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Did they represent an advance-guard of the Kassite tribes, who eventually succeeded in establishing themselves as the Third Dynasty in Babylon? Or were they the Elamites who, when driven from Ur and Larsam, retreated southwards and maintained their independence on the shores of the Persian Gulf?
Eannatum and Gudea of Lagash both place her immediately after Anu and Enlil, giving her precedence over Enki; and even in the Kassite Kudurru inscriptions of the thirteenth and twelfth centuries, where she is referred to, she takes rank after Enki and before the other gods.
The old claims to sovereignty in the west, however, were never resigned; but the Kassite kings had to content themselves with intriguing against the Egyptian government in Palestine, either with disaffected Canaanites, or with the Hittites and Mitannians, while at the same time they professed to be the firm friends of the Egyptian Pharaoh.
Here again we are carried to a date when the Kassite kings of Babylonia held rule in Canaan, or led thither their armies, and when the Babylonians were called, as they are in the Tel el-Amarna tablets, the Kassi or sons of Cush. Nimrod himself may be the Kassite monarch Nazi-Murudas.
As yet the cuneiform documents are silent about him, but it is probable that he was one of the early Kassite kings who established their dominion over the cities of Babylonia. He is called the son of Cush or Kas, and "the beginning of his kingdom" was Babylon, which had now for six centuries been the capital of the country.
In the two preceding chapters we have dealt with the political history of Western Asia from the very earliest period of the Sumerian city-states down to the time of the Kassite kings.
It is probable that the Kassite kings of the Third Dynasty exercised authority not only over Babylonia but also over the greater part of Elam, for a number of inscriptions of Kassite kings of Babylonia have been found by M. de Morgan at Susa.
As regards the political situation there, even at the beginning of the Kassite Dynasty—a change probably attended by long internecine struggles—Babylonia seems to have lost its western possessions on the Mediterranean, and we may rather suppose that it was the kings of Mitani who ruled these territories in the time of Thutmosis III.
On their retirement Babylonia, falling into weak native hands, was a prey to a succession of inroads from the Kassite mountains beyond Elam, from Elam itself, from the growing Semitic power of Asshur, Babylon's former vassal, from the Hittite Empire founded in Cappadocia about 1500 B.C., from the fresh wave of Arabian overflow which is distinguished as the Aramaean, and from yet another following it, which is usually called Chaldaean; and it was not till almost the close of the twelfth century that one of these intruding elements attained sufficient independence and security of tenure to begin to exalt Babylonia again into a mistress of foreign empire.
This Elamite campaign of Ea-gamil is recorded by the new chronicle, which relates how he was defeated and driven from the country by Ulam-Buriash, the brother of Bitiliash the Kassite.
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