part 2, p. 243, and vol. iii. part 1, p. 136, identifies Nimrod with

Merodach, the god of Babylon; partly on the ground of the similarity of name, Merodach being Amar-utuci or Amar-ud in Accadian, partly because Merodach the patron-deity of Babylon stood in the same relation to that city that Asshur did to Assyria (see Micah v. 6), and partly since we find Merodach called “a hero” like Nimrod in Genesis, and assigned “four divine dogs” as though he were a hunter. These dogs are Uccumu “the despoiler,” Acculu “the devourer,” Icsuda “the capturer,” and Iltebu “the carrier away.” Merodach, it must be remembered, is always represented as a man, and is armed with weapons of war.

Mr. Smith first fancied that Nimrod might be Khammuragas, whom he identified with the first Arab king of Berosus, as this line of kings appeared to be connected with the Cossæans. This identification failing, after the discovery of the Deluge tablet in 1872, he conjectured that the hero whose name is provisionally read Izdubar is the Nimrod of the Bible, a conjecture which has since been adopted by several other scholars.

The supposition that Nimrod was an ethnic or geographical name, which was at one time favoured by Sir Henry Rawlinson, and has since been urged by Professor Oppert, is quite untenable, for it would be impossible on this theory to account for certain features in what we are told of the hero.

Mr. Smith’s opinion that he was the hero of the Izdubar Epic was first founded on the discovery that the latter formed the centre of the national historical poetry, and was the hero of Babylonian legend—in fact, occupies much the same place as Nimrod in later Arab tradition.

Izdubar, moreover, agrees _exactly_ in character with Nimrod; he was a hunter, according to the cuneiform legends, who contended with and destroyed the lion, tiger, leopard, and wild bull or buffalo, animals the most formidable in the chase in any country. He ruled first in Babylonia over the region which from other sources we know to have been the centre of Nimrod’s kingdom. The principal scene, too, of his exploits and triumphs was the city of Erech, which, according to Genesis, was the second capital of Nimrod.

There remains the fact that the cuneiform name of this hero is undeciphered, the name Izdubar being a mere makeshift. It is possible that when the phonetic reading of the characters is found it will turn out to correspond with the name Nimrod. At all events it is noteworthy that Izdubar seems to have been specially connected with the town of Marad, the original Accadian name of which was Amarda, and that the Accadian _an Amarda_ or “god of Amarda,” closely corresponds with the Biblical name of Nimrod. The translations and notes given in this book will lead, perhaps, to the general admission of the identity of the hero Izdubar with the traditional Nimrod; but this result can be firmly established only when more evidence is before us than that which we have at present.

At the time of the opening of the Epic, the great city of the south of Babylonia, and the capital of this part of the country, was Uruk, called in Genesis, Erech. Erech was devoted to the worship of Anu, the god of heaven, and his wife, the goddess Anatu, as well as of Istar, the Phœnician Ashtoreth, or Astarte, the myth of whose love for the Sun-god Dumuzi or Tammuz, the Adonis of Greek story, is alluded to in the course of the poem. The worship of Anatu, however, was subsequent to the Semitic occupation of the country, since the necessity of providing a female deity by the side of every male one was not felt until the Accadians, whose language was unacquainted with genders, were succeeded by the Semites with their nouns either masculine or feminine.

Here may provisionally be placed the first fragment of the Izdubar legends, K 3200. This fragment consists of part of the third column of a tablet, which is probably the first; and it gives an account of a conquest of Erech by its enemies. The fragment reads:—

1. his ..... he left

2. ....... and he goes down to the river,

3. .... in the river his ship is made good.

4. .... he is .... and he weeps bitterly

5. .... placed, the city of Ganganna which had (suffered) destruction.

6. .... their _samuri_ (were) she asses

7. .... their _raburi_ (were) great wild bulls.

8. Like cattle the people fears,

9. like doves the slaves mourn.

10. The gods of Erech the lofty

11. turned to flies and brood in swarms.

12. The spirits (_sedu_) of Erech the lofty

13. turned to cocks and went forth in outposts.

14. For three years the city of Erech does the enemy besiege,

15. the great gates were thrown down and trampled upon,

16. the goddess Istar before its enemies could not lift her head.

17. Bel his mouth opened and speaks,

18. to Istar the queen a speech he makes:

19. ..... in the midst of Nipur my hands have placed,

20. .... my country? Babylon (Din-tir) the house of my delight,

21. my .... I gave my hands.

22. ..... he was favourable to the sanctuaries

23. ..... in the day ....

24. ..... the great gods. ....

Here we have a graphic account of the condition of Erech, when the enemy overran the country, and the first question which occurs is, who were these conquerors? Conjecture is idle in the want of evidence. They may have been the Semitic successors of the Accadians, they may have been the Medes of Berosus, or they may have been tribes who belong only to the realm of mythology. Mr. Smith believed that they were the subjects of Khumbaba, the tyrant whose death is related in the fourth book of the Epic, and who ruled over the land of Elam.

The name of Khumbaba, or Khubaba, as it is occasionally written, is probably a compound of “Khumba,” or “Khumbume,” the name of one of the chief Elamite gods. Many other Elamite names compounded with Khumba are mentioned in the inscriptions: Khumba-sidir, an early chief; Khumba-undasa, an Elamite general opposed to Sennacherib; Khumba-nigas, an Elamite monarch opposed to Sargon; Tul-khumba, an Elamite city, &c.

The notice of foreign dominion, and particularly of Elamite supremacy at this time, may, perhaps, form a clue from which to ascertain the approximate age of the poems as we have them. We know that myths are localized in the country of those who hand them down to posterity, and assigned to an age which has made an impression on their narrators. There must have been some reason for the legendary siege and capture of Erech, some actual event around which the story of Izdubar has entwined itself.

Looking at the fragments of Berosus and the notices of Greek and Roman authors, we may ask whether there is any epoch of conquest and foreign dominion which can be fixed upon as representing such an actual event? Let us glance for a moment at the earlier history of Babylonia so far as it is known to us.

The earlier part of the list of dynasties quoted from Berosus gives the following periods from the Flood downwards:—

86 Chaldean kings from the Flood down to the Median conquest, reigning for 34,080 or 33,091 years.

8 Median kings who conquered and held Babylon, 234, or 224, or 190 years.

11 other kings, race and duration unknown.

49 Chaldean kings, for 458 years.

The last of these dynasties preceded a dynasty of kings called Arabian by the copyists of Berosus, and though neither the number of the reigns nor the length of time assigned to the dynasty agrees with what the monuments tell us of the Cassite or Cossæan line of kings, there is no other line which can in any way be identified with the Arabians of the Babylonian historian. The 49 Chaldean kings must, therefore, have reigned before Khammuragas, that is before B.C. 2000-1750. Now an inscription of Nabonidus informs us that Lig-bagas, the first monarch of all Chaldea of whom we know, flourished 700 years anterior to the reign of Khammuragas; he would, therefore, come among the 11 nameless kings of Berosus, supposing any reliance can be placed on the statements of the latter, and about 250 years before the accession of the Chaldean dynasty. But the engraved cylinders and seals of the age of Lig-bagas show that the legend of Izdubar was already popular, and we must accordingly seek a still older period in which to place its origin and attachment to a particular historical event. Hence it may well be that the siege of Erech, the memory of which is preserved in the first book of the Izdubar Epic, was the work of those foreign invaders whom the Babylonian historian has termed Median.

Now it is not improbable that the Median dynasty was really Elamite; or at all events belonged to the same race as the primitive inhabitants of Elam. This race was closely allied to the Accadians; and it was spread over the whole range of country which stretched from the southern shores of the Caspian to the Persian Gulf. The Protomedes, as they are sometimes called, were not conquered and supplanted by Aryan invaders from the east till the ninth century B.C. It was in their country that Kharsak-kurra, “the Mountain of the East,” was localized whereon the Accadians and their kinsfolk in Elam and Media believed the ark to have rested after the Flood, and which they regarded as the cradle of their race. It was therefore pre-eminently “the land,” _mada_ in Accadian, and from this _mada_ there is every reason to think the name of Media has been derived. Consequently, the Medians of Berosus, the inhabitants of _mada_ “the land” of the east, need not have been more than one of the many Elamite swarms that from time to time descended into the fertile plains of Babylonia, and not unfrequently obtained a settlement there. Such were the Accadians, or “Highlanders” themselves; such, too, the two Cassite or Cossæan dynasties which we learn from the monuments long held sway over Chaldea.

An early Babylonian cylinder, which came from Erech and originally belonged to a member of the royal family of that city, presents us with a curious picture of a rude nomad tribe apparently arriving in Babylonia. The chief marches in front armed with bow and arrows, and wearing the same kind of boots with turned-up ends as distinguished the Hittites in ancient times and are still worn in Asia Minor and Greece. They indicate that the wearer came from a cold and mountainous country. The animals’ skins which compose the dresses of his three retainers also point to a similar conclusion. Besides the retainers, the wife of the chief is depicted, as well as two slaves who carry some objects on their shoulders. Unfortunately no light is cast upon the group by the inscription, which simply states that the cylinder belonged to “Gibil-dur (or Ne-Zicum), the brother of the king of Erech, the librarian, thy servant.” All we can gather from it is that the famous library of Erech, which furnished Assur-bani-pal and his scribes with the original texts of the Izdubar Epic, was already in existence, and that the office of librarian was considered honourable enough to be borne by a brother of the reigning monarch.

If the legendary siege of Erech is not to be referred to the epoch of the Median conquest, it may have fallen at the time when the image of the goddess Nana was carried away from Erech by the Elamite king Kudur-nankhundi, 1635 years before the capture of Shushan, the capital of Elam, by the Assyrians (about B.C. 645), and consequently about B.C. 2280. A fragment which refers to this period in “Cuneiform Inscriptions,” vol. iii. p. 38, relates the destruction wrought in the country by the Elamites, and makes Kudur-nankhundi follow one of the other monarchs of an Elamite dynasty and exceed his predecessors in the injury he did to the country.

Putting together the detached notices of this period, the following may approximately represent the chronology, the dates being understood as round numbers.

? B.C. 2750, Elamites (Medes) overrun Babylonia.

B.C. 2280, Kudur-nankhundi, king of Elam, ravages Erech.

B.C. 1800, Khammuragas conquers Babylonia.

Although the dates transmitted through ancient authors are as a rule vague and doubtful, there are many independent notices which seem to point to somewhere about the twenty-third century before the Christian era for the foundation of the Babylonian and Assyrian power. Several of these dates are connected either directly or by implication with Nimrod, who first formed a united empire over these regions.

The following are some of these notices:—

Simplicius relates that Callisthenes, the friend of Alexander, sent to Aristotle from Babylon a series of stellar observations reaching back 1,903 years before the taking of Babylon by Alexander. This would make 1903 + 331 = B.C. 2234.

Berosus and Critodemus are said by Pliny to have made the inscribed stellar observations reach to 480 years before the era of Phoroneus; as the latter date was supposed to be about the middle of the eighteenth century B.C., 480 years before it comes also to about the period of Kudur-nankhundi.

Diodorus makes the Assyrian empire commence a thousand years or more before the Trojan war.

Ctesias and Cephalion make its foundation early in the twenty-second century B.C.

The two last statements, however, are probably derived from Ctesias, whose so-called history has been shown by cuneiform decipherment to have been a mere fiction put together out of misunderstood myths and fragments of theology. In any case, too, they apply only to the foundation of the Assyrian power, which was modern as compared with that of Babylonia, in spite of the assertion of Sargon, who boasts of having been preceded on the throne by 350 kings.

Of the latter part of the first tablet of the Izdubar Epic we have as yet no knowledge.