United States or Bahamas ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The "land of the Amorites" formed the basis and starting-point for the expedition of Naram-Sin into Magan; it must, therefore, have reached to the southern border of Palestine, if not even farther. The road trodden by his forces would have been the same as that which was afterwards traversed by Chedor-laomer, and would have led him through Kadesh-barnea.
When overrunning the plains and cities of the Sumerians, the Semites were comparatively uncivilized, and, so far as we know, without a system of writing of their own. The incursions into Elam must have taken place under the great Semitic conquerors, such as Sar-gon and Narâm-Sin and Alu-usharshid.
Tradition relates that two of the earliest Semitic rulers whose names are known to us, Sargon and Narâm-Sin, kings of Agade, held sway in Elam, for in the "Omens" which were current in a later period concerning them, the former is credited with the conquest of the whole country, while of the latter it is related that he conquered Apirak, an Elamite district, and captured its king.
The conquests of Sargon and Naram-Sin had borne fruit in the commerce that had followed upon them. Once more the curtain falls, and Canaan is hidden for a while out of our sight. Babylonia has become a united kingdom with its capital and centre at Babylon. His family seems to have been in part, if not wholly, of South Arabian extraction.
For the geographical references need not be treated as exhaustive, but as confined to the more important districts through which the expedition passed. The district of Ibla which is also mentioned by Narâm-Sin and Gudea, lay probably to the north of Iarmuti, perhaps on the southern slopes of Taurus.
Concerning the later rulers of city-states of Babylonia which succeeded the disruption of the empire founded by Sargon of Agade and consolidated by Narâm-Sin, his son, the excavations have little to tell us which has not already been made use of by Prof. Maspero in his history of this period.*
Far below the palace of Xerxes he has found vastly earlier remains. There is the column set up, if we can believe the Assyriologists who trust the chronology of Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon, and it is not incredible, three thousand eight hundred years before Christ, by Naram-Sin, a Babylonian king, to commemorate one of his raids into the land of what were perhaps his stronger enemies.
Thus in the time of Sargon of Agade, about 3800 B.C., an extensive system of royal convoys was established between the principal cities. At Telloh the late M. de Sarzec came across numbers of lumps of clay bearing the seal impressions of Sargon and of his son Narâm-Sin, which had been used as seals and labels upon packages sent from Agade to Shirpurla.
Can it have been that the mountain whereon the God of Israel afterwards revealed Himself to Moses was dedicated to the Moon-god of Babylon by Naram-Sin the Chaldæn conqueror? If such indeed were the case, it would have been more than two thousand years before the Israelitish exodus.
That monuments of such great interest to the early history of Chaldæa should have been found at Susa in Persia was sufficiently startling, but an easy explanation was at first forthcoming from the fact that Narâm-Sin's stele of victory had been used by the later Elamite king, Shutruk-Nakhkhunte, for an inscription of his own; this he had engraved in seven long lines along the great cone in front of Narâm-Sin, which is probably intended to represent the peak of the mountain.
Word Of The Day