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'Belit of Akkad, whom Nebuchadnezzar invokes, is none other than the great Belit, the consort of Bel. 'Akkad' is here used for Babylonia, and the qualification is added to distinguish her from other 'ladies, as, e.g., 'Belit-ekalli, who, we have seen, was Gula. Malik and Bunene.
They planted themselves first in northern Babylonia, and then gradually extended their power over the districts on the south. The conquerors adopted the civilization of the conquered. The earliest Semitic kings all used the Sumerian dialect in their inscriptions. It was only by slow degrees that the native language was superseded by that of the new rulers.
It seems to me that the addition which emphasizes this identity of Bel with another god, Dagan, is to indicate that the Bel of the triad, and not Bel-Marduk, is here meant. 'Governor of Bel' for governor of Babylonia, and 'subjects of Bel' for subjects of Babylonia. See p. 89 and chapter vii. Rassam, Cylinder ix. 75. See chapter xii., "The Assyrian Pantheon," p. 208.
It was while Babylonia was thus divided into more than one kingdom, that the first Chaldæan empire of which we know was formed by the military skill of Sargon of Akkad. Sargon was of Semitic origin, but his birth seems to have been obscure.
These introductory paragraphs record how the king gradually conquered the peoples to the north and northeast of Assyria, and how he finally undertook a successful campaign against Babylon, during which he captured the city and completely subjugated both Northern and Southern Babylonia. Tukulti-Mnib's reign thus marks an epoch in the history of his country.
This supposition is not inconsistent with the suggestion that the dynasty of the Country of the Sea was Sumerian, and that under it the Sumerians once more became the predominant race in Babylonia. The new chronicle also relates how the dynasty of the Country of the Sea succumbed in its turn before the incursions of the Kassites.
He is only one, though the principal one, of all the explorers of the buried records of the empires of the Tigris and Euphrates. And Babylonia and Assyria are not the only countries that history required us to explore. Greece and its neighboring states and islands have not even yet been fairly investigated. Much of Asia Minor is still a virgin field.
"To seize the hands of Bel" was equivalent to legitimizing one's claim to the throne of Babylonia, and the chroniclers of the south consistently decline to recognize Assyrian rulers as kings of Babylonia until they have come to Babylon and "seized the hands of Bel." That this ceremony was annually performed by the kings of Babylonia after the union of the southern states is quite certain.
The trade of the world passed through it and met in it; the merchants of Egypt and Ethiopia could traffic in Palestine with the traders of Babylonia and the far East. It was destined by nature to be a land of commerce and trade.
In Egypt the remedy was a centralised government which could undertake great irrigation works and intensive cultivation. In Babylonia, for the first time in history, foreign trade was made to support a larger population than the land itself could maintain. There was little or no infanticide in Babylonia, but the death-rate in these steaming alluvial plains has always been very high.
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