The empire was maintained by perpetual re-conquests, and its extent varied with the energy shown by its chiefs, or with the resources which were for the moment available.

Separated from the confines of the empire by only a narrow isthmus, Egypt loomed on the horizon, and appeared to beckon to her rival. Her natural fertility, the industry of her inhabitants, the stores of gold and perfumes which she received from the heart of Ethiopia, were well known by the passage to and fro of her caravans, and the recollection of her treasures must have frequently provoked the envy of Asiatic courts. Egypt had, however, strangely declined from her former greatness, and the line of princes who governed her had little in common with the Pharaohs who had rendered her name so formidable under the XIIth dynasty. She was now under the rule of the Xoites, whose influence was probably confined to the Delta, and extended merely in name over the Said and Nubia. The feudal lords, ever ready to reassert their independence as soon as the central power waned, shared between them the possession of the Nile valley below Memphis: the princes of Thebes, who were probably descendants of Usirtasen, owned the largest fiefdom, and though some slight scruple may have prevented them from donning the pschënt or placing their names within a cartouche, they assumed notwithstanding the plenitude of royal power. A favourable opportunity was therefore offered to an invader, and the Chaldæans might have attacked with impunity a people thus divided among themselves.* They stopped short, however, at the southern frontier of Syria, or if they pushed further forward, it was without any important result: distance from head-quarters, or possibly reiterated attacks of the Elamites, prevented them from placing in the field an adequate force for such a momentous undertaking. What they had not dared to venture, others more audacious were to accomplish. At this juncture, so runs the Egyptian record, there came to us a king named Timaios. Under this king, then, I know not wherefore, the god caused to blow upon us a baleful wind, and in the face of all probability bands from the East, people of ignoble race, came upon us unawares, attacked the country, and subdued it easily and without fighting.

* The theory that the divisions of Egypt, under the XIVth
dynasty, and the discords between its feudatory princes,
were one of the main causes of the success of the Shepherds,
is now admitted to be correct.

It is possible that they owed this rapid victory to the presence in their armies of a factor hitherto unknown to the African--the war-chariot--and before the horse and his driver the Egyptians gave way in a body.* The invaders appeared as a cloud of locusts on the banks of the Nile. Towns and temples were alike pillaged, burnt, and ruined; they massacred all they could of the male population, reduced to slavery those of the women and children whose lives they spared, and then proclaimed as king Salatis, one of their chiefs.** He established a semblance of regular government, chose Memphis as his capital, and imposed a tax upon the vanquished. Two perils, however, immediately threatened the security of his triumph: in the south the Theban lords, taking matters into their own hands after the downfall of the Xoites, refused the oath of allegiance to Salatis, and organized an obstinate resistance;*** in the north he had to take measures to protect himself against an attack of the Chaldæans or of the Élamites who were oppressing Chaldæa.****

* The horse was unknown, or at any rate had not been
employed in. Egypt prior to the invasion; we find it,
however, in general use immediately after the expulsion of
the Shepherds, see the tomb of Pihiri. Moreover, all
historians agree in admitting that it was introduced into
the country under the rule of the Shepherds. The use of the
war-chariot in Chaldæa at an epoch prior to the Hyksôs
invasion, is proved by a fragment of the Vulture Stele; it
is therefore, natural to suppose that the Hyksôs used the
chariot in war, and that the rapidity of their conquest was
due to it.

** The name Salatis (var. Saitôs) seems to be derived from a
Semitic word, Siialît = the chief, the governor; this
was the title which Joseph received when Pharaoh gave him
authority over the whole of Egypt (Gen. xli. 43). Salatis
may not, therefore, have been the real name of the first
Hyksôs king, but his title, which the Egyptians
misunderstood, and from which they evolved a proper name:
Uhlemann has, indeed, deduced from this that Manetho, being
familiar with the passage referring to Joseph, had forged
the name of Salatis. Ebers imagined that he could decipher
the Egyptian form of this princes name on the Colossus of
Tell-Mokdam, where Naville has since read with certainty the
name of a Pharaoh of the XIIIth and XIVth dynasties,
Nahsiri.

*** The text of Manetho speaks of taxes which he imposed on
the high and low lands, which would seem to include the
Thebaid in the kingdom; it is, however, stated in the next
few pages that the successors of Salatis waged an incessant
war against the Egyptians, which can only refer to
hostilities against the Thebans. We are forced, therefore,
to admit, either that Manetho took the title of lord of the
high and low lands which belonged to Salatis, literally, or
that the Thebans, after submitting at first, subsequently
refused to pay tribute, thus provoking a war.

**** Manetho here speaks of Assyrians; this is an error
which is to be explained by the imperfect state of
historical knowledge in Greece at the time of the Macedonian
supremacy. We need not for this reason be led to cast doubt
upon the historic value of the narrative: we must remember
the suzerainty which the kings of Babylon exercised over
Syria, and read _Chaldæans_ where Manetho has written
_Assyrians_. In Herodotus Assyria is the regular term for
Babylonia, and Babylonia is called the land of the
Assyrians.